Category Archives: books

What I Read in 2024

No commentary this year, though I did send a newsletter with a few highlights.

*Asterisks mark books I read on Kindle.

For School (6)

  • The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Gilgamesh the Hero, Geraldine McCaughrean
  • The God Beneath the Sea, Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen
  • The Oresteia, Aeschylus (trans. Ted Hughes)

Children’s (11)

  • Penrod, Booth Tarkington
  • *Children of the New Forest, Francis Marryat
  • *The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, Charlotte M. Yonge
  • *Moonfleet, John Meade Falkner
  • Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  • *Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
  • The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, Julie Andrews Edwards
  • The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Teddy’s Button, Amy Le Feuvre
  • *The Midnight Folk, John Masefield

Fiction (8)

  • The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
  • Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
  • *The High Window, Raymond Chandler
  • *Penny Plain, O. Douglas
  • *The Mystery, Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
  • *We Did Not Reason Why, H. W. Taylor
  • Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Non-fiction (14)

  • *Hills and the Sea, Hilaire Belloc
  • Poetics, Aristotle (trans. Kenneth A. Telford)
  • Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubnar
  • A Nature Diary, Richard Adams
  • The Theopolitan Vision, Peter J. Leithart
  • Good to Great, Jim Collins
  • The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt
  • The One Thing, Gary Keller
  • *Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Joe Rigney
  • Schaeffer on the Christian Life, William Edgar
  • Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger
  • *Men and Marriage, George Gilder
  • Hospitality, Mark Brians and Drew Knowles
  • The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton

Read-Alouds (2)

  • Brave Ollie Possum, Ethan Nicolle
  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Total: 41

Books and Seasons

Robin Sloan is reading The Green Knight on New Years Day. I plan to read it over the Twelve Days of Christmas. That puts me in mind of other books I try to read at specific times of the year.

  • Advent: Auden’s For the Time Being
  • Christmas: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever; The Green Knight; A Christmas Carol
  • Lent: Piers Plowman; Hamlet

I wonder what other book/season pairings there are in my life. Maybe I’ll add Dandelion Wine to read over the summer.

Better Drowned than Duffers

I’m only a few chapters into Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, but already I’m convinced that the children have some of the best parents in literature.

What I Read in 2023

This past summer I called Spectrum to see if they could lower the price of our internet service. Not only did they cut it in half, they threw in a free Galaxy tablet. It’s cheap as far as tablets go, but it has had a huge effect on my reading habits this year. Since I don’t really like reading books on the computer, I never really made use of the treasure trove that is the Internet Archive.1 For some reason, reading on a tablet doesn’t bother me as much, so I’ve been able to dive into all the books I can’t afford to buy. I prefer paper books, of course, as does any sane person, but it’s hard to argue with cheap. Books I read on the tablet are marked with a **double asterisk. One *asterisk means I read it on my Kindle.

Picken’s Exciting Summer pl2 (1949) Norman Davis (American, 1907-)

Read-Alouds (10)

  • Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder – I was freshly impressed with the descriptions in this book. And the last paragraph was unexpectedly poignant:
    • “She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
  • More Milly-Molly-Mandy, Joyce Lankester Brisley – Cute, from what I remember.
  • Stuart Little, E. B. White – My daughter loves stories about tiny people right now (The Borrowers, The Littles, The Indian in the Cupboard), so she was fascinated by Stuart. When I was young, I enjoyed Stuart Little for the same reason. I was always bothered by the end, though, when Stuart throws a massive tantrum and ruins any chance of friendship he has with the girl. And there’s the weirdness of the invisible car. And his massive crush on that bird! Man, what an odd book.
  • The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann Wyss – This was a tough one to read aloud. So many long descriptions with relatively little dialogue or action. I think we have an abridged version around here somewhere. I’d recommend going with that.
  • The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo – Despite what you may have heard, this book is very much meh. It tries to be profound, but ends up being neither here nor there. I would have happily given it away, but my daughter adores it and reads it all the time.
  • The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis – I hesitated to read this to my six-year-old and probably should have listened to those instincts. By the time we got to the last few chapters (the happily-ever-after), she was pretty much checked out.
  • The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien – Another difficult one for a six-year-old to sit through. I found it funnier than I had before (especially grumpy old Gandalf, which for some reason I pronounce “Gand-awlf” in real life, but “Gand-alf” when I’m reading).
  • Freddy and the Spaceship, Walter R. Brooks – The Freddy books are so good. Seek them out and read.
  • The Indian in the Cupboard, Lynne Reid Banks – Once, when asked for writing advice, Joss Whedon said, “Play your cards early. It forces you to come up with new cards.” This book is a perfect example of that storytelling strategy. Omri (what a name) only keeps the Indian secret for a few chapters before his friend Patrick finds out, and Patrick spills the beans a few chapters later.
  • The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken – Another favorite. I’d love to read more Aiken, but I have trouble finding her books.

