A retelling of Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness I heard about from Bret Anthony Johnston on NPR's "You Have to Read This" segment. It's still percolating, but I think I might love it. Below is a passage from page 219 that feels indicative for a number of reasons:

"But there was also something rich, at times, about the scrub, despite itself. Something sustaining, unselfish, fertile even. Perhaps this was because it made no claims. It did not promise anything, except, maybe, to replicate through it's array of absences the body's inner solitude and to free its tenants and its guests from their addictions and their vanities. The empty lands--these very caves, these paths, these desert pavements made of rock, these pebbled flats, these badlands, and these unwatered river beds--they were siblings to the empty spaces in the heart. Why else would scrubs have any holy visitors at all? Ten thousand quarantiners had come to these parched hills and passed their days, some delirious with illness; others feverish with god, and guilt, and lunacy, unravelled from themselves by visions of a better and eternal world; the rest made mad by fasting. Yet at the end of their forty days, the scrub sent all of them away enriched and dryly irrigated."