Catholic Bible Study Companion: All 73 Books Explained in Plain English — One-Page Summaries, Key Verses, Teaching, Mass Connections, and a Daily Reading Plan for Beginners

Most people who open a Catholic Bible get about three weeks in and stall somewhere in Leviticus, among the grain offerings.That is not a discipline problem. The Bible is not one book. It is a library of 73, written across more than a thousand years by shepherds, kings, prison inmates, a doctor and a tax collector. Nobody reads a library front to back.This companion gives you one page for every one of those 73 books, laid out the same way each time. Read one page and you know where to find everything on all the others.On a single page you get: - What the book is about, in one sentence- What actually happens in it, in plain English- The themes running through it- How it is arranged, chapter by chapter- A key verse worth carrying with you- What the Catholic Church draws from the book- Where you are most likely to hear it read at MassThat last one is the part most Catholics are never told. You hear three readings and a psalm on Sunday without being told where the passage came from or what surrounded it. Here you get the lectionary placements: which Sunday, which season, which year of the cycle.All seven deuterocanonical books have their own page and are marked so you can see at a glance which ones your Protestant friends will not find in their Bible. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees are here, along with the longer Catholic Esther and Daniel. A short chapter explains how the number 73 was settled and why it differs.At the back is a 52-week reading plan for people who have started the Bible before and not finished it. Five readings a week, two to five chapters each, about fifteen minutes. The two spare days are deliberate. A plan that punishes you for missing Tuesday is a plan you abandon in March.Keep it open beside your Bible, read it straight through for the shape of the whole story, or start at week one of the plan.Open your Bible. Find the page. Start anywhere.