I realize everyone has a different way of learning. I  like variety, so I’m sharing the four most current books I’ve been reading to study the Book of Mormon. I just finished the one edited by Rosenvall. I’m starting the Maxwell Institute one now.

All four have the entire text of the Book of Mormon — but not in your traditional chapter, heading, verse, column format. These are better for me to understand the story, and not look at it as a scripture book printed on fine tissue paper. Verses tend to breakup the story – we pull out verses for cute little quotes and have no idea of the context. It’s really not fair to the authors. These books are formatted more like reading someone’s journal, more like the original authors might have written their thoughts, history, and experiences. (You can still see verses notated within the texts.) And no commentary. I don’t want to be distracted. Don’t get me wrong, I read commentary — I have all of Hugh Nibley’s Book of Mormon classes on audio and transcripts. I go to the Joseph Smith Papers on the Internet. I buy some books. I have a bunch of books. But when I’m reading the Book of Mormon I want to read the words and see how they hit me without someone else’s point of view. Later I read the commentaries and often find some gems. I appreciate another person’s research. And I like to write in my books and take some notes in one of those moleskin notebooks.

 

 

 

*Books are linked to my Amazon affiliate account. If you click on the links you can take a look at the inside of the books on Amazon.