As the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, I grew up learning Bible stories; there are ways to teach religious tales without resorting to gimmicks. Why has this Christian publisher decided to present the tales in a religious doodle book? Is this a tongue-in-cheek look at the Bible stories? A way to keep kids busy/quiet during the sermon? I really can’t tell.

If the book is actually intended to teach children about the Bible, there are glaring omissions, such as bypassing the creation of Eve and skipping quickly from Jesus’ birth to his death and resurrection, with nothing about his life and his miracles in between. Leaving out important Bible stories and abbreviating others make the tales included confusing to follow despite their chronological order.

Directions instruct children to draw unfamiliar items and situations without any context: “Joseph dreamed that sheaves of grain bowed down to his sheaf. Finish this drawing” and “Naaman was healed of his leprosy after washing in the Jordan River. Finish this scene.” On the other hand, the occasional attempts at modernization (“Instead of traveling with a sack of grain, you might travel with a suitcase. Design your own suitcase here.”) are bizarrely out of place.

Other doodles are disturbing, like “God sent ten plagues. Plague number one: The water of the Nile River turned to blood. Complete the scene.” And then there’s this one:

“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into a fiery furnace because they refused to bow down to false gods. Finish this scene…and don’t forget to add the angel of the Lord!”

While I’m all in favor of not sugar-coating the stories in the Bible, maybe these stories are better told in prose and the images left to the imagination.

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Let’s just say I’ve been in a mood. But what hand of Providence brought me to download At Home in Mitford, the first of Jan Karon’s novels about the mild-mannered Episcopalian Father Tim and his flock in a cozy Blue Ridge Mountains hamlet? Oh my goodness (as F.T. might say) I am loving it. And the hero has already made me a better person. Last night I came home to see Richard folding the t-shirts I had left in the dryer last weekend. To cover my own embarrassment at falling down on the job, my left-handed Scorpio instinct was to say something caustic about it being high time someone got around to the laundry but I thought, what would Father Tim do?, and instead said “I’m sorry I left the t-shirts in the dryer.”

The pleasure of the book is its comfortable, steady-paced, dullness–right now, Father Tim is trying to settle on the menu for a dinner party he wants to have for his friends. He’s just gone jogging for the first time. His irrepressible (by Mitford standards) dog Barnabas will only sit when Father Tim orates Scripture. The village vet and his wife, in their middle age, are expecting a baby. I am completely engrossed. Martha says if I like this sort of thing I should try Miss Read’s books, too.

I’ve been editing a lot of Guide and Magazine book reviews this week, and the contrast to my new reading crush could not be greater. Once you get above chapter book level, it seems like almost all new fiction for kids is (or wants to be) thrilling, exciting, harum-scarum, suspenseful, non-stop, etc. Don’t kids ever read to relax?

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A semi-related question: people who went to college a generation after I did swear that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is the greatest book they ever read. Is it hard?

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