In this week's "Relief Recommends," fiction editor Alan Ackmann talks about one of his favorite places to go on the web, The Brick Testament.

In order to understand this week’s recommendation, you have to understand something about my childhood: I was a blockhead.  

I don’t mean that I was a scholastically late-bloomer (unless you count long-division, which still makes me sweat).  I mean that I was one of those quiet, bookish kids who also loved Legos, creating whole cities and dramas from those clicking, connective bits of plastic.  But for me, it went deeper.  I loved the imagination, and the aesthetics of Legos.  I loved the idea that so much was possible from something so initially unimpressive.  I loved the Rubbermaid bin my grandma gave me for storing blocks, and how it rattled when I took it out of the closet.  One of the triumphs of my childhood is when I couldn’t afford to buy the latest pirate themed Lego set, and so I recreated the whole darn ship myself with what I had.  And you know what?  I’m still pretty proud of that.  

Even today, I’m the guy who has old sets in his parent’s basement (“it’s a pretty big basement” I’d say if the subject came up), the guy who whines that contemporary Legos are more like model sets, which destroys the creativity (“we had three red bricks, two yellow bricks, one weird blue brick with eyes, and we liked it!”), and the guy who is somewhat indignant that he just had to add the word “Lego” to his MS Word Dictionary (“Take that you squiggly red line!”).  

Of course, I’m also the guy who thinks it’s awesome that Brendan Powell Smith created The Brick Testament.

In case you hadn’t guessed, The Brick Testament (to quote their web-site) is “the largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible in the world, with over 3,600 illustrations that retell more than 300 stories from The Bible.”  And every illustration is made entirely out of Legos.  But the point of the website (and its accompanying hardcover books) is not subversive; it “is to give people an increased knowledge of the contents of The Bible in a way that is fun and compelling while remaining true to the text of the scriptures.”  What follows, then, is a recreation that is not only accurate, but also splendidly artful.

If you don’t believe me, head on over to the site and check out the mammoth Noah’s Ark, the spectacularly detailed Garden of Eden, or the lavishly rampaging hordes of Gideon.  It’s impressive stuff, made even more so by the careful art direction—most camera angles seem precisely chosen, and draw focus to the appropriate parts of the work, whether it is Cain’s snide expression following the murder of his brother, or the forlorn tower of Babel, standing starkly against the horizon once the tribes have been scattered.  Such images add resonance, and invite meditation.

That’s also the main advantage to the format.  Many Bible stories, in their original versions, are written in a way that is artfully efficient but also rather brisk, so that it becomes easy to race through the details and lose the subtlety.  The Brick Testament, by contrast, is leisurely, often progressing at a pace of one illustration per verse (and therefore per page).  This may help thwart a reader’s natural inclination to brush through the narrative, and forces a more languid pace.  And as one of those people who have difficulty reading in a way not at least partially driven by speed (thank you very much, graduate school) I appreciate anything that makes me slow down.  

A few disclaimers: First, I have not looked at the entire site in detail.  I’ve been working my way through in Biblical order, am almost to Exodus, and therefore cannot fully vouch for anything beyond that.  Second, take the ratings system seriously—stories are noted beforehand if the images contain violence, cursing, sexuality, or nudity (strictly the Lego kind), and these might not fully be for children.  After all, these are uncensored stories are from the Bible, and we all know that the Bible can be a pretty brutal book.  But then again…if such a thing bothered you, you probably wouldn’t be trolling the waters of Relief, now would you?

Speaking of Relief, we’ll back again next week with a review of Stacy Barton’s short story collection Surviving Nashville.  Stacy has previously appeared in Relief, and is also forthcoming in our pages.  We love it when nice people do well!  Until then, tide yourself over with The Brick Testament.  Trust me—it’s well worth your time.

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• Stuff Other Than Writing
• Using Setting Wisely in Fiction
• The Importance of Characterization
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