Finished reading, an early 2019 compendium

Maybe I’ll start posting these every time again… but for now I’ve got a long-ish list of books I’ve finished already this year. Particular standouts are in bold. Here goes nothin':

All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment by Hannah Anderson
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger

The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar TisbyTisby carefully and methodically lays out the complicity and often encouragement that the American church gave to personal and institutional racism. A painful but needed reminder that we have a long way to go and a lot to make right.

The Killer Collective by Barry Eisler
Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission by Michael J. Gorman
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

We Need Each Other: Responding to God’s Call to Live Together by Jean VanierVanier is a Catholic humanitarian who founded a federation of communities dedicated to caring for people with developmental disabilities. I’ve heard and watched a couple interviews with Vanier and his holiness and humility are immediately evident in a way that’s incredibly rare. (His On Being interview with Krista Tippett is a great one.)His book is similarly humble and holy.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian MalanWritten prior to the end of apartheid in South Africa, Malan, a white South African journalist, tries to come to grips with the system of white supremacy that to him seems both wicked and unchangeable.

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham
The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblical Hebraica by Ernst Wurthwein
Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty by Gregory A. BoydBoyd makes the case that doubt can enhance faith, and that at times the need for certainty can be more damaging than helpful. I’m right there with him on that one.

Paul: A Biography by N. T. Wright
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Hyperion by Dan SimmonsAward-winning science fiction. Imaginative in a way that only the best sci-fi is.

Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream by Carson Vaughan

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock by Gregory Alan ThornburyA well-written and -researched biography of one of the truly fascinating characters of early contemporary Christian music.

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

Flee, Be Silent, Pray: An Anxious Evangelical Finds Peace with God through Contemplative Prayer by Ed Cyzewski
Cyzewski makes the case for contemplative prayer being not just helpful but necessary, and makes it sound easy enough that even this long-time evangelical feels like I should take up the practice.

At the moment I’ve got another long one going: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (1200 pages!)

My 2018 Reading in Review

Time for a quick recap of my 2018 reading. I’ve done several reading posts through the year so this can just be a summary.

Thanks to Goodreads I can report I read 71 books in 2018. 33 of those were fiction, the remaining 38 were mostly history and theology, with a few biographies thrown in. Though I have a large virtual stack of unread books in my Kindle app, most of my reading this year was still dead tree books. (Maybe this year I can start plowing through the electronic ones…)

A few notable favorites for the year:

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak
Meeting Brad Jersak and hearing him teach this past summer at the Water to Wine Gathering was a highlight of my year. In this book Brad sketches a truly hopeful view of final things, of an eternal city whose gates are always open and inviting. I need to go re-read this one.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone
I’m sure I wasn’t ready to read this one when it was published back in 2011. But to pick it up in late 2018 and read Dr. Cone’s insightful parallels between the cross on which Jesus suffered and the trees on which so many black people were lynched throughout American history was a powerful thing. I was struct by how the Bible is adaptable and interpretable (a more palatable word to some might be “relevant”) to such diverse swaths of the human experience.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
This one is a sort of alt-history crossed with Hidden Figures written from a strongly feminist viewpoint. Loved it. Next to pass it on to my daughters.

They weren’t all awesome.

Generally if I start in and after 40-50 pages I’m significantly unimpressed, I just put the book back on the return-to-library pile and pick up another one. Life’s too short to stick it out through bad books. There were a few clunkers, though, that I did manage to get all the way through and wouldn’t recommend. Two that stick out are Street Freaks by Terry Brooks (sci-fi writer trying cyber-punk and abusing every cliche in the genre) and The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey, which I wrote about earlier.

On to 2019!

I started the year thinking that I needed to burn through my Kindle and purchased book backlog. Then a week later I went to the library and borrwed four more books. Maybe I have a problem… but I guess it’s a good sort of problem to have.

Finished reading: 2018, part five

My reading has apparently slowed down a bit this summer. Still, there’s been some good stuff recently:

Well, first an intro to the first two books. I heard Brad Jersak speak at the Water to Wine Gathering back in June - what a treat. Brad is a Canadian pastor and author, more recent convert to Orthodoxy, and spent many years in pastoral ministry working with the mentally challenged and the poor. He’s funny, wise, and kind… and I’ll pick up whatever book he writes next.

A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel by Bradley Jersak If Christ is the truest expression of what God is like, what does that really mean? How should we then think about God? Jersak is no fan of the “loving Son protects us from the wrath of the angry Father” picture, and instead works through what it looks like to think that Jesus is what God the Father is like.

Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem by Bradley Jersak Here Jersak takes a careful look at the Biblical texts about heaven and hell and judgment. While it seems he can’t quite bring himself to become a universalist, he makes a strong case for the potential that heaven will be much fuller, and hell much emptier, than my traditional evangelical upbringing taught me to expect. And I like the hopeful view. If there’s a reasonable case for being hopeful, why not be hopeful?