Children’s Fiction (10)

  • *William Again, Richmal Crompton – Recommended by Alastair Roberts. A rascally young boy gets into all kinds of scrapes. It’s hard not to like William’s straightforward nature, even though he would be intolerable in real life.
  • The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin – Evergreen. Happy fourth of July.
  • **The Story of a Short Life, Juliana Horatia Ewing – Sometimes I make forays into old children’s literature, hoping to find a gem. This one wasn’t.
  • **Picken’s Exciting Summer, Norman Davis – A fun, simple little story about a boy growing up in a small African village. I found it through its illustrations, which are phenomenal.
  • How to Eat Fried Worms, Thomas Campbell – Better than I thought. There’s something so boyish about the idea of sticking to such an arbitrary, unpleasant task for the sake of winning a bet.
  • Al Capone Does My Shirts, Gennifer Choldenko – The book would have been far more interesting if the last chapter had been the third chapter.
  • The Arrow and the Crown, Emma C. Fox – I finally read this! Well done, Emma Fox. Buy it here.
  • Hush-Hush, Remy Wilkins – Finally read this, too! Well done, Remy. Buy it here.
  • *The Bark of the Bog Owl, Jonathan Rogers – A fun fantasy retelling of the David story.
  • Over Sea, Under Stone, Susan Cooper – I always hear about Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, so I assumed it was the first book in the series. No, it’s the second. The adventures start in Over Sea, Under Stone, which was enjoyable. Worth having on the shelf.

Teaching (7)

  • Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis; The Golden Fleece, Padraic Colum; Gilgamesh the Hero, Geraldine McCaughrean; The Odyssey (Lombardo); The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney; Watership Down, Richard Adams – Assigned reading.
  • Cuneiform, Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor – Very good. Irving Finkel is quite a character in his own right, as you can see from this video of him teaching a Youtuber to write in cuneiform.

Theology and the Christian Life (5)

  • On Earth as it is in Heaven, Peter J. Leithart
  • *The Covenant Household, Douglas Wilson
  • Pastor, ed. William H. Willimon
  • Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen
  • *The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, Jeremiah Burroughs – Long, but worth it. (His name should have been Jeremiah Thorough.)

Adult Fiction (9)

