2023 Top Book List
I have begun a tradition in the last few years of sharing with family and friends my favorite books read over the past 12 months. It serves as a sort of sharing of my inner world. What I wrestled with, was stimulated by, and felt in my heart was steered by books. Reading well takes dexterity of mind and heart; it takes intentionality and intensity to throw yourself into mastering and being mastered by books. Two building blocks of fruitful reading that stick out to me in my own literary journey this year are the virtue of listening and the courage to read books that shake you to the core.
Listening to the printed voice of another, especially one historically distant from you, is a test of humility. The instinct to produce assumptions by the second must be painstakingly swatted away over and over again like nagging mosquitos on a summertime back porch. Unfortunately, we read others like we talk to others. As they speak, we act as if we are passionately listening but the whole time are fixated on formulating our own predetermined response to whatever is coming out of their mouth. We are eager for them to close their lips, so we can open ours. This habit affects our literary patience. We gag authors and have them repeat back to us what we want reinforced in our own thinking.
Yet fruitful reading involves a submission of our minds and mouths and offers first our ears and eyes. We attempt to hear the author on his or her own terms, historically and existentially placing ourselves in his or her mind and body attempting to think and feel the person behind the pen. There is no substitute for listening in the production of good readers, and it goes beyond the intellectual; listening, whether to books or people, is a skill that cultivates our character. The fruit comes in the fact that listening to others usually shines light on blind spots in our own thinking, a process that cannot happen to those who refuse to open their ears and shut their mouths. Tracy K. Smith sums this up well in her own words:
Do books serve a moral function, in your view? How so? It’s a mistake to expect literature to teach us how to live our lives. But the practice of reading does, to my mind, serve a moral function. On its most basic level, literature instills in us the capacity to be rapt and beholden to a stranger’s voice, to do everything possible to hear and heed that voice in such a way that it is permitted to illuminate something. Sometimes what it illuminates are facets of ourselves — even our former or future selves. This to me feels like a very vital moral exercise (Interview, NYT [November 19, 2023]).
Second, courage is required to read books that stretch and shock you on both an intellectual and spiritual level. Franz Kakfa, the great Czech writer, voices this opinion in colorful terms in a letter to a friend:
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe (letter to Oskar Polak).
Now, Kafka puts it in depressing terms and does so because of his depressing worldview (Kafka poetically described humanity as the product of one of “God’s bad days”!). What I retrieve from his letter is the emphasis on refusing to waste time reading books that simply reinforce our own knowledge and never move our souls. Read what challenges you and makes your head hurt at times. Read books where you have to reread and reread and reread paragraphs, even sentences, to grasp the complexity of their arguments. These are the books that strengthen the fibers of your mind. They are mountains that you will sit on top of at the end and will remember the journey for the rest of your life. Skip the junk food and read works of substance.
Kafka’s more immediate concern is that readers engage books that wake their souls from their slumber. As he frames it, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” He wants readers to be stunned with existential lightning by what they read. Are we willing to open ourselves up to that possibility? I want to read books that voice the God-given restlessness of what Bonhoeffer called a “hunger for eternity in the midst of time.” So, here is a brief tour of a few favorite texts that engaged my mind and pierced my heart this year:
Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition by Michael Haykin
Michael Haykin takes readers on a tour of the spiritual significance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the first two centuries of the Baptist tradition. I resonate very much with the importance of the ordinances having a faith-building effect that brings one into deeper communion with our triune God. The fruit of these convictions is seen in the spirituality of the Baptists Haykin presents in the book.
The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner
Out this year, The Wandering Mind is a fascinating study of the spiritual significance and practical outworking of concentration in the lives of medieval monks. Jamie Kreiner, a historian of the early Middle Ages at the University of Georgia, does not shield readers from the peculiarities of the world of monasticism, yet she makes a compelling case for envying these ancient monks for their spiritually infused discipline in our modern world of decadence and starvation of meaning. Her most provocative (and persuasive) argument is that our modern culture’s awareness that distraction must be conquered since it is an ethical dilemma with harmful effects on a meaningful life is a belief that rests on presuppositions of a Christian heritage. She points to the monastic tradition as the original warriors against distraction but demonstrates that monks had a coherent worldview for identifying why distraction is a vice and not a virtue (i.e. distraction is a disorder stemming from the fall of man and is a sin that must be sanctified both personally and cosmically). Modernity knows distraction is functionally harmful, but does not have the moral equipment to provide presuppositions for why we should not just scroll through Facebook and eat Cheetos all day. But the monks have both the gun and the bullets for why distraction should be shot!
Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age by Joseph Minich
Minich tackles the material aspects of why atheism can feel like the default of many in the modern world. He analyzes influences like industrialization, economics, and technology on how unbelief is formed in our social imaginary. This is a great companion to the intellectual histories of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age or Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
This was the most difficult text I read all year, but its insights and grounding in the theology and exegesis of the most delicate aspects of Christology were worth every hour spent wading through its pages. Another benefit was the charity displayed by Steven Duby as he engaged in some of the most contentious issues in theology. His character and content are highly recommended.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabella Wilkerson
I have come back to this book again and again in recent years. It is a masterful telling of the history of reconstruction and African-American migration in the generations after the Civil War by following a few families’ stories from beginning to end. One of the greatest gaps in my education from kindergarten to graduate studies is the period between the Civil War and World War I. Wilkerson’s project of history via biography quite literally puts flesh and blood on this time in America’s history. It is the small details of unknown lives that shine a light on the strength and endurance of so many African Americans in the midst of so much persecution. At the end of the book, Wilkerson describes the elderly scenes of one of the last living figures whom she has tracked through the whole text. This matriarch and her descendants stand in a cemetery on top of the corpses of many of those who had made the journey from the South to the North to find a new homeland. One headstone reads: “THY TRIAL’S ENDED” (p.520). Read the book to learn about these trials and their triumphs.
Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton
Burton wrote one of the best analyses of our current culture’s (neopagan) religious mood a few years ago. In a continuation of that exploration, she produced a book that focuses on the deification project that our culture has stamped as the point of life. Self-creation is salvation. Burton tracks the intellectual history of this idea starting with the Renaissance period as it snowballs into its exotic current form in the brand that is Kimberly Kardashian on the popular level and its sophisticated form in Silicon Valley. She argues there has been a “a radical, modern reimagining of the nature of reality, humans place in it, and, even more significantly, of who or what ‘created’ humanity to begin with” (p.5). She goes on,
I believe we have not so much done away with a belief in the divine as we have relocated it. We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us - more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires. Our obsession with self-creation is also an obsession with the idea that we have the power that we once believed God did: to remake ourselves and our realities, not in the image of God but in that of our own desires. (p.5-6).
Burton is no Christian. She is a confessing participant in the story she analyzes. Yet she recognizes the problems with a culture declaring everyone god and their own desires infallible revelation. In her reflections at the end, Burton asks questions that humble modernity’s project: how do you know your true desires are speaking? How can you trust a culture of marketing that wants “you to be your true self” with so much capitalistic gain wrapped up in you choosing their products to be the solution to finding yourself? Being a god is harder than we imagine.
Daniel Rowland and the Great Evangelical Awakening in Wales by Eifion Evans
The mighty revivals of the 18th century are most associated with preachers like Whitefield, Wesley, and Edwards. Daniel Rowland, the great leader of revivals in Wales, has been neglected as an instrument of God in his generation worth studying. Rowland and his companions’ story nourished my soul in the last month of the year. His biographer, Effion Evans, reflects in the opening pages on why Rowland was hidden from a wider audience after his death:
Then, paradoxically, the very success attending Rowland's ministry contributed to the failure of posterity to record its history…A glorious change had come to Wales, and for many years to come a great harvest was to be reaped. His successors, closest to him, were simply too busy with the work to find time to write his biography. The years following his passing witnessed further seasons of extraordinary spiritual success, calling for yet more preaching and spiritual oversight. The very scale of the Holy Spirit's operations stretched ministerial resources to the limits (2).
That statement should inspire us. Would we aspire that those around us are too busy reaping the fruit of our ministry to write our biography? That is a godly ambition.
