Just a quick post to summarize my reading and a few favorites this year. I read a total of 71 books in 2017, which I’ll split up into fiction, non-fiction, and theology. I’ll highlight no more than two in each category as particular favorites.
Fiction
- Broken Trust – W.E.B. Griffin
- Bounty – Michael Byrnes
- The Whistler – John Grisham
- The Believer – Joakim Zander
- Last Year – Robert Charles Wilson
- Dune – Frank Herbert
- Before the Fall – Noah Hawley
- The Girl Who Drank the Moon – Kelly Barnhill
- The Shadow Land – Elizabeth Kostova
- Walkaway – Cory Doctorow
- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers
- A Closed and Common Orbit – Becky Chambers
- Parable of the Sower – Octavia E. Butler
- Till We Have Faces – C. S. Lewis (re-read)
- The Switch – Joseph Finder
- Price of Duty – Dale Brown
- Point of Contact – Mike Maden
- The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. – Neal Stephenson
- City of Stairs – Robert Jackson Bennett
- Boneshaker – Cherie Priest
- Autonomous – Annalee Newitz
- The Berlin Project – Gregory Benford
- Over Sea, Under Stone – Susan Cooper
- The Force – Don Winslow
- The Quantum Spy – David Ignatius
- The Dark Net – Benjamin Percy
- The Punch Escrow – Tal M. Klein
The Force is a well-written crime story featuring a flawed detective. A really engaging page-turner where I didn’t know where the story was going when I was half-way through.
The Punch Escrow is a sci-fi thriller that takes one reasonable conceit and runs with it to great effect. A really fun novel to close out the year.
Non-Fiction
- Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America – Ibram X. Kendi
- A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
- Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House about the Future of Faith in America – Michael Wear
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion – Jonathan Haidt
- Instrumental: A memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music – James Rhodes
- A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier – David Welky
- Now – The Physics of Time – Richard A. Muller
- The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies – and What They Have Done to Us – David Thomson
- City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York – Tyler Anbinder
- A Natural History of the Piano – Stuart Isacoff
- The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science – Julie Des Jardins
- The Silk Roads: A New History of the World – Peter Frankopan
- Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen
- The World Will Be Saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of Dorothy Day – Kate Hennessy
- Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business – John Newhouse
- Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich – Norman Ohler
- The Givenness of Things – Marilynne Robinson
- Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption – Bryan Stevenson
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America – Richard Rothstein
- Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic – Sam Quinones
- The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – David McCullough
- Movies are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings – Josh Larsen
- The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II – Svetlana Alexievich
- A Colony in a Nation – Chris Hayes
- Getting Religion: Faith, Culture & Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama – Kenneth L. Woodward
- Khrushchev: The Man and His Era – William Taubman
- Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness – Edward K. Kaplan
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples – Ilan Pappe
- Spiritial Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 – Edward K. Kaplan
- How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds – Alan Jacobs
- The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency – Chris Whipple
- Nevertheless: A Memoir – Alec Baldwin
I started off the year with a bang reading Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. Stunning writing about the history of racism in America. So much that we as middle-class white Americans aren’t familiar with. But the one that will likely stick with me even more and provoke some re-reads came late in the year: Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. In this time of “fake news” and incessant online argument, Jacobs provides some much-needed sanity and advice.
Theology
- How to Survive a Shipwreck – Jonathan Martin
- Introduction to the Old Testament – J. Alberto Soggin
- The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion – N.T. Wright
- Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines that Shape the Church for Mission – David E. Fitch
- Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life – Tish Harrison Warren
- The Imperfect Disciple: Grace for People Who Can’t Get Their Act Together – Jared C. Wilson
- People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just an Issue – Preston Sprinkle
- The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? – David Bentley Hart
- Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony – Richard Bauckham
- A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story – Diana Butler Bass
- The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the Role of Worship Leader – Mark Pierson
- Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News – Brian Zahnd
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham will permanently change how I read the Gospels. His case that most people named by name in the Gospels were specifically named because they were known eyewitnesses puts the accounts in a new light.
And I had heard good stuff about D.B. Hart’s little volume The Doors of the Sea for a long time but just never gotten to it. In it he uses the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 to frame his response to the age-old question of how a good, omnipotent God can allow such evil and suffering. My theological upbringing has been pretty Calvinist, but Hart’s very non-Calvinist approach (he’s Orthodox) provided a more compelling and beautiful explanation than anything I’ve previously read.
Summary
On the whole, I feel like I got a lot of variety this year and read a lot of interesting books. I do have a handful that I started and for some reason bogged down in and need to come back to – Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God is on that list… to be picked up sometime soon.
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