2024 Top Book List
*For those who care nothing about books, there is a hodgepodge of other top picks from movies, music, and more.
Yes. Yes. Yes. It has come with Christmas greetings. The long-awaited, anticipated, overrated, favorite book list from this year’s feedings. Of course, I always push the list to the bottom, so you have to read my rant about reading before peaking. I am already getting carried away with rhymes so let’s get to my geeking. [Don’t think I can’t see you cheesing.]
Before I lament, I want to offer thanks. Two dear friends, Josh and Grace Mura, have wonderfully gifted me with a book club of their own creation starting in 2025. Each month, they select a book from my wish list and send it to me like a subscription service. I have never been more excited about a gift in my life. We all need thoughtful friends like Josh and Grace. I hope to read many books together with them this year. There is something true in Cormac McCarthy’s line when his character says, “having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood” (The Passenger).
Lamentations
The crank in me wants to bemoan the billions of dollars spent producing bad books this year. The market is stuffed to the gills with new titles. Major publishing houses are pumping out more books than ever. People (like me) who think the internet needs to hear what they have to say now have access to self-publishing like never before. Every celebrity, influencer, politician, athlete, and underwear model have a memoir, a “wellness” guide, or, heaven forbid, a cookbook. Some of these people have a hat trick in this junk.
My question is, who is reading this stuff? Who is reading anything? It amazes me that book production is booming while reading books is dwindling. Basic literacy is declining in horrifying ways in the U.S. College students are now less and less likely to read deeply as undergrads and develop a meaningful reading life. There are plenty of statistics for this, but an article in Slate by a college professor this year that I have cited many times articulates the experience of those statistics:
I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted (Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted: Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively,” Slate [Feb 11, 2024]).
Adults, even lifelong readers, have been warped as well. Our internet age is tooling with the plasticity of our brains like Play-Doh. In a highly recommended book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, Samuel James reproduced a paragraph from an article in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr in 2008 entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Read it reflectively:
Over the past few years, I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going so far as I can tell —but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
A decade and a half deeper into digital immersion, don’t we all feel this? Our world is “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot). I worry reading books will go extinct, and libraries will be museums. There was a time when men had a study with books, not a mancave with a TV. Let’s get back to that. With your early mornings, evenings, and Sabbath afternoons, keep literacy alive.
Motivation
Pick a book and tackle it with friends. Climb it together like a mountain and experience the payoff of sitting on top surveying the path you travelled on. This year, I enjoyed reading and reflecting on Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men with a few friends and watching the film adaption afterwards. Books have a way of stirring conversations about the deepest things in life, and stories are best at articulating our realities.
I am looking forward to climbing Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate in 2025 with a couple of friends. Grossman is known as the 20th century’s greatest Russian novelist in line with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the century before him. I know we will have long nights looking at this book and into ourselves as it opens up what only great stories do. I love those moments when you find yourself like Mr. Bennet: “With a book he was regardless of time” (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice).
Exhortation
When you pick up books, don’t try to master them. Let them master you:
Don’t wring truths out of [books] they don’t want to tell you.
Don’t demand everything in a moment and don’t force them to be efficient.
Don’t throw them away when they don’t do things your way.
Enjoy them for what they draw out of you, reveal about you to yourself, and help you see in others.
Let them change you because you love them.
Read them humbly and don’t try too hard to tell them what they mean
(Lipinski & Kern, A CiRCE Guide to Reading).
I always end my spiel on the importance of books with an acknowledgement of their limits. Books are not a substitute for living. They can be what stimulates rich living. Every year I seem to read a line that makes that point to me, and this year was no exception. Frédéric Gros nailed it and nailed me:
Books are not to teach us how to live (that is the sad task of lesson-givers), but to make us want to live, to live differently: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle. ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live’ [Henry David Thoreau] (A Philosophy of Walking).
Live for reading but read for real life.
THE LIST
This year, I decided to organize the list by genre and offer one or two from each category.
Fiction
`1. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
This was the best fiction book I read all year. Levi is a first-time author, but he is seasoned at life. The writing is simple. The story is hopeful. It is the story of an old man spiritually fathering strangers who need convicting encouragement. I will be handing out copies of this book for a long time. Allen Levi is also a Georgia native, and the setting is obviously modeled after his hometown, the river settlement of Columbus, Georgia.
2. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen is one of those generational American novelists for our time. He is usually considered in the company of David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson. Crossroads is his latest attempt at exploring the mine of the American psyche and the experience of family in our modern world. The novel follows a family in the 70s who is fractured in more ways than one: a father who is a withered pastor fading in the bitterness of dreams he believes were obliterated by his wife and kids and is flirting with an affair as his out, a mother who is rupturing under the unwantedness of her husband and the secrets of her past, a teenage daughter in the battlefield of young love and loss, a teenage son who is too smart for his own good, and a college kid wrestling with the complexity of honoring or disobeying a father who he sees as everything he doesn’t want to be but is dying for his approval.
Disclaimer: there are some R Rated pages of this book. They can be skipped without missing the plot.