  • *The World’s Desire, H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang – The further adventures of Odysseus, in which he travels to Egypt and marries Helen. I had high hopes for a Haggard-Lang collaboration, and they didn’t disappoint in terms of concept. Odysseus arrives in Egypt just as the Israelites are leaving, and in the final battle he comes face to face with a Norseman named Wolf (a Laestrygonian according to the authors, but clearly inspired by Beowulf). It’s like the Avengers for nerds of ancient literature! Unfortunately, the story is utterly flat and boring. Oh, well.
  • *Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep, John Buchan – Excellent. A large part of the appeal of these books, to me at least, is the heroes’ combination of nerve, experience, education, lifestyle, and sense of duty. These are men I want to be like. (Except Sandy. There’s no one like Sandy. He’s in a class of his own.)
  • Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith – Read on the recommendation of Josh Gibbs. Very well written and disturbing.
  • The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Painfully bad on a writing level, but effective on the level of what CS Lewis called “narrative lust.” I finished it in a matter of hours, probably.
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë – Fifteen hours of listening to the audiobook only to reach an unsatisfying conclusion. Gilbert is such a whiner.
  • *The Chinese Maze Murders, Robert Van Gulik – Judge Dee should be ranked with Holmes, Poirot, Father Brown, etc. as one of literature’s great detectives. It was also interesting to compare some of the tropes of Western detective stories with the world of medieval Chinese mysteries. For one thing, while Western detectives work alone, Judge Dee is always surrounded by his associates. (You can see this same trend in Asian detective movies, too.) If I can get my hands on another Judge Dee novel, I’ll certainly read it.

Non-Fiction (22)

  • Something like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa – If you’re looking for tips on filmmaking, this isn’t the right book. It is, as it says in the title, autobiographical, about his childhood and early career. He does make some pithy comments about movies, though. Here are a few:
    • “The art of motion pictures is intimately bound up with science.”
    • “The films an audience really enjoys are the ones that were enjoyable in the making. Yet pleasure in the work can’t be achieved unless you know you have put all of your strength into it and have done your best to make it come alive. A film made in this spirit reveals the hearts of the crew.”
    • “Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.”
  • *Plowing in Hope, David Bruce Hegeman – Helped me clarify what exactly I’m trying to do with Good Work.
  • **Picture This, Molly Bang – Fascinating. Bang develops an illustration on the page and writes about what’s working and what isn’t. The best kind of instruction.
  • *Essays in Idleness, Agnes Repplier – Repplier should be on anyone’s short list of essayists to read. Classic examples of the form.
  • *Anabasis, Xenophon – One of those “should have read” books. Very much a diary of the journey, which would have to be severely edited to become an exciting adventure story. Still, quite a few meaty quotes and several memorable scenes. “The sea! The sea!”
  • Born a Crime, Trevor Noah – Enjoyable.
  • Conscience Decides, Thomas More – Probably not the best introduction to More or the best summary of his thoughts, but hey, it was on my shelf.
  • Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, Kitty Burns Florey – A fun book about diagramming sentences. Florey writes with so much personality, I find her writing very pleasant to read. (Her non-fiction, at least. I gave up on the one novel of hers I started.)
  • The Dorean Principle, Conley Owens – Essentially, the thesis of this book is that ministers shouldn’t charge for their ministry. An inarguable point, perhaps, but Owens extends “ministry” to include anything that contributes to the education or edification of Christians or to evangelism of any kind. This includes Christian publishers, musicians, parachurch organizations, conferences, etc. Owens believes ministry should always be supported voluntarily, without being subject to obligation of any kind. He bases his argument on Paul’s letters, which means he has to perform a few contortions to explain Paul’s frequent requests for financial support. To be honest, I didn’t completely follow all the ins and outs of Owens’s explanation. I need to reexamine it, though, since his thesis, if true, directly impacts much of the work I am or hope to be involved in.
  • **Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper – Very useful.
  • The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Good, but Antifragile is better. It covers the same ground and a whole lot more.
  • **Take Ivy, T. Hayashida et al. – A lookbook of late 1960s Ivy style.
  • **The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell – If you’re looking for someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient myths from around the world, look no further than Joseph Campbell. If you’re looking for someone who can interpret and explain those myths, ignore Campbell and pick up a copy of Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.
  • **The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers – I needed to read this. Extremely helpful in pinpointing the role artists play in the Christian community.
  • The Early Church, Henry Chadwick – Helpful, but it’s going to take years of study before I can keep all these heresies straight.
  • The Story of the Church, Walter Russell Bowie – Useful, especially the chapters about the early and medieval church. After the Reformation, the story meanders somewhat.
  • **Defending Boyhood, Anthony Esolen – Esolen tends to say the same things over and over, but he says them so eloquently, and they’re so true, I don’t mind.
  • **Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen – See above.
  • **The Headmaster, John McPhee – I wrote a little about this book in one of my newsletters.
  • Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, Douglas Wilson – What a product of its time this book is. I will be forever grateful for it, but I do think we need a new manifesto for classical education.
  • Planet Middle School, Kevin Leman – Good bits here and there.
  • Hold On to Your Kids, Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté – Very good. The main thrust of the book is that parenting naturally includes an attachment relationship in which the child is oriented to the parents. As the authors say, “It is the thesis of this book that the disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives.” […] We use the word disorder in its most basic sense: a disruption of the natural order of things.” Much more to say about this book.

