Book #17 - Lamb by Christopher Moore

After reading some pretty heavy books lately, I thought I'd lighten things up a bit by reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Best Friend. I thought this was such a cute concept and had some great potential for comic as well as poignant moments. At times, this book did a great job of living up to my expectations (a scene where Joshua and Biff taste coffee for the first time and Josh goes on a healing frenzy while high on coffee cracked me up!). But for the most part, it really fell flat for me. The author was headed in the right direction, with Jesus learning about the good from all religions from the three wise men, who ended up each representing a different world of religious thought. I could really picture the young Jesus wanting to learn from other religious societies so that he could bring about real change for his followers. But the author threw in really, really random stuff (abominable snowman, kung fu, etc.) and also thought it was funny to have Biff be the true genious (discovering evolution, that the world isn't flat, and latte, for goodness sake). I'm not pretending to be devoutly religious, but when you write a book about Jesus' life and the reader comes away with, "Well, he was a sort of interesting character, I guess," I think the author failed a bit. Bummer.