History
1. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel W. Howe
This book is a wide-ranging analysis of American culture and life during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Howe displayed the driving forces in the shaping of American life were the communication revolution and the shifting political environment of the nation. Howe’s text serves as a resource for all serious historians of this period in the American story, particularly those interested in the development of America through its social history. Howe’s mix of technological innovations with detailed narratives of political figures is important for historians avoiding monocausal conclusions in this field. I cannot imagine the lifetime of scholarship and mastery of history it takes to write a book like this.
2. John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America by Eric Smith
Written by one of my professors at Southern Seminary, this is technically a biography of John Leland, but it attempts to provide a window into the post-revolution period of America while also demonstrating Leland’s part in shaping what America’s religious and political life looked like. The book unpacked Leland’s life by examining different aspects of his long career. The major argument of the book is that Leland’s grassroots, Jeffersonian individualism baptized by New Light religion was the drumbeat that Leland skipped to in all he did. Leland’s beliefs represented both a growing democratization of American Christianity and helped shape many cultural and political evangelical principles today such as liberty of conscience, skepticism of education, anti-institutionalism, and the centrality of personal piety.
Theology/Biblical Studies
1. The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context by Michael LeFebvre
Lefebvre’s book is a fresh gale that contributes to an old debate on Genesis 1 and 2 by looking at the agricultural system and law of the Pentateuch to better understand the presentation of the creation days and events through the lens of Israel’s concept of calendar and agricultural rhythms. I learned a lot from this book.
2. On Christian Teaching by Augustine
I spent a lot of time revisiting Augustine this year in other works of his fame, but this was my first time through On Christian Teaching. Augustine, a master teacher, dispenses wisdom on what Christians are teaching and how Christians should teach. As Augustine always does, he uncovered every presupposition and explored the depths of our starting points in his discussion of the point of the Bible, the point of learning anything, and his understanding of hermeneutics. My favorite section was his wisdom for those who are teachers in the church. Every teacher of the Bible should hear what he has to say.
Pastoral Theology/Ministry
1. The Pastor as Minor Poet by Craig Barnes
For Barnes, pastors are minor poets. He gives one of the most sobering yet inspiring visions of pastoral ministry I have ever seen. I love this image. With all the wisdom of a seasoned ministry, Barnes weaves what a pastor as poet looks like. Here is a sample of insights from the book:
The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it. Then it is large enough to proclaim a holy joy, which is what makes the pastor's soul so attractive. The early church found gravitas through persecution. The desert fathers and monks found it by abandoning comfort and dedicating themselves to a vocation of prayer for the world. Most reformers have found it in prison. The American slaves found it in the hot cotton fields. Pastors find it by committing themselves to the One who called them into ministry, but whose work is so often resisted by the congregation and by the pastors themselves (49).
This is what pastors really mean when they complain about the loneliness of their calling. No one can do this priestly work for them, or even with them. It is ironic that a profession that surrounds pastors with so many people leave them alone with their own ponderings. And this is the part of the profession that is completely missed by everyone the pastor serves. The members of the church envy their pastor for the many relationships that seem to come as perks of the job. They aren't there to see what happens after all the meetings and visits are done, when the pastor is forced to make the solitary journey into the Holy of Holies to offer exhausted prayers over a cup of tea.
There is nothing hierarchical or elitist about this loneliest dimension of the job. To the contrary, pastors are never more servants of the church than when they're alone with their thoughts about what God is doing in the lives of others. But they're not really alone. Their souls are crowded with all who have made their way deep inside. And of course, there is also the nagging presence of those holy words that will not go away. This is how pastors love their congregations — they take them into their souls, where they carry on both sides of a conversation between the people and their God (108).
After spending so many hours during the previous week in front of a television, a secular form of Sabbath rest, those in the pews are accustomed to being sold a message in thirty seconds. Then another thirty-second pitch races onto the screen. And another. So even though the body is stretched out on the sofa during all of this, the mind of the viewer is actually moving pretty fast. It's not working hard, but it is moving quickly to the next thing. Essentially the same thing happens when people tire of television and go to their computers to surf the Net. And it's the same thing that happened earlier in the day when they raced through their appointments — they moved quickly without working hard. As a minor poet, the preacher has to invite the congregation to move slower mentally while working harder, the exact opposite of their expertise. Poets are among the last people in society who do not confuse busyness with hard work, and who move slowly to devote themselves to the extraordinarily hard work of paying attention to life (134-35).
Devotional
1. The Secret Place of Thunder by John Starke
This was a short book I read slowly. It is a long form meditation springing from a phrase in Psalm 81:7: In distress you called, and I delivered you, I answered you in the secret place of thunder. Starke is a pastor in New York City trying to bring an unhurried and simple vision for life to a place of busyness and opulent dreams. There is a lot of wisdom here for what it means to be distinctly Christian in our modern world. Samples:
I want to emphasize that these are small crucifying steps. The work of unwinding our hearts is difficult and slow. It's remarkable that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn't instruct us toward grand or famous acts of faith and courage, just ordinary spiritual obedience done in a hidden way. But even so, practicing these ordinary things— these small crucifying steps—in a hidden, intentional way has a transformative effect (24).