Plays (2)

  • The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde – Still one of the funniest plays ever written.
  • Little Women: The Musical, Allan Knee & Mindi Dickstein

Poetry (3)

  • The Desk Drawer Anthology, ed. Longworth and Roosevelt – By design, a collection of semi-forgotten treasures.
  • Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, Anthony and Ben Holden – Not *this* grown man. Ok, maybe a few of them made me sniffle.
  • *Poems 1914-1919, Maurice Baring – Baring wrote a great translation of Pushkin’s “The Prophet,” but his sing-songy English couplets get a bit old.

Total: 68

  1. The Archive is one of the three free internet services I’ve ever donated to. The others are Wikipedia and Ad-Block Plus. ↩︎

Spenser Links

I may be the only person on Earth who has a Google Alert for “edmund spenser,” so I may be the only person who knows just how rarely his name is invoked in the English-speaking world. Occasionally, a rare “Una and the Lion” coin will go to auction, and every Valentine’s Day there are multiple blogs posting snippets of “Amoretti,” but ninety percent of the time, there’s nary a peep.

Once in a while, however, Spenser’s name does survive the editor’s axe. I used to post these references on my Edmund Spenser blog, but as I rarely use that site these days, I thought this was a more appropriate venue.

First, and most randomly, here he is quoted in the bridge column of the Hastings Tribune: “So double was his pains, so double be his praise.”

The website Hogwarts Professor wrote a much-deserved tribute to the great scholar Alastair Fowler, who edited CS Lewis’s book Spenser’s Images of Life, and who also shared my hatred of “new historicism.”

Exaudi, an album of choral music by Christopher Fox, contains a song based on Prothalamion:

A Spousal Verse (2004), written for the Clerks, is a harmonically rich setting of the sixth stanza of Prothalamion (1596), by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. Fragments of melody are interwoven into brief contrapuntal units. Birds, Venus herself, and Peace are implored to bless the wedding, with the last verse serving as a refrain: ‘Upon your Brydale day, which is not long: Sweete Themmes run softlie, till I end my Song.'”

A brief overview of the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey must include a mention of Spenser, of course.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poet, modeled a poem after the stanza form invented by Spenser. Here’s Jesse Nathan’s description in McSweeney’s:

His first book of poems, The Ground, starts with an ancient newness, a nine-line stanza repurposed from Edmund Spenser, who had used it in Renaissance England before Shakespeare was a name anyone knew. Phillips’s oeuvre begins in this way, and you aren’t meant to have to immediately hear the Spenser; that’s part of the point, that the traditions flow under the lines like an unseen river, unseen but profoundly there, not obscuring what’s on the surface but feeding it:

In the beginning was this surface. A wall. A beginning.
Tonight it coaxed music from a Harlem cloudbank. It freestyled
A smoke from a stranger’s coat. It stole thinned gin.
It was at the edge of its beginnings but outside
Looking in. The lapse-blue façade of Harlem Hospital is weatherstill
Like a starlit lake in the midst of Lenox Avenue …

It was this poem, published in 2012, that announced the emergence of a major talent. Willing to draw on all the available resources, willing to cull and reject and amplify—this, the work seemed to be saying, is an urgent poetics of inventive reinvention.

Fun!

