Books I loved this year (Updated)

a few titles to add to your Christmas list

On this matter I can only speak for myself, but I’m almost certain that I became a writer because I loved books. I never in my life wanted to “write”, but I have always had an overflowing “to read” pile. This was for years a source of embarrassment to me. The library makes me feel greedy, like I imagine overeaters feel at the refrigerator or compulsive shoppers at the mall. The end of the year is the best time for people like me, as everyone releases their “best of” lists, just in time for holiday shopping. Here are some of the best books I read this year.

Books on beauty and design

Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski (1987). I will probably write about this in the new year, but I spent last year in a redecorating spree that felt existential in a way I suspect you can’t understand if you aren’t a woman in midlife. It was my All Fours, except we were talking curtains (If you get the reference, you’ll understand).* Halfway through I needed to theorize what interiors meant. Rybczynski gives a history of how people came to live in their homes as we do. If