Customer Reviews

The Holy Bible: King James Version

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(52)

 

 

This Comedy-Fantasy is one of my favorites to read when I'm having a bad day, along with the Monty Python and the Holy Grail transcript! King James is a comedic genius rivaling Ricky Gervais and will surely be remembered as such for generations to come.

The plot follows the antagonistic character God, an angsty old man hungry for power, who becomes bored in his isolation and so creates a magical world where he places a naked man and a woman, but neglects to tell them the difference between right and wrong. He puts a magic forbidden apple on a tree and places a magic snake to tempt the naked people to eat the magic apple, apparently forgetting that he forgot to teach them what it means to be "wrong" about trusting the snake and eating the apple- so they eat the apple, and then the fun really begins!

Follow God through the years as he overcomes obstacles such as figuring out how to kill off the human race, impregnating a married woman, and being generally disliked by the majority of the world's population!

With countless stories about incest, murder, rape, violence, and genocide OK'd by God, The Holy Bible is a laugh a minute! I just love that every hotel I visit already has The Holy Bible laid out for me, where I can easily reach it if I am feeling homesick and need a quick pick-me-up.

::SPOILER ALERT::

The character Satan fill's the role of God's avasary. Satan and God both enjoy killing people- in the end however, with his all-powerful and all-knowing magical powers, God racks up thousands of kills while Satan is barely able to boast a handful!

The next time you find yourself a hankerin' for a Saturday night box office comedy, consider a cheaper alternative. Stay home and read the Bible.

For those of you who don't know, this is God's second novel after the Old Testament. It's a marked improvement, in my opinion. He got rid of a lot of his previous angst and scorn, and has really begun to show some of the maturity present in his later works. He's become a much more loving and kind God, and, noticeably, he doesn't throw nearly as many tantrums as he did in the first book.

That said, there is still vast room for improvement. Plot wise, there isn't really much suspense, and the story can be incredibly repetitive. In like four chapters, he just rewords the same basic story over and over again. To top that off, he puts those chapters one right after the other. Like we wouldn't notice! I like the whole Jesus character, but let's face it, the whole good guy martyr thing has been done before. There was no need to devote so much of the book to that guy.

If you're really looking for a good God read, check out the Koran or the Book of Mormon. They're much more polished. Plus, the storytelling in the Book of Mormon is wild. Some people say it goes too far and point to it as evidence that God's over the hill, but I beg to differ. Just read it. God's like a genius or something. I mean, magic spectacles! Tell me that isn't awesome. I don't know how he dreams up some of this crap.

The first half of this novel includes a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it then seems to degenerate into endless racism and sexism. The second half, while slightly more coherent, is plodding.

I picked this up because I heard it advertised as the Gospel, which translates to "good news." It opens up by telling the reader how the human race is doomed because two poorly developed characters ate an apple that a snake told them to eat.

That's not good news.

I can't say I found much good news at all in this. It actually closes by telling us that the world is going to end, and how we should all be prepared.

I would not recommend this book to others. It does not deliver on many of its advertised promises, and features weak characters and archaic diction.

This novel was a sort of dark read. From the first book, there are already gratuitous implications of incest, brain-bashing, and some other really messed up stuff (don't want to spoil it for those of you who love creepypasta like this novel). Throughout the first chapter of this novel (there are two very long chapters, each with several mock accounts by some very creative novelists) there are more and more references and even direct accounts of God destroying people for not worshipping him the right way. Oh, and NEVAR create a bronze, gold, or even Papier-māché symbol of God, he does NOT like it. He gets all jealous because he has separation anxiety, and he gets violent really quickly. But we stick with him, because we know he'll change when he realizes we're not going anywhere. This novel was pretty exciting, approximately until the book of Psalms and the book of Proverbs.

Then the Bible started to lull. Honestly, it could've been cut off after the first four books; after that there's not really much suspense of whether the characters would survive or be totally annihilated by their creator and friend, the moody, adolescent God. After these there are some very depressing poems and some prose which is equally depressing. There is a VERY sensual book called Song of Solomon. The smut-peddling author is describing the minutiae of his lover's body (female, presumably; although possibly a man with Gynecomastia and a tight rear-end) and talking about secksing her up really good, and there's a massage to completion and it's very disturbing. Not an easy read: I felt like I was reading smut when I pulled it out in public (probably shouldn't have been touching myself, but come on: bible readers, back me up on this!). After that some pretty boring stuff happens, but it's just a prologue to the next section of the book, called the New Testament, sometimes the New Testament of Jesus Christ (the protagonist in this section).

While reading the New Testament I laughed out loud as I pondered the feasibility of having a star lead three men thousands of miles to see a woman they had never met giving birth to a baby they also didin't know, but who they will worship and one day kill for, in a sort of cult (more on that later); and I cried when Jesus had his heart broken by that hot drunk chick he met at the party. More sex, predictably: God has sex with mary, a virgin, to make a sort of man-god hybrid that he'll act through (a sort of puppet, but one that has half or a quarter of a brain that can think on its own), a whole bunch of murder, more depressing stuff in between, then it gets very dull. It drags on for what seem like twenty or more books (in reality it's around nine I think), then goes out with a bang with the Book of Revelation. It's a very, very deeply disturbing account by a man named John who had supposedly been exiled, alone, to the island of Patmos (they named it after the actual island of Patmos (the novel likes tying itself into the natural world to give readers the impression that it's a factual account rather than fiction, which it purely is in actuality)). There are very deeply disturbing hallucinations described as though the writer was actually experiencing this while writing for John. There are some dragons, and pretty much the Earth blows up (not really, but kind of -- just read it).