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee Hugo-winning sci-fi to change things up. A decent story, nothing amazing but entertaining enough.

Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk I picked this one off the library shelf on a whim and ended up not really liking it that much. Brutal, pessimistic, dark… No time for that nonsense.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky Kurlansky tracks the usage of salt through history. The book is more interesting when it focuses on ancient times, and progressively less interesting as it reaches the modern day. Also there were far more recipes for salting foods included than I will really ever need.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin A classic from Baldwin, and the first I’ve read of him. What a writer! Beautifully written with a powerful message.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Picked this one up after @johnthelutheran raved about it. I’d previously read Faber’s Book of Strange New Things and enjoyed it. The Crimson Petal and the White was something completely different - a Victorian novel that reminded me a good bit of Dickens - but it kept me interested all the way through.

Finished reading: 2018, part four

What I’ve read the past month or so:

Head On by John Scalzi A sequel in Scalzi’s series from the near future where some humans are afflicted by a disease that causes “lock in”, where their bodies are vegetative but their minds are able to interact with the outside world via a neural interface and proxy robot-like bodies. An entertaining read.

The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott Interesting to read a biography of Merton written by someone other than himself. (While The Seven Storey Mountain is well worth a read, it’s clearly pretty one-sided.) Merton remains a fascinating character to me.

Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth Miller I found Miller’s name when looking at biology textbooks - he’s the author of a very popular one used by our public high school. Turns out he’s a professing Christian who has spent a bunch of time thinking and writing about how he makes sense of his faith in light of his life-long study of evolution. I found the book thoughtful and very reasonable. Worth a read.

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior This one isn’t out yet, but I snagged a review copy and will write a full post later. Prior uses each chapter in this book to highlight a virtue and a great book that illustrates the virtue. I now have a bunch more books on my list that I’ve somehow failed to read thus far.

How Right You Are, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse Light-hearted fluff… perfect for reading on vacation next to a swimming pool… which was exactly what I did.

Warning Light by David Ricciardi Highly forgettable spy thriller. Something about a guy who may or may not have been spying on an Iranian nuclear site and then is trying to escape. Yawn.

The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire by Alan Kreider Now this was a good one. Kreider was a Professor of Church History at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. He spends most of this volume examining primary sources from the first few centuries A.D. (basically 1st century up through Constantine) and looking at what those Christians viewed as important. Notably important: patience and longsuffering. It becomes clear reading Kreider how much the tenor of the early church changed when Constantine brought them out of the

Bed and Board: Plain Talk About Marriage by Robert Farrar Capon This one was in urban legend status for a while - an old, out-of-print title from a beloved (if somewhat niche) author that supposedly was very good. And hey, it got reprinted, and it’s not even that expensive! Capon is his familiar crusty self, and honestly the chapters on marriage fell a little short in my mind. But the chapter on Things and our approach to them was golden. Completely worth the price of the book. Merits a blog post later.

Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties by James F. Simon A nice overview of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower and how they interacted specifically around civil rights issues in the 1950s. Most striking to me was how different a time it was politically - Warren and Eisenhower were centrist and courted as presidential candidates by both political parties. We could use some more of that today. Warren particularly was an interesting story to me. Second-generation European immigrant, son of blue-collar parents just scraping by, had fairness as an overriding political objective, and championed both social programs and fiscal responsibility, and somehow made it all work as governor of California.

Finished reading: 2018, part three

Books I’ve read the past couple months:

Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen

A fun little sci-fi story I discovered on the library shelf. A sort of space-based adventure / mystery story where the main character has a special ability that comes in quite handy at times.

Traitor by Jonathan de Shalit

A not-so-memorable spy novel.

Immeasurable: Reflections on the Soul of Ministry in the Age of Church, Inc. by Skye Jethani

A hit-and-miss collection of essays. When Jethani is on, his insight into the issues in evangelicalism are really good.

Kangaroo Too by Curtis C. Chen

Hey, I liked the first book in the series… The second one was pretty good, too.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

An overview of the various historical perspectives on Adam and Eve. Easy to read, fairly interesting.

City of Endless Night by Douglas Preston

I have always enjoyed the Agent Pendergast series from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. This one was no exception.

What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

I typically love Robinson’s essays, but this book left me a bit cold. Its themes are more repetitive than her previous books of essays - perhaps because they’re condensed from various talks she’s given?

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

A fascinating account of growing up as an unschooled Mormon survivalist in Idaho and the journey out to the real world. And it has some really great cover art.

Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith by Richard J. Foster

Foster reviews key contributions to the Christian faith from various Christian traditions. Encouraging precisely because it recognizes first that these truly are all strands of the Christian faith (an angle that too many in my current flavor of evangelicalism would dispute) and second, that they provide rich value to believers.

The Night Trade by Barry Eisler

Eisler knows how to write a thriller.

