Last night, in an attempt to rec­tify my bro­ken sleep pat­terns, I sought out the most dull work of fic­tion in the house so that I could bore myself to sleep. My choice, under­stand­ably one might think, was the Book of Mor­mon, which we got from a cou­ple of mis­sion­ar­ies for the price of two cups of cof­fee and half an hour of pre­tend­ing to care.

Unfor­tu­nately, it seems that I was wrong about the bore­dom. It’s now the next day, and I actu­ally want to read more. Wrapped up in 0 AD Judeo-Christian “and so it came to pass” rub­bish is a story which could hap­pily be renamed “Nephi’s Swash­buck­ling Adven­ture” and turned into at least a third-rate movie. So far, in the first twenty pages or so: Nephi and his dad have had visions from God and been ban­ished from Jerusalem, but have snuck back in to grab some loot. When his brother tries to pay the bad guy for the loot they want, the bad guy beats him up and sends hench­men after him. So Nephi sneaks in, finds the bad guy drunk, kills him with his own sword after argu­ing with God, then steals the guy’s armour too. Once in the bad guy’s armour, every­one mis­takes Nephi for the bad guy, so he makes off with the loot and one of the bad guy’s ser­vants too, who I choose to believe is a ninja butler.

Being hor­ri­bly reli­gious and thus male-centric there’s been a dis­tinct lack of buxom wenches so far, but appar­ently in the next chap­ter they sail to Amer­ica, so who knows, there might be pirates!