2022 in review (2): Books read and unread
A year in books
I mentioned in the prior post that this has been a year in which I relearnt the love of reading. In this post I'm going to list for you all the books I read, excepting those that were directly work-related (or in Greek, Latin, or Gaelic), and all the books I've started and still have on the go (some of these more likely to finish than others; I do abandon books, but plenty of them I just am going slower, or only started recently; some of them are much longer reads than others). I have a few reflections at the end.
I will say here, that if there's a book on the Completed List that you'd like a review of, let me know and I'll see what I can do! Plenty of them deserve their own reviews but haven’t gotten them (yet).
Books Read
You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Alan Noble
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs
Divided by Faith, Smith and Emerson
Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair. Duke L. Kwon, Gregory Thompson
Truth-Telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, Henry Reynolds
Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just, Timothy Keller
Faithful Antiracism: Moving Past Talk to Systemic Change, Christina Barland Edmondson, Chad Brennan
Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope, Esau McCaulley
Truth's Table: Black Women's Musings on Life, Love, and Liberation, Ekemini Uwan, Christina Edmondson, Michelle Higgins
White Lies: Nine Ways to Expose and Resist the Racial Systems That Divide Us, Daniel Hill
White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White, Daniel Hill
Why Can't We Be Friends? : Avoidance Is Not Purity, Aimee Byrd
Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, Mark Charles, Soong-Chan Rah
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, Timothy Keller
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
Being the Bad Guys: How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn't, Stephen McAlpine
A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever , Cal Newport
Indistractable, Nir Eyal
The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, Andy Crouch
Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, Miroslav Volf
Why Won't You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts. Harriet Lerner
When the Noise won't stop, Paul Grimmond
Chokepoint Capitalism, Cory Doctorow
Forgive, Timothy Keller
Reactivity, Paul David Tripp
How to Fight Racism, Jemar Tisby
The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby
Praying in Public, Pat Quinn
Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Fight for your Pastor, Peter Orr
How to Eat Your Bible, Nate Pickowicz
The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale
[Un]intentional, Doug Smith
Say It: Celebration Expository Preaching in the African American Tradition
Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times. Soong-Chan Rah
Gathered Together, Karl Deenick
Equipped to Love: Building Idolatry-Free Relationships, Norm Wakefield
7 Books in the Dune series by Frank Herbert
6 Books in the Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski
So I just kind of collapsed two fiction series at the end, but expanding out we are at 51, which is pretty good since I didn’t start my reading kick until, hmm, May?
Books Started
Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History, Bain Attwood
Terra Nullius, Claire G. Coleman
Presence in the Modern World: A New Translation, Jacques Ellul
The History Wars, Stuart Macintyre
Slavery As Moral Problem: In the Early Church and Today, Jennifer A. Glancy
Psalms for Black Lives: Reflections for the Work of Liberation. Gabby Cudjoe-Wilkes, Andrew Wilkes
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Andy Crouch
Voices of Lament: Reflections on Brokenness and Hope in a World Longing for Justice, ed. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson
Trinitarian Dogmatics: Exploring the Grammar of the Christian Doctrine of God. D Glenn Butner Jr
Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. Richard Foster
The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. Dallas Willard
Year with God: Living Out the Spiritual Disciplines. Richard J. Foster
Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis. R. B. Jamieson
Resurrection and the moral order, Oliver O'Donovan
Old Testament Ethics, Christopher Wright
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Biblical Critical Theory, Christopher Watkin
Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf
Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz
Understanding Gender Dysphoria, Mark Yarhouse
Some of these are long books, and I think they'll get a review in due time. Wright, O'Donovan, Fanon, Watkin are all long and complicated books that need a lot of reading and processing time.
Reflections:
I did a lot of reading about Race and Racism this year. Three things probably spurred that. (i) through a series of events, all kind of leading back to my friend Ryan really, I started listening to a lot more Black Christians, and then reading works by Black Christian authors, and thinking about these issues a lot more. (ii) I realised personally that I had a lot to learn from the Black Church, even though it's so removed from my own personal context, and I have indeed done so; (iii) the more I started reading and listening in this area, the more other books on the topic I got interested in.
I read a surprising amount of Timothy Keller this year. Maybe not so surprising, I do like Keller. The prayer book was incredibly helpful to me. The justice book was good, though it wasn't as amazing as perhaps I'd hoped. The forgiveness book was very timely - in some ways it served as a bookend in counterpart to Volf's Free of Charge which I read much earlier in the year, and really helped me work through theologically and practically some issues related to forgiveness in my own life. It hasn't solved any external situations, but it has helped me process my own forgiveness towards others, and understand why they might be struggling to do the same to me.
I got through a lot of fiction; quite a bit of that was audiobooks, but still. Fiction is something I can consume at rapid rates, especially if I am also ill at the time. I may do more literary fiction next year.
Next year I have reading plans, obviously. I’d like to finish a lot of the books on the ‘started’ list above (though not all of them, some are going to the ‘abandoned’ list!). I have plenty of books I’d like to start as well. I’m looking to balance my reading out a bit more, and hopefully we’ll see that bear fruit in 2023.