In the Cinemaholic, Diksha Sundriyal muses on the source of the enigmatic phrase “What is lost will be found” in Netflix’s show 1899:

There are two instances where this phrase appears in some form in the real world, and their context helps us understand what it might mean for Maura and the passengers. The first is the poem, ‘The Faerie Queene’ by Edmund Spenser. One of the longest poems in English literature, it follows the stories of several knights while also talking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. While one can take it at its face value, the poem is known for being full of allegories, with different layers to its verses.

One of the lines in the poem’s ‘The Ways of God Unsearchable‘ part reads: “For whatsoever from one place doth fall/ Is with the tide unto an other brought/ For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.” The last line bears some resemblance to the phrase Maura finds on the envelope. These lines talk about the place of things and how they always surface no matter how deep they are buried. If something has disappeared from its place, then it will show up somewhere else one way or another in some form. And no matter how elusive it might be, if you look for it long enough, you will eventually find it.

Last, Rebecca Reynolds has announced an interesting project: a prose “translation” of the entire Faerie Queene. In a post at the Rabbit Room, she explains:

I’ve spent the past four years working with Renaissance scholars to create a line-by-line, text-faithful prose rendering of Spenser’s work. I’ve included many footnotes referencing Spenserian scholars while offering a version of the text that allows readers to move easily through the plot. My goal isn’t to replace Spenser’s original work—that would be impossible—but to provide a transitional work that gives modern readers the confidence to tackle the original.

She also has a great (longish) introduction to Spenser and the Faerie Queene on her website. And be sure to check out the awesome illustrations.

What I Read in 2022

Read Alouds (18)

  • Ramon Quimby, Age 8, Beverly Cleary – A very dreary book, but Cleary still does what she does best: capturing life through a child’s eyes.
  • Half-Magic, Edward Eager – A favorite. The plotline about magic transitions into the plotline about family so smoothly it feels natural. And it’s refreshing to read a book where the children need a grown-up to come in and sort everything out.
  • Magic by the Lake, Edward Eager – Not as good as Half-Magic. Most of the adventures are based on other books, which feels like cheating, and they feel very disconnected.
  • The Borrowers, Mary Norton – Surprisingly thick descriptions. Norton seems to have taken pains over her writing. The story is good, but the ending may be unsatisfying to younger readers.
  • Flat Stanley, Jeff Brown – My father read this to us years ago and it stuck with me. My daughter seemed to enjoy it, too, though I hope not too much. I’d hate to find her on the floor under towering stacks of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
  • The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald – A great old-fashioned tale.
  • The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis – The first half is edge-of-your-seat great. The second half plods a little.
  • Hank the Cowdog: The Case of the Halloween Ghost, John R. Erickson – I was worried the whole “unreliable narrator” thing would go over my five-year-old’s head, but she enjoyed my Hank and Drover voices too much to care.
  • Because of Winn-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo – One reviewer said each chapter is structured like a short story, which is true: beginning, middle, end. The overall book is a mixed bag. Too simple for adults, too slow for children.
  • The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting – Charming, but loosely plotted. I started with the 1948 edition and realized partway through I was going to have to navigate some pretty on-the-nose racism. Thankfully, the publisher, assisted by the author’s son, revised it 1988. The worst scene, when the Doctor turns Prince Bumpo’s skin white so that he will let them out of jail, was rewritten so that Polynesia simply hypnotizes the Prince. It falls flat, but they did their best. I hear the second Dolittle book is better than the first.
  • Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne – I enjoyed this more as an adult than I did as a child. The characters are petty and small-minded, for the most part, but Milne is usually able to portray them affectionately. At times, Pooh reminded me of Freddy the Pig. I wonder if there’s some connection there.
  • The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne – For the most part, the stories are more tightly plotted than in the original. Piglet’s selfless act at the end always gets me, especially because it is immediately followed by another selfless act by Pooh. The very end, with Christopher Robin and Pooh at the beautifully named Galleons Lap, just barely stays this side of saccharine. But it does.
  • The Light Princess, George MacDonald – C. S. Lewis said that MacDonald was a modern-day mythmaker. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the bizarre scene of the snake drinking the lake dry by sucking on a stone teat. Bizarre.
  • Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater – An old favorite.
  • Treasures of the Snow, Patricia St. John – One of my favorites. Her portrayal of bitterness reminded me strongly of Lewis’s fiction.
  • Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry – Some good scenes, but not great.
  • Freddy Goes to the North Pole, Walter R. Brooks – You either love the Freddy the Pig books or you just don’t get them at all. My daughter, I’m happy to say, loved this one.
  • The Courage of Sarah Noble, Alice Dalgliesh – Short and simple.

