Clemency Suggests | 15 December 2007

It seems bizarre to me that book shopping at this time of year should be about negotiating your way through mountainous piles of ‘Things You Never Knew About…’ or ‘The Book of Absolutely Useless…’ -type miscellanies. Surely Christmas, with its long, lazy afternoons and that strange week of limbo between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, is the perfect opportunity to get stuck into those weighty tomes you’d normally only have time to read on a long summer holiday? By the time you’ve shelled out a tenner for some flimsy collation of trivia to go in your beloved’s stocking (absolutely useless, indeed), you may as well have spent the extra few quid and bought one of the many genuine titles gasping for attention underneath the Truss and Schott ziggurats out there.

This season, when even the fiercely agnostic may find themselves subconsciously singing along to familiar biblical passages in the form of Christmas carols, I highly recommend Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography (Atlantic Books, £16.99).