The topic for today is a book I pretend to have read, only I come up empty. So here’s a different angle. This is a book that I have never read cover to cover, although I’ve read many excerpts, and those many times.

Every student at my high school, Pius X, needed one of these, and I’ve owned this copy since my freshman year, which was a long time ago. You’d think that after so many decades I’d have worked my way through it, but the one time I tried to read it start to finish, I didn’t make it past Genesis. It’s a book that I’ve turned to, though, on an ‘as needed’ basis. Most recently: some dire words I found in Jeremiah appear in my next novel, The Price of Blood.