As you may recall, I made a New Year's resolution to read 52 books this year. I got off to a great start, but since that first book I've found myself falling into old patterns, like watching too much TV and doing too much mindless web surfing. Since the whole point of the 52 book challenge was to change these behaviors, I'm not going to let a little early failure deter me from my quest. If I'm going to fail, I'm going to do so as publicly as possible.

With that in mind, I'm happy to report that I finished book number two last week: The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta.

The summary from the book's front flap:

The Abstinence Teacher focuses on two divorced parents who each play key roles in the lives of other people’s children: Ruth Ramsey is the human sexuality teacher at the local high school who believes that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power.” Her younger daughter’s soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim is a member of The Tabernacle, the local evangelical Christian church that wants to take its message outside the doors of its own sanctuary, and sees a useful target in Ruth Ramsey. Adversaries in a small-town culture war, Ruth and Tim instinctively distrust one another. But when a controversy on the playing field forces the two of them to actually talk to each other, an uneasy friendship begins to develop.

I found myself far more interested in Tim's story. His motivations were far more developed than Ruth's and his plotline simply more interesting. Because of this, his character rose well beyond the typical evangelical stereotypes and became the more sympathetic of the two characters. Through Tim's experiences, I was able to look beyond my own biases and begin to understand why his religious beliefs were so important to him. Perrotta clearly put in a lot of research to help him understand the evangelical world, and it shows in his writing. But that doesn't mean he ignores the darker side of the born-again world, which is represented in the book by Tim's manipulative (and probably mentally ill) pastor and a few of his fellow churchgoers.

Ruth, on the other hand, was rather one dimensional, and her struggles with work and romance never really come to life. By the book's end I was only interested in her story as it related to Tim's.

Let's hope I finish book number three in less than two months.