Children’s Fiction (13)

  • Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool – Felt like the kind of novel that would get you an agent but not a publisher, if you know what I mean.
  • Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl – A lot of Dahl’s books have a mean streak, especially against adults. This one, the story of a boy who learns his dad poaches pheasants from a nearby estate, is legitimately heartwarming.
  • Across the Desert, Dusti Bowling – Forgettable.
  • Scythe, Neal Shusterman – Craft-wise, better than Unwind, but the characters were less likeable and the plot more unbelievable.
  • Word to Caesar, Geoffrey Trease – A zippy adventure with just enough historical detail to make it interesting. Henty-lite.
  • The Iron Tsar, Geoffrey Trease – Very similar to Word to Caesar. The characters are flat, but the plot moves. This guy could easily have been a screenwriter.
  • The Sinking City, Christine Cohen – Another good adventure from Canonball Books. The world-building in this one is first-rate.
  • The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jeanne Birdsall – I enjoyed this one much more than the first book.
  • The Boy and the River, Henri Bosco – Short and sensual. The descriptions of the river and its flora and fauna are so luxuriant they border on suffocating. I couldn’t help wondering if the touch is lighter in French. Posted a quote here.
  • The White Stag, Kate Seredy – Read like a fairy tale. I now know more about Huns and Magyars than I used to.
  • Henry Reed, Inc., Keith Robertson – A thirteen-year-old boy spends his summer in a sleepy town in New Jersey. Most novels that start this way continue with the boy discovering magic, solving a mystery, or making friends with a crotchety neighbor. Henry Reed starts a business. (This is one of the only kids’ novels I know about free enterprise.) The book is written in the first person, in the form of journal (not diary) entries, which provides a lot of humor. Henry is interested in almost everything, is smart and inventive, and is almost completely ignorant of how he comes across. It’s very amusing. I’d enjoy a chapter written from Midge’s perspective.
  • Hatchet, Gary Paulsen – When I was young, I somehow got the idea that this was a bad book. It does have divorce, heart attacks, starvation, diarrhea, moose attacks, and a dead body. But it’s not bad.
  • The Golem’s Eye, Jonathan Stroud – I enjoyed The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in the Bartimaeus trilogy, but this one just didn’t do it for me.

Teaching (7)

  • Assigned for class: Aeneid, Virgil (translated by Stanley Lombardo); Watership Down, Richard Adams (what a book); Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis; Gilgamesh the Hero, Geraldine McCaughrean; The Golden Fleece, Padraic Colum
  • Responsive School Discipline, Chip Wood and Babs Freeman-Loftis – Practical.
  • Norms and Nobility, David V. Hicks – People in my circles don’t talk about this book, but they need to.

Theology and the Christian Life (15)