This kind of maturity, however, is in conflict with a performative world. Our culture thinks more about advancement than maturity. We are more concerned with getting ahead and moving forward. Maturity doesn't pay off as quickly. Our performative culture has fooled us into thinking that advancement and accomplishment equate to maturity. Yet with all our accomplishments and advancements, we still cannot manage conflict or negotiate difficult emotions or relationships, and often our leadership positions have outpaced our maturity so we aren't able to steward them well (42).
Biography
1. William Carey by S.P. Carey
S.P. Carey’s magnum opus on his namesake, William Carey, is my favorite portrait of Carey and his companions that I have read so far. S.P Carey is a beautiful writer. I wept through this book. The lives of these little men from England were a witness to the world of a whole life wagered on Christ and his Great Commission. The moment Carey’s great companion and co-laborer, Joshua Marshman, comes to see him before he dies is a testament to their bond that could be recognized in one another beyond words. Carey was blind and could not make much sense of who was speaking to him in his final days. His physical senses were failing, but his soul could recognize his bosom brother:
On Sunday, 8 June, 1834, Joshua Marshman, his companion in tribulation and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, felt an unusual burden of spirit as he visited him before setting off to Calcutta for the duties of the Lord's Day. Kneeling by his side, he felt certain he did so for the last time, and prayed from a full heart blessing God for the goodness of Carey's Indian years. When he concluded, Carey's wife of twelve years - the gentle Grace - asked, ‘Do you know, dear, who is praying with you?’ “Yes, I do,” whispered Carey, and pressed the hand of his loyal and dear colleague. So they parted, to be divided (in Marshman's case) for a little season of three and a half years, for before he returned the following day, Carey was home with the Lord (387).
2. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
This year I was drawn to portraits of the South. I don’t know why. I think I am learning the importance of place, tradition, of the complexity of the places we call home. In a flattened land of suburbia and a monocultural medium like social media that basically makes the whole country watch, listen, and be shaped by the same things, I long for the distinctions of geography and regional culture. The generations of my family before me lived in towns like the one Janisse Ray describes places that are different worlds than the one I live in. Ray articulates a place those behind me experienced. She masterfully reflects on the hard but necessary task of making sense of the good, bad, and ugly of where one grows up and who one grows up with. Here is her description of her mother in the midst of what all might consider a broken life:
What faith she had. She was so strong a ship could have been hewn from her body. If it weren't for us children and her powerful mothering instincts, she would have broken, I think. Instead, she kept a vigil of prayer-praying as every pan of biscuits rose in the hot hot oven, praying as she mended a sweater, praying that the chair at the head of the table would again be filled with the man she loved. Every sweep of the worn broom was a prayer…I think she entered the world to define long-suffering (96, 193).
Best Overall
1. A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros
I spent a lot of time thinking about how the movement of the body relates to the health of the mind and the flourishing of the soul. These thoughts stimulated that inner conversation more than anything. The book is a reflection on the centrality walking (yes, literally w-a-l-k-i-n-g, putting one front in front of the other) in the lives of great thinkers (Nietzsche, Thoreau, Rousseau, etc.) and the beauty of walking for living a thoughtful life. He ponders such a simple act in only the way a philosopher can. I came away with the wonders of walking as fuel for full living. Here are a sample of good lines:
The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight; finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It's an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal. But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this; then that; and then something else. When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.
Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship. Thus a mountain skyline that stays with you all day, which you observe in different lights, defines and articulates itself. When you are walking, nothing moves: only imperceptibly do the hills draw closer, the surroundings change (9).
You don't walk to kill time but to welcome it, to pick off its leaves and petals one by one, second by second (56).
One always walks in silence. Once you have left streets, populated roads, public spaces (all that speed, jostling and clamour, the clatter of thousands of footsteps, the white noise of shouts and murmurs, snatches of words, the rumble and whir of engines), silence is retrieved, initially as a transparency. All is calm, expectant and at rest. You are out of the world's chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears (81).
Concentration, oneness, clearing out. Just a small phrase to repeat tirelessly: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a poor sinner. After a few minutes, a few hours, it is no longer a praying man but a man become prayer. He has become a continuous invocation of Christ, and little by little the terrible discomfort, the saturation of a mind suffocated by repeating the same thing, the mouth twisted by the mumbling of the lips, are succeeded in an instant, with sacral suddenness, by pure tranquillity. The repetition becomes spontaneous, fluid, effortless, comparable to the heartbeat. And the monk finds total security in an indefinite unending murmur, in the ceaseless breathing of his prayer. Just as when you walk, there comes a moment when, from the monotonous repetition of the tread, there suddenly arises an absolute calm. You are no longer thinking of anything, no care can affect you, nothing exists but the regularity of the movement within you, or rather: the whole of you is the calm repetition of your steps (147-48).
MEDIA ROUNDUP
Movie: One Life (starring Anthony Hopkins)
Documentary: The Lost Children (Netflix)
Album: Orchestral Works by Gabríel Ólafs
EP: Sable by Bon Iver
Song: Thanksgiving Hymn by Allen Levi
Podcasts: Noble; The Open Ears Project
Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your favorites and reflections from 2024. Feel free to send them over!
Merry Christmas!