The Year of Living Biblically

A.J. Jacobs is, as his official bio puts it, 'a bestselling author and human guinea pig'. He's very funny, too. As editor-at-large for Esquire magazine he has a highly enviable freedom: he gets to dream up a goofy stunt and then follow it through to the nth degree. One early experiment saw him living by the principles of Radical Honesty, where not even small, social fibs are permitted. (The resulting article was called "I think you're fat".)

For another, he outsourced every possible aspect of his life to a team of people in Bangalore, India - their tasks included answering his emails, arguing with his wife and reading bedtime stories to his young son. Next, he devoted a year to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from front to back. This made him a lot more knowledgeable, and all but unbearable socially, as he acknowledges in his delightful book-length chronicle The Know-It-All.

Then came his biggest challenge so far: live for one year following as literally as possible the precepts laid down in The Bible. He began by writing down "every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice". The resulting list of more than 700 rules ran for 72 pages. "You shall not marry your wife's sister" proved easy; "Put to death men and women who commit adultery" was more problematic. (He did, in the end, manage a brief exchange of hurled pebbles with a cranky septuagenarian he encountered in a park.)

Extravagantly bearded, dressed all in white and blowing a ram's horn on the street to mark the start of each month, he made a striking figure, even in Manhattan. But to his own surprise, amid all the goofy incongruities that arise when you mix biblical literalism with modern life, Jacobs found himself on a genuine spiritual journey. His book The Year of Living Biblically is snortingly funny but has an unexpected depth, too. Click here to read an extract.

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