The Lost Book of Mormon

I accidentally read this book. I pulled it off the shelf with zero context (and thankfully the standard academic library cover instead of the campy cover it apparently should have had) and read the first page. That first page still didn't help me know what the book was about exactly, but I loved it and wanted to read the rest.

After reading it, it's still a difficult book to categorize. It's perhaps best described as a travel memoir of a writer and fan of the Book of Mormon, trying to understand what it is to write a sacred text. As a practicing (but often skeptical) Latter-day Saint/Mormon, it was fascinating to see the Book of Mormon from an outside perspective. So rarely does anyone outside the faith tradition take the book seriously that it's easy to think the only ways to engage the book are as orthodox believer or incredulous critic. Steinberg is neither.

Often laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the first chapters, I enjoyed myself all the way through, even if the concluding chapters had less insight than the first half. All in all worth reading for any fans of the Book of Mormon.