  • A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis – My third or fourth time through. Lewis was such a keen observer of humans, he’s insightful even at his most raw.
  • Papa Don’t Pope, Douglas Wilson – Surprisingly good. This felt like his older books—more gracious and less joking. Almost every chapter starts with some variation of “So I was talking to a Catholic friend of mine…”
  • Treasure in Clay Jars, edited by Lois Y. Barrett – An examination of the qualities that make a church “missional.” The authors (six of them) have a low standard of orthodoxy, but the qualities themselves are inarguable: Missional vocation; Biblical formation and discipleship; Taking risks as a contrast community; Practices that demonstrate God’s intent for the world; Worship as public witness; Dependence on the Holy Spirit; Pointing toward the reign of God; Missional authority.
  • The Peacemaker, Ken Sande – A helpful book about how Christians ought to resolve conflict.
  • Solomon Says, Mark Horne – Gives a helpful structure of Proverbs and draws out a few key insights.
  • Finding God at Home, Ernest Boyer, Jr. – A mix of good and bad.
  • Confessing the Faith, Chad VanDixhoorn – A helpful commentary on the Westminster Confession.
  • Hints on Child-Training, H. Clay Trumbull – Very good.
  • Mother Kirk, Douglas Wilson – A very solid handbook of church life and ministry. From my perspective, this is a sort of background text for a lot of what I did growing up.
  • Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, C. S. Lewis – Josh Gibbs once said that C. S. Lewis was a better anthropologist than theologian, and this book is a perfect example. His descriptions of the experience of prayer are great, as are his descriptions of the personality of the One we pray to, but the more theological claims made me wince. For example, to Lewis, the bodily resurrection apparently means the sensory resurrection, despite what the disciples saw and heard and felt when Christ walked through the wall. I’m surprised so many of my friends like this book so much.
  • Seven Days that Divide the World, John C. Lennox – An unusual book in some ways. The main point of the book is that Genesis isn’t specific enough to definitively prove the Young Earth position, so we should rely on scientific evidence, which supports the Old Earth position. Lennox’s argument relies on the historical debate between geo- and heliocentrism. Back then, he says, Christians eventually admitted, in the face of scientific evidence, that Earth was not fixed at the center of the solar system. The Bible passages that seem to support that concept were judged to be metaphorical. So it is with Young vs. Old Earth, and Christians need to stop being so stubborn about it. Lennox isn’t trying to rewrite Scripture, however. He takes the historic Christian position on the creation of Man (no ape ancestors here) and the death and resurrection of Christ. He wants to say no more and no less than the text. I appreciate that he takes this seriously and would love to see more books like this, but I have quibbles. For example, in arguing for scriptural agnosticism on this issue, Lennox is de facto taking an Old Earth position. There is no other reason to throw away centuries of Christian writing on the subject. I was reminded of a Sunday school class at a church I once attended which was meant to “explore the question of whether women should be elders.” Needless to say, the teacher had already decided that they should. He just needed to appear impartial in order to convince us.
  • Help for the New Pastor, Charles Malcolm Wingard – The word that comes to mind reading this book is “humble.” A simple guide for young pastors on what the ministry entails.
  • The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer – So trendy it was hard to stomach—”mindfulness,” “minimalism,” “follower of Jesus” (instead of “Christian”). I read it with a few friends, and when we met to discuss it, I was surprised to learn how much they both liked it. I guess it depends on where you’re coming from.
  • Gashmu Saith It, Douglas Wilson – A few good bits, but man, what a terrible title.
  • Decluttering Your Marriage, Douglas Wilson – I’d heard most of this before, in one form or another. I did like his point about correcting others. We prefer to ignore the sins of others when they aren’t getting on our nerves; it’s only when they start to annoy us that correcting them suddenly seems to be of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, that’s when we’re least qualified.

Adult Fiction (9)

  • Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini – Action-packed and fun, but a little too long.
  • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame – A beautiful book. It has its fans and its haters, and I understand both reactions. But the haters are wrong.
  • The Alto Wore Tweed, Mark Schweizer – Some downright terrible writing. But ecclesiastical humor always gets me.
  • Casino Royale, Ian Fleming – I was pleasantly surprised. Bond is disgusting, of course, but Fleming was able to make him human, too. The writing as a whole was not great, but occasionally Fleming caught me off guard with a particularly vivid sentence like this one: “He pushed the revs up and up, hurrying the car to eighty then to ninety, his huge Marchal headlights boring a safe white tunnel, nearly half a mile long, between the walls of the night.” Exactly the mix of poetry and pulp that you want in a spy thriller.
  • The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler – I read these in reverse order. Marlowe is much more sour in TLG; in TBS he seems positively chipper by comparison.
  • On Beauty, Zadie Smith – Smith is brilliant at creating characters and building scenes (funny, tender, awkward, tense, you name it). I’m not sure she’s very interested in plot, however.
  • Going Postal, Terry Pratchett – This was my third or fourth Pratchett and I’m finally starting to see the appeal. It helped that this one is about a reformed con man doing his best to save the outdated Ankh-Morpork post office. I’m a sucker for stories of people doing the right thing when the right thing is all but impossible.
  • Dune, Frank Herbert – Fine, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