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

I picked this one up from the library against my better judgment, but thought the topic was interesting and that I’d go into it with an open mind. The author admits in the preface that she is telling a one-sided story, and then she grinds that axe for the entire book. Sure, Christianity has a checkered history, but to hear Nixey tell it the world would be a rich nirvana of love and learning were it not for centuries of hateful narrow-minded Christians.

The Deceivers by Alex Berenson

I’d never read Berenson before. This one’s a passable spy thriller adopting a ripped-from-the-headlines plot of Russian interference in a US presidential election. They just don’t make spy novels anymore like Tom Clancy used to.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

Following my sad pattern of being prompted to read famous authors after hearing of their deaths, I picked this one up after Tom Wolfe passed away last week. Now I’m gonna have to go find some of his other books. While the story of the test pilots who became the first round of US astronauts in the late 1950s is interesting enough on its own, what’s truly memorable is Wolfe’s voice and style.

Finished reading: 2018, part two

Books I’ve read over the past month or so:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles An utterly charming novel about a Russian nobleman confined to hotel “house arrest” after the 1917 revolution. His adventures interacting with hotel staff (which he soon becomes) and guests are full of wit and grace and humor. I don’t recall who recommended this one to me but I owe them my thanks.

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage by Jared Yates Sexton A memoir from a liberal writer who covered the 2016 US presidential election. Heartfelt, but not as interesting or memorable as I had hoped it might be.

House of Spies by Daniel Silva OK, the Gabriel Allon series is getting old. I probably should’ve figured that out seeing as this is book #17 in the series.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami I first became acquainted with Murakami through his Absolutely on Music book that I read a couple months ago. Having discovered he was a novelist I figured it was worth reading one. 1Q84 was just interesting enough to keep me going through its 900 pages. I guess it’s a love story at heart, albeit one with some odd and unexplained sci-fi twists.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon A YA sci-fi novel with strong race / slavery / gender themes. Interesting in that it tried hard to represent a lot of racial and gender diversity. Managed to do it while only a little bit heavy-handed with the message.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler Heard about this one on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. Fascinating (to me, a bit of a con law nerd) history of how American law has treated corporations with regard to rights and freedoms. Some cases, it seems, have had unintended consequences as the years went by; Ralph Nader’s efforts to win corporate speech rights back in the 1970’s seemed meant to benefit ordinary people by freeing up information that the government had restricted. Those same rights were used as the basis 30 years later for deciding in Citizens United that corporations could dump unlimited money into political campaigns.

Crimes of the Father by Thomas Keneally The author of the novel Schindler’s List takes on the Catholic church abuse scandal. Pleasant yet forgettable prose.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Realized I didn’t know much about Malcolm X, and this particular biography was recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates somewhere. A very readable picture of a fascinating man.

Finished reading: where has 2018 gone already?

I start each year with the intent of writing up Finished Reading posts on a book-by-book basis. Then I find myself in the first week of February and realize I’m nine books behind already. So it’s compendium time. Here’s what I’ve ready in 2018 so far:

My 2017 reading in review

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.

Finished reading: 2017 year-end edition

I’ve gotten seriously slack at listing all the books I’ve been reading. Consider this my year-end catch-up post. (Not to be confused with my year-in-review post which will come next week sometime.)

Here’s what I’ve finished reading since last time I posted:

Fiction

  • City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
  • Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
  • Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
  • The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford
  • Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
  • The Force by Don Winslow
  • The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius

Non-Fiction

  • A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples by Ilan Pappe
  • Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 by Edward K. Kaplan
  • Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God by Brian Zahnd
  • The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency by Chris Whipple
  • How to Think by Alan Jacobs

I’m currently reading The Punch Escrow by Tal M. Klein, which if it stays on track will climb pretty high up my favorites list for the year. Stay tuned!

Finished reading: fiction!

Two weeks, two business trips, it was time for light reading. Trolling the fiction shelves found me these:

Price of Duty by Dale Brown

Dale Brown has managed to crank out 21 books in the Patrick McLanahan series over the past 30 years. I’ve read far too many of them. They crossed the line into ridiculousness several books back… and this one is no different. This one reads more like the script for a direct-to-video action movie (a genre, I fear, that has been killed off by Netflix!) than a proper novel.

Tom Clancy - Point of Contact by Mike Maden

Tom Clancy is long dead and buried but his name and book series lives on. According to Amazon, this book is “Jack Ryan Universe book #23”, which is roughly the same output as Dale Brown’s series in roughly the same timeframe. This one was thin enough that, writing this post a couple weeks after finishing the book, I have exactly zero recollection of what this one was about.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Now this one was worth my time. While it starts out seeming to be about ’the return of magic’, it’s much more an adventure in time travel combined with some humorous observations about how bureaucracy can take over and ruin even the best ideas. I had a lot of fun here.