Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Library

Rob Bell's Sex God.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

Rob Bell's second book, Sex God, has the same strange font and colors on the pages as his first book, Velvet Elvis, but once I got past that (and the one-paragraph sentences), I settled into the book quickly. It's a fast and easy read, short and not complicated by any means.

It would be a great book for someone thinking of marriage, or to explain sex in a way that wasn't just a "True Love Waits" ring or as a mere bodily function. Bell's goal is to show the spiritual symbolism and importance. This is not a Christian sex manual by any means. In fact, you'd probably be surprised, after seeing that title on the cover, what it's really about.

A couple of things about Bell's writing:

Footnotes: His footnotes at the end supply a nice list of other books you might want to read and serve less as footnotes and more as parenthetical statements that would have slowed the main writing down had they been interjected into the text. I like his footnotes; some don't. I would suspect if you were more of a scholarly person, you might not find them so clever.
Production: The format, colors, layout, spacing, font -- it's different and hard to get used to at first.
Phrasing: Bell uses lots of one-sentence paragraphs and what I'd call "incomplete" sentences that are like interjections or after-thoughts. It takes some getting used to at first.

The title, Sex God: Exploring the endless connections between sexuality and spirituality, might put some people off right away.

That's too bad. You should read the book.

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