Dearly beloved, we are daily gathered here on this blog to celebrate the holy estate of literature. But this, as you'll be aware, is a holier than usual year for the Word – 2011 being the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.
Over the weekend, Jeanette Winterson wrote that "the King James translation was written to be read out loud" – and she speaks as one who knows, having grown up in a household where virtually nothing else was read and begun her prodigious literary career as a pint-sized Pentecostalist preacher aged six. The book's founding spirit, meanwhile, is being honoured at the Bath literature festival next week with a round-the-clock reading of all 66 books in the first five days of March.
Literary stars such as Alexander McCall Smith and Adam Nicolson have volunteered to step up to the pulpit, as well as actors Bill Paterson and Timothy West – the latter getting the fireworks-blazing finale, the Book of Revelation.
But organisers are very keen for volunteers from the congregation to declaim a stretch, with help on hand from theatre director Hannah Drake, who'll be offering oratorical tips where needed.
Not all of us are within an easy pilgrimage of Bath, but for those who are there are slots still open for the willing. The rest of us can dream: which verses, chapters or books would you choose to read? If you don't fancy the job yourself, can you think of a writer who would be better suited to the task?
I was lucky enough to witness the singular sight of Howard Jacobson delivering a Sunday sermon in a church in Oxford last year. He left the lesson-reading to others in the congregation, his theme being the creative imagination's similarity to religious belief and how he wouldn't really trust novelists who called themselves atheists. He said afterwards that he felt absolutely at home in the pulpit, and he does have a real gift for righteous thunder, so I'd love to hear him deliver a stretch from the Book of Job. (He is, conveniently enough, in Bath for the festival.)
Will Self wrote a terrific essay for Canongate a few years back about Revelation, noting its strong appeal to the disturbed and bringing out the intense, visionary madness in the text itself. Self is also good at emphatic judgments, and an accomplished public speaker.
But whom, brothers and sisters, would you call on?