The book then sets itself up for a sequel, then just sort of ends with a nauseatingly cheesy resolution (this actually is recounted a whopping FOUR times, and is then referenced throughout the next books in the New Testament). All in all, not a great read. It's one of those books that you hate reading, but want to be able to say you've read, so you can joke about it at parties and wonder what drugs they were on when writing it. It's also got good paper if you like to roll your own cigarettes, I usually just buy Bibles instead of paper to be frank.

I actually found this book a more entertaining read:

The Book of Mormon

There are some hysterical inaccuracies and anachronisms in pretty much every book of this one. Have fun, thanks for reading; thumbs up or down if you liked reading and I'll make sure to do some more!


Thanks for reading,

Aaron Mallory
amallory3@gatech.edu
Ga Tech School of Mathematics, College of Computing

/* Pro Tip: The Bible is not written in chronological order: the resolution is recounted once in each of the first four books of the New Testament. */

The main character* of this book is an insane, genocidal sociopath. First he creates people that have no knowledge of good and evil/ Then he requires that they follow rules that can only be followed if they had knowledge of good and evil? What kind of sick, sadistic jerk does that?

The story goes WAY downhill from there. The so-called "bad guy" of the story** kills maybe a dozen people or so. The "good guy" kills MILLIONS! Most because they don't know him! Why didn't he just introduce himself if having people know him was so important?

It's a difficult book to finish. I enjoy a good horror story but this read more like the depraved ramblings of a lunatic. If you really want to read it, there's usually a free copy in any motel room.

* "The Lord", "The Word" or whatever of the long list of names the authors came up with. Honestly, pick a name and stick with it.

** "The Devil", "The Beast" or "The Serpent" or whatever. Seriously, the authors should have kept notes to maintain some continuity!

This is the most cynical case of plagiarism I have read in a long while. I expect King James (a little pretentious no?) will be getting several writs for breach of copyright from the Egyptians, Zoroastrians, even the Buddhists.


Think how disillusioned I was when it turned out King James didn't even write it!

Better luck next time

I'm not generally a fan of fantasy fiction, but I felt obligated to read this title, it being the popular example of the genre. The story has a good premise that I can't help but think suffers in its implementation. The collaborative writing and editing processes, to say nothing of numerous translations, render the basic message somewhat indistinct. For example, as early as the first chapter, the authors make an attempt to introduce literally everything into the plot, even going so far as to suggest that the beginning of the story is the beginning of the universe. The rest of the book, however, makes no attempt to reconcile these far-reaching plot threads, instead focusing solely on the actions of a (relatively) small group of characters in the Middle East. Even with these strenuous limitations the remainder of the novel suffers from an overabundance of characters, most of whom are crude caricatures and only mentioned in passing. The authors would have done better to limit the scope of the plot, both in time and setting, to better highlight their message. The few characters who are developed suffer from serious inconsistencies as a result of the collaborative writing process.

Take, for example, the main character, God. In the first half of the book, which has a very linear and logical format, God is something of a bully. Only a few pages into the first chapter he has condemned the entire human race to a lifetime of suffering by casting their ancestors out of an idyllic paradise. Whenever anyone says or does anything critical of him, God either kills them outright or makes them wish they were dead. He kills women and children, he levels cities, at one point he even wipes out the whole human race with the exception of a single elderly couple, who are forced to engage in years of back-breaking manual labor simply to survive. God's history is never fleshed out; the authors simply leave him in place, unchanging, as a literal deus ex machina to be called into play whenever the plot gets too convoluted. It isn't hard to imagine that God's character in this part of the book was inspired by the Greek ideal of Zeus: an omniscient entity who rains suffering upon mankind from on high whenever he's in a bad mood.

At some point the original authors apparently felt they had done their part and the book sat around unfinished for a few centuries until a new group came along to add their contribution. The second portion of the story, the "New Testament", doesn't start off in a promising manner: God, evidently still in his Zeus mode, impregnates a mortal woman who, by his own admission, has done nothing wrong. (The authors even make a point of saying that, although married, she was a virgin prior to this episode.) Predictably, she gives birth to a half-human demigod, who at the age of thirty suddenly decides to start talking to people about his origins. Apparently fatherhood has softened God up somewhat; he's now willing to forgive and forget, no matter what people do, as long as they're willing to tell him how great his son, Jesus, is. The authors make no attempt to explain the about-face, and after a while some Romans show up to kill off the Jesus character, without God's interference. The intervening portions of the book are devoted to a collection of pithy parables with less-than-subtle morals, presented out of order and without context. Here the editors' methodology of slapping together the works of disparate authors, even leaving out whole books to clear up the larger inconsistencies, comes into play. A few main characters wander about, telling everyone how great Jesus was, presumably so that God, who doesn't show up at all in this part of the story, will treat them well. The narrative is stripped of any cronological basis and on the whole becomes fairly tedious.

Having fortunately sensed that they were losing their audience, a third group of authors then came along and added a brief summary so fantastic that it makes the rest of the book seem like an accurate history. God makes another appearance, just in time to see the human race he allegedly loved destroyed - except, of course, for those people who told other people about what a nice guy his son was.

On the whole, the book could have better presented its moral message by sticking to a well-defined format, be it a cronological narrative or a succession of fables. It's certainly worth a read; just be prepared to be confused by the characters and their motivations.

I must say, this book was a disappointment, It's plot holes, macabre, and shock value centric efforts come up short with the awkward ending and pretentious claims about the validity of the content. Overall a confusing, dim-witted attempt at moral ingenuity.

In short, a bunch of primitive stories tied together by a narcissistic, murderous protagonist with a split personality (Jesus and some other ghost), who will send people to eternal hell just for the fact that they do not worship Him, or something like that. Clearly, the book needed better copy editing, as it's full of contradictions.