The Armies of The Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller edited by Michael Haykin
I wept through portions of these letters. Reading Andrew Fuller and a host of other brothers amongst the Particular Baptists of the 18th century has sparked a personal revival in my life at the close of 2023. I reflect on this in more detail in another blog. Here is a fitting taste of Fuller for the end of the year. In a letter to fellow pastors in 1785, Fuller writes:
As to our own lives, if we are real Christians, probably we can remember times wherein the great concerns of salvation seemed to eclipse all other objects. We covenanted with God. We resigned over all to him. We loved to be his, wholly his, rather than our own. We were willing to do any thing, or become any thing, that should glorify his name. And is it so now? No! But why not? What iniquity have we found in him, that we are gone away backward? "O my people," saith the Lord, "what have I done unto thee?...Wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me!" [Micah 6:3] Have I been a hard master, or a churlish father, or a faithless friend? Have I not been patient enough with you, or generous enough towards you? Could I have done any thing more for you that I have not done? Was the covenant you made with me a hard bargain? Was it hard on your side for me to be made sin, who knew no sins, that you might be made the righteousness of God in me? Were the rewards of my service such as you could not live upon? Is it better with you now than then? O Christian reader! Pause awhile. Lay aside the paper, and retire before God! Reflect, and pour out thy soul before him. Say unto him, "O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of face!" [Dan. 9:7] Thus, thus, "remember... whence thou art fallen, and repent" [Rev. 2:3]
But do not stop here. Think it not sufficient that we lament and mourn over our departures from God. We must return to him with full purpose of heart. “Strengthen the things that remain which are ready to die." Cherish a greater love to the truths of God—pay an invariable regard to the discipline of his house—cultivate love to one another—frequently mingle souls by frequently assembling yourselves together—encourage a meek, humble, and savoury spirit, rather than a curious one. These are some of the things among us that are "ready to die!" (p.106-07).
How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key
This was probably the most enjoyable read of the year. Key, a professor of literature at Savannah College of Art & Design, is one of the best writers I have ever read. It is the most introspective and bare-all memoir of a marriage I have ever come across. It is a story about the survival of a marriage in light of an affair, and yet it is so much more. Key, the guiltless party in terms of adultery, does not tell this story as the spotless lamb who endured being sinned against. He analyzes his own sin and brokenness that contributed to his marriage’s undoing. Key is raw, really raw, and he draws out sins in your own heart and head by shockingly verbalizing them.
This is also a Christian story of incomprehensible death and resurrection. Key is no theologian. His occasional theologizing is confused at times, but it is clear (to me at least) that this man and his wife experienced the power of the gospel to save their marriage, and its honesty about sin, repentance, doubt, and bitterness can cut deep into us for our good. Outside of the miraculous reconciliation itself, some of the means of God doing his redemptive work are so encouraging in this book. Particularly, the impact of a small church plant the couple was a part of. The body of Christ, with no thrills or frills, was a ship amidst the storm of their life where God could hide and heal them. I am not going to give you the best quotes. Read the book for that! But here are two samples of Key’s comedy and honesty:
I'd heard thousands of sermons in my young life, maybe too many. I have always felt pity for people who did this for a living. You try writing and delivering a new TED or two every week for ten or twenty or thirty years, based on a book nobody reads, baring your inmost thoughts for a crowd of friendlies who've heard it all before and strangers who'd rather be washing a cat (p.77).
For a brief and harried season of my life, I was a single parent and just about died. The dishes alone were enough to make you deny the existence of a loving God. Parents are like arms. You can swing it with one but two work best and three would be weird. Perhaps one day we will evolve ourselves into some better arrangement for the children, where benevolent armies of solar-powered robots raise children on expansive baby farms, but until Elon funds this nightmare, marriage is what we've got. It's good for us and it's good for the kids, even when it hurts like hell. I think often of our daughters and what they have learned of love in this strange season. I suppose we've given them enough trauma to turn all three into artists or writers, or at least law students. But we’re here, all of us: a nuclear family, detonated but not destroyed. We won't be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We'll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended (p.290).
Thanks for making it to the end! I am sure you are a remnant. Until next year, Merry Christmas!