Books I Read (or Re-Read) in 2015

In the back of my journal, I keep a little list of the books I read. I don’t do this as a kind of score-keeping exercise; more as an aid to reflection. Here’s the list for 2015, in the order in which they were read:

The Poems of Wilfred Owen
Rudy Wiebe: Come Back
John Grisham: Gray Mountain
John Grisham: The Litigators
John Clare: Poems (selected by Paul Farley)
Matt Garvin: Six Radical Decisions
Malcolm Gladwell: David and Goliath
Wendell Berry: That Distant Land
Bill Hybels: Too Busy Not to Pray
Kent Haruf: Plainsong
Kent Haruf: Eventide
Lesslie Newbigin: Proper Confidence
Rudy Wiebe: The Blue Mountains of China
John Goldingay: Exodus and Leviticus for Everyone
Guy Vanderhaeghe: The Last Crossing
Carrie LaSeur: The Home Place
Greg Ogden: Transforming Discipleship
Thomas King: Medicine River
Guy Vanderhaeghe: A Good Man
Bill Hull: The Disciple-Making Pastor
Wendell Berry: The Memory of Old Jack
N.T. Wright: How God Became King
Guy Vanderhaeghe: The Englishman’s Boy
Francis Spufford: Unapologetic
Scot McKnight: The King Jesus Gospel
Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
Wendell Berry: A World Lost
Tom Wright: Simply Jesus
R.T. France: Mark (Doubleday Bible Commentary)
N.T. Wright: Simply Good News
Elizabeth Gaskell: Cranford
C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity
O. Hallesby: Prayer
Wendell Berry: Hannah Coulter
Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Moorland Cottage
Michael Curry: Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus
Craig Johnson: A Cold Dish
Wendell Berry: Remembering
Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
Jack Nisbet: Sources of the River
John Goldingay: Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone
D’arcy Jenish: Epic Wanderer: David Thompson and the Mapping of the Canadian West
Craig Johnson: Death Without Company
Craig Johnson: Kindness Goes Unpunished
Francis S. Collins: The Language of God
William E. Moreau, Ed.: The Writings of David Thompson, Vol. 1: The Travels, 1850 Version.
Craig Johnson: Another Man’s Moccasins
C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters
Ursula K. LeGuin: A Wizard of Earthsea
C.S. Lewis: Miracles
Paula Gooder: Heaven
C.S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Tombs of Atuan
Sarah McLean: Pink is the New Black
Arthur Ransome: Swallows and Amazons
Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth
N.T. Wright: Luke for Everyone
C.J. Sansom: Lamentation
Harold Percy: Your Church Can Thrive
Dan Rubinstein: Born to Walk
Nick Baines: Why Wish You A Merry Christmas?
Stephen Cottrell: Walking Backwards to Christmas
St. Athanasius: On the Incarnation of the Word of God
John Grisham: The Rogue Lawyer
Adam Hamilton: Making Sense of the Bible
Wendell Berry: This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems

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A few reflections.

First, this is a much longer list than the one I posted this time last year. I was disappointed in myself at how little I’d read last year, when I remembered what an avid reader I used to be. This year I’ve intentionally spent a lot less time surfing the web and reading blogs, and more time on reading books, both light and substantial. And I’ve enjoyed it.

Some of these were books I worked on for a while. The Writings of David Thompson, for instance, was one I worked on, on and off, for a couple of months, and so was the big fat Wendell Berry poetry book This Day.

I’ve discovered a few authors I’ve really enjoyed this year. Guy Vanderhaeghe’s trilogy about the old Canadian/American west was hugely enjoyable; I’ll look forward to reading anything new he comes out with. I read my first Salman Rushdie book and really liked it. I enjoyed Craig Johnson’s Longmire mysteries way more than the Netflix TV series based on them. And (how come it took me so long) I started reading Ursula K. LeGuin and I know I’ll go on to read a lot more of her books.

A couple of broadly ‘Christian’ books stood out for me. Adam Hamilton’s Making Sense of the Bible is one of the best introductory books I’ve ever read; he tells the story of how the Bible came about, discusses issues like biblical authority, ‘inerrancy’ etc., and then goes on to consider specific issues: creation and science, violence, homosexuality. Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic was a fresh way of approaching the whole issue of commending Christianity to others, not so much by intellectual argument as by reflecting on our emotional makeup as human beings. Ole Hallesby’s old classic Prayer was refreshing and inspiring, and again I found myself asking ‘How come I waited so long to read it?’

Finally, I’ve decided to slowly re-read my C.S. Lewis collection, and I made a good start this year. I hadn’t read Miracles or The Problem of Pain since the 1980s, and I remembered them as being a difficult read, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I didn’t find them anything like as hard as I had expected; I thoroughly enjoyed them, in fact.

What’s ahead? My good friend Daren Wride has written a book called DNA of a Christ-Follower; he was kind enough to ask my opinion of an earlier draft of the book, and I’m looking forward to reading the final text. I’ve also decided to read Dante’s Divine Comedy; I read the Inferno and half of the Purgatorio a few years ago, but then ran out of steam. I’m going to have another go at them. I’m looking forward to more Ursula LeGuin, more re-reading of C.S. Lewis, and some more poetry, too: I’ve got some volumes of Thomas Hardy, John Clare, Oscar Wilde, and John Keats in my pile. Also in the pile are Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the 1541 French edition of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (quite a bit shorter than the final version), and Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. And I’m sure that when I want an easy read I’ll read a few more of Craig Johnson’s Longmire mysteries!

That’s just the stuff I know about, but of course, there will be surprises – even surprisers that are already on my shelves. Like most readers, I’ve bought books I’ve left unread, for one reason or another. I know from long experience that at least once this year I’ll probably have the experience of taking one of those ‘undiscovered countries’ down from the shelf, starting to read it, and finding it unexpectedly good.

Happy reading in 2016, folks!