93 books like The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha

At the time, when I read this book, I’d just become a father. Naturally, the story about a father trying to protect his son in a harsh dystopian world was captivating for me and still is to this day.

I loved the book's gritty realism and felt as if I were walking beside the characters during the entire journey. I also found McCarthy’s writing style unique and something new from the best-selling paperbacks I’d often read before picking up his book.

Pynchon’s most famous tome is one of the 20th Century’s top literary heavyweights, up on the shelf next to Ulysses and To the Lighthouse, and I dove into it as an aspiring literato, eager to add it to my “conquered classics” list. But I was totally unprepared for the novel’s explosive humor. Still one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, it follows the main character, Tyrone Slothrop, through the ruins of war-ravaged Europe, from the rooftop banana farm in London during the V2 rocket attacks, to the Herman Goering Hotel and Casino on the newly liberated French Riviera, to the German rocket factories at Nordhausen, where we learn the secrets behind Dr. Laszlo Jamf’s diabolical Imipolex G. Along the way we meet Roger Mexico and Colonel Ernest Pudding, Darlene Quoad and Geli Tripping, Scorpia Mossmoon and Richard M. Zhlubb, to name a paltry few. Even Mickey Rooney shows… show more.

The original metafiction narrator, postmodern before there was a modern to be post about, Tristram Shandy bumbles his way through his pseudo-biography, unreliable to family and readers alike. He doesn't even manage to get born by the end of the first volume. And yet his innumerable faults only make me like him more.

I can't help but admire the chutzpah of a man who interrupts the story to offer the reader the chance to buy their way into the dedication–and for the bargain sum of only fifty guineas!

Remember how disappointed you were when you first tried to read Tolkien's The Silmarillion? You'd just devoured The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and you needed more Middle Earth, and you asked for The Silmarillian for your birthday and you received it!  And it was just a bunch of half-baked fleshless ideas! Well, there's nothing half-baked about Masters of Atlantis! Masters of Atlantis is my least favorite book by my most favorite author! Why did I choose it for this list over Portis's other four novels? Because, for the vast majority of its 300-plus pages, it reads like a hurried summary of a tangled web of bizarro characters negotiating an interwoven freak-o-system of conspiratorial cults!

This is the most sensible, persuasive commentary on the Book of Exodus that a contemporary reader could want.

Prager’s pages on the Ten Commandments alone are brilliant and revelatory. But he excels throughout in addressing modern anxieties about a book over 3000 years old and its many insights into human striving. When you’re through with this one, move on to his Genesis!

Who Wrote the Bible? is my go-to book for explaining to undergraduates the classic Documentary Hypothesis, that is, the theory that describes how humans wrote and edited the Bible. Friedman’s style is clear and engaging, and he frames his explanation as an academic mystery. I (with other scholars) don’t always agree with his conclusions, but they responsible and worth considering. My students regularly note that this was their favorite book of the semester.

The Thomas Nelson Study Bible is my second favorite commentary to use. It shares many similarities with The MacArthur Study Bible. There are helpful charts and maps. The commentary is clear and understandable. The cross-references are helpful as are the other study tools. The images and charts are done wonderfully. There are over 1,000 articles and notes spread through the commentary, which provide a greater understanding of certain passages and topics. Again there are also book introductions and the outlines can be very helpful. The word studies, the Strong’s numbers in case you want to do further study. The indexes and concordances at the back are helpful and easy to use. One point to consider is while John MacArthur’s commentary is Calvinistic, The Thomas Nelson Study Bible doesn’t seem to lean toward Calvinism or Arminianism, probably to reach multiple denominations.

As its title implies, this book is accessible to the entire family and would be a great resource for Sunday school teachers who want to provide their students with a larger understanding of the life and times of peoples in ancient Palestine and Rome. The book is broken down into easy-to-find categories such as "The Home," "Warfare," and "Travel and Communication," to name a few. There are stunning photographs on every page with detailed and clear explanations. The back of the book has timelines of the Bible and a map of Palestine in New Testament times with highlights of key events in the New Testament. There is also an alphabetical index that makes it easy to find information on specific topics.

Using state-of-the-art scholarship and his own vast erudition, Calasso reveals the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament)—the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity—in a whole new way.

You will time and again be shocked by this book, and swear that he must be making things up, that these wild tales can’t possibly be in the Bible… yet indeed, all of them are there. A revolutionary book on a revolutionary religion. 

After reading this imaginative story, I never thought of Eve in the same way again. Havah is a stunning depiction of the first woman—one created, not born. Tosca Lee takes us on an original journey into the life, choices, and emotions of the first woman. It is a story of sin, but more than that, it is a story of creative love and the gift of free will. This story allows us to sympathize with Havah, and even ask ourselves what we might have done in her place. Enthralling and inspiring!