Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
(Doubleday, $30)
Back in 2012, a story that briefly raced around the world raised “the tantalizing possibility of an entirely different Christian history,” said Lucas Wittmann in Time .com. At an academic conference in Rome, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King presented a scrap of papyrus bearing snatches of Coptic text including a partial sentence indicating that Jesus may have had a wife. Centuries of church doctrine suddenly teetered. “But there was one problem”: The document, as journalist Ariel Sabar later helped confirm, was a forgery. Sabar’s new book, which fleshes out the exposé he wrote in 2016 for The Atlantic, offers revealing glimpses of the antiquities trade, the history of ancient Christian texts, and the often eccentric scholars who study them. Above all, “it’s a story about journalism done right.”
“The book is as good as a detective novel,” said Katherine Powers in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When a self-described collector reached out to King to share the fragment, the Harvard scholar was initially skeptical but eventually agreed to give it a look, then championed it. Other scholars quickly questioned the document—asking why, for example, the Coptic text contained a galling grammatical error. But King defended her conclusion 18 months later in the Harvard Theological Review. We’re only a third into the book by this point, said Alex
by Sarah Waters (2009). I tend to be a setting-focused writer, so I gravitate to books with settings that become part of the story. My favorite house stories are the ones, like this English ghost story, where the house feels like a character: a living, breathing creature that’s so much more than just a building.
The Little Stranger
by Italo Calvino (1973). I love a good fantasy, but I’m even more fond of stories that take reality and tip it ever so gently over into the fantastical. I’m also fascinated by the ways Calvino plays with structure and how stories are told, in this case laid out as tarot cards upon a table.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
by Raymond Chandler (1939). A few years ago, I went through a noir phase and read all the Chandler and Hammett I could get my hands on. I love how mystery can propel a narrative, especially when that mystery is dimly lit and wearing something slinky and drinking a martini.
The Big Sleep
by Donna Tartt (1992). A whydunit more than a whodunit, The Secret History grabbed me from its perfect first sentence, and across 500 pages and beyond, I don’t think it ever let go. Tartt’s celebrated debut also allowed me to work the phrase “bacchanalian murderousness” into The Starless Sea.
The Secret History
by Madeleine L’Engle (1962). I first read A Wrinkle in Time at age 9 or 10, and of all the story’s wondrous elements, it’s the beginning that stays with me the most: In the attic of a regular house on a stormy night, an unhappy girl is shivering under a patchwork quilt just as something is about to change.
A Wrinkle in Time
by Homer. This is one of the books that I return to over and over again, and I now have two copies of Emily Wilson’s wonderful new translation so that I can take notes in the paperback. I was hoping to keep the hardcover pristine—but it has been nibbled on by a kitten.
The Odyssey