2017 - A Year in Books

I’ll admit that 2017 has not been one of my favorite years. This year we struggled through months of grueling heat, insect infestations, neighborhood deterioration, political upheaval, an empty nest, anxiety, and crippling discouragement.

But it was also the year of my 10th Anniversary trip with my wonderful husband, Paul. We toured Hearst Castle, as we did on our honeymoon. We fell in love with a little village called Cambria. We stayed in Koreatown, feasted on Greek, Oaxacan, and Georgian food, and feasted our eyes on all the great art we could find at the Crocker, the Huntington Library, and our happy place, the Getty Center. 

It was also the year Paul began a job that has changed his life for the better, the year he took up watercolors and became an artist, the year I sold my first artwork since I was in my 20's, and the year that forged a few new friendships that will likely last for the duration of our lives.

Too often, I would say, we look for big miracles as proof of God’s grace, and entirely miss the daily miracle of survival. As our pastor, Matthew Raley, said this morning, the last morning of 2017, and I quote loosely, “‘If we don’t gather the manna we will die’ is not the way we like to live.” It’s certainly not the way I like to live. But God’s daily provision does not cease to be a miracle just because I cease to appreciate it.

And with all that said, I’ll get on with the bit about the books. I thought it would be nice to start keeping track of what I read each year. Hopefully it will encourage me and you to pull our heads out of the mental sinkhole of the Internet on a regular basis and challenge our minds with deep, complex, and diverse thoughts and arguments. 

I started this list late in the year, so I’m pretty sure I’ve left something out. But here is what I can remember reading in 2017, in no particular order:

1. The Holy Bible: This was my fourth consecutive year of reading the great book from cover to cover. Today, I am 80 days into my fifth reading and can say with confidence that I can no more plumb the depths of this book if I read it every year for the rest of my life than we can sound the depths of God, or even only the cosmos, given all eternity.


2. Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks: I came to love Sacks, “a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author,” through radio interviews on NPR's Science Friday. His voice and manner are irresistible (were irresistible ...he died in 2015). He believed the human brain is the “most incredible thing in the universe." His fascination is contagious. I enjoyed this book, but as with anything pertaining to Sacks, I’d rather listen to his voice than read him. This book is an interesting and compassionate account, mainly through case studies, of the many conditions of the brain that cause hallucinations. I will admit that toward the end it got, for me, a bit like listening to someone who always talks about their dreams. Meaning, I got tired of these stories a little before I got to the end of the book. I would, however, still recommend it, but first, listen to an interview with Sacks so you can have his lovely voice in your head as you read.


3. The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler: Paul and I learned about Butler at our visit to the Huntington Library this June. Home to her papers, the Library opened an exhibit examining her life and work this year. I read this book aloud, in its entirety, to Paul. I’ve heard her genre referred to as African-American Futurism. Set in a not-too-future California, its setting is a little too close to home. Post-apocalyptic minus the apocalypse, it shows a state where no particular cataclysm is necessary to take us beyond Thunderdome. The future she presents seems not only possible, but probable. It’s story still haunts me.
   
   The protagonist, the young daughter of a Christian minister, finds the faith of her parents insufficient to the world she is facing. She develops her own creed, her own followers, and sets off to make build a new kind of life. (Upon finishing this book, we immediately purchased the sequel, The Parable of the Talents, but have not read it yet.) I highly recommend this book, but should probably state clearly, for those who haven’t figured it out, this is not a Christian book, nor is it for the faint of heart.


4. Renegade: Martin Luther, the Graphic Biography, by Andrea Grosso Ciponte and Dacia Palmerino: I won my copy from Plough Publishing in an online contest. It’s a beautiful book, and a provocative and honest look at Martin Luther and his role in the Protestant Reformation. I was raised, educated from 4th through 12th grades, and confirmed as a Lutheran. Though no longer a practicing Lutheran, my Reformation heritage remains dear to me. I will likely make reading this book an October tradition.