Non-Fiction (15)

  • The Years with Ross, James Thurber – All the humor of the New Yorker’s early years with Harold Ross as editor-in-chief. Some of the jokes were a bit too inside-baseball, but Thurber can really do one-liners.
  • An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis – Lots to chew on.
  • The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande – A doctor I know told me that this is a controversial book in the medical community. I don’t know why. Gawande makes a strong case.
  • In the House of Tom Bombadil, C. R. Wiley – Some very good insights. I need to read LOTR again.
  • The Household and the War for the Cosmos, C. R. Wiley – Reading this felt like riding in the front seat of Wiley’s truck as he drove through a familiar town, making turns at random and occasionally doubling back on himself, pointing out various details, some of which were interesting, but most of which others had shown me a long time ago. In other words, my takeaway was a mix of “I’ve seen this before” and “Where did that come from?”
  • It’s Good to Be a Man, Michael Foster and D. Bnonn Tennant – Real bad.
  • Made to Stick, Chip Heath & Dan Heath – Very helpful for thinking about mission statements.
  • The End of the World is Just the Beginning, Peter Zeihan – Others have praised and critiqued this book, so I’ll just give my impressions: 1) Zeihan views the world through geographic and demographic lenses, paying particular attention to economies and resources. I’m really glad he does because I don’t, and someone ought to. 2) Because of the above, he misses a lot of what makes people tick. Not everyone goes to war because he’s hungry.
  • How to Think, Alan Jacobs – I’m familiar enough with Jacobs’s writing that not much in this book was new to me. I did think many times, however, of certain acquaintances of mine and how stubborn they can be in their thinking, especially online.
  • How to Keep House While Drowning, K. C. Davis – This is the kind of book I’ll forget that I read in a few years.
  • The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan – Provides some necessary political background for The End of the World. Specifically, it helped me understand why Zeihan is so sure the US will withdraw from the global scene in the next few decades.
  • The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis – Very good. I listened to the audiobook, so I didn’t take a lot of notes.
  • Deep Work, Cal Newport – One of the most immediately useful books I’ve read in a while.
  • Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull – Another audiobook, so I can’t remember a ton, but there were a lot of good ideas here.
  • The Half-Acre Homestead, Lloyd Kahn and Lesley Creed – A photographic tour of the authors’ home, garden, and studio, with commentary in the margins. Read kind of like a blog, with 46 years of experience behind it.
  • Hiroshima, John Hersey – Gut-wrenching.

Comic Books and Graphic Novels (1)

  • Pearls Sells Out, Stephan Pastis

Plays (7)

  • Pride and Prejudice, Janet Munsil
  • Pride and Prejudice, Helen Jerome
  • Medea, Alcestis, and The Bacchae, Euripides – Three plays included in Adler’s Great Books. All odd in their own ways. Medea contains an extremely unpleasant, though understandable, protagonist. Alcestis has all the ingredients for a tragedy, but ends happily, thanks to Heracles. The Bacchae is nightmarishly violent, but also portrays a witty and charismatic Dionysus. More than most Greek playwrights, Euripides seems like he would have been at home in the 20th century world of theater.
  • The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie
  • Witness for the Prosecution, Agatha Christie

Poetry (1)

  • Poetry I, ed. Richard Corbin

Total: 86