5. The Vanishing American Adult, by Ben Sasse: On the one hand, this book had me cheering, as he was the first person I'd heard of, besides myself, who is bothered by the current use of “adult” as a verb (an optional activity) rather than its original use as a noun (a state of being). I loved his call to teach young people to tackle life as the strong and capable beings they are, to make them gritty and independent. On the other hand, I found myself occasionally downright angry, as his solutions were clearly geared toward his own “kind” -  white, wealthy, well-connected, conservatives. His chapters on travel, as a case in point, felt almost like a personal insult. All that said, I think his overall thesis has tons of merit, and is worth considering, especially for parents and grandparents.


6. Gospel and Kingdom and Gospel and Revelation, by Graeme Goldsworthy: I'm not sure whether this should count as two books or as a third of one book, as these are two parts of the Goldsworthy Trilogy, a series of theology books written for the layman, and, in my edition, bound together in a single volume. The third, which I haven’t read yet, is Gospel and Wisdom. I received this collection several years ago as a gift from a friend in South Africa, but only just got around to reading it. Boy am I glad I did! Goldsworthy opened wide the doors of Biblical theology, of seeing the Bible as a more cohesive whole, and Christ as pervasive through it.


7. Hoping for Something Better, by Nancy Guthrie: I heard about Guthrie from her podcast, Help Me Teach the Bible and selected this book for use in a group women’s Bible study at my church. I did not lead the group, but attended and studied along with the rest. This book is a 12-week flyover of the book of Hebrews. The study questions were more in-depth than a typical women’s study, for which I am grateful. (I get tired of Christian women’s books treating me like a pile of feelings disembodied from a functioning brain and either handing me all the answers for life in the form of guilt and a list of rules, or speaking to me in emotionally charged but essentially meaningless language.) The "teaching" chapters were engaging and very helpful in displaying how the passages we just studied can touch us in our daily lives.


8. Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shatterly: though I knew better, the movie tie-in cover of my copy made me feel like I was supposed to be reading a novel, rather than non-fiction. Fighting my way past that, I loved this book! Shatterly covers so much history I was unaware of and so many remarkable lives. When I put it down I knew I’d just met a group of women of whom the world was not worthy, women who, in the face of racism and sexism, served their country, communities, and churches with courage, intelligence, dignity, and, though the author only hints at it, vibrant Christian faith.


9. The Promised One, Seeing Jesus in Genesis, by Nancy Guthrie: this was actually the first of Guthrie’s books that I read this year. Again, I was screening it for potential use by one of our women’s groups at my church. I would recommend this book to anyone for personal or group study, with two caveats, 1) it claims to be a 10-week Study, but realistically speaking, this would take the average group twice that long. 2) It is written from a decidedly Covenant Theology (Presbyterian) perspective. So it makes a few statements that will raise eyebrows among those who, like most evangelicals these days, hold to the Dispensational theological framework.


10. Jesus on Every Page, by David Murray: another layman’s introduction to Biblical theology, I would recommend this book for its section on Christ as the angel of the LORD and the glory of the LORD alone. (This books also adopts the framework of Covenant theology.)


11. Kingdom Through Covenant, by Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum: I’m listing this even though I’m only 229 pages into its 716 (not counting the Lexical Analysis and indexes) just because I’m so excited about it. And here’s why: for years I’ve been dissatisfied with both the Dispensational and Covenant theological frameworks. Each has flaws I can’t seem to work past. These authors seem to have butted up against the same barriers, and claim to have navigated a via media. So far its been worth reading just for the thorough overview of the two “opposing” views and their distinctives. I am now enjoying a walk through the explanation of Kingdom Through Covenant, which they hold forth as the thread that connects the Bible and its redemption narrative from beginning to end. This is not, I should note, a read for everyone. It is on the scholarly end of the spectrum. I have a high tolerance for that sort of reading. A lot of people do not. 

And that's it, the fireworks and gunfire have erupted in the neighborhood. The dogs are upset. It's the end of another year.

For the new year, I pray a blessing for us all. May God grant us eyes to see His kindness in every breath we take, in every morsel we eat, in every lovely moment we share with loved ones, and in every beauty we see in our world and our fellow-man. May he bless us with hearts that turn from unkind and selfish use of our lives and bodies and toward the love and forgiveness He offers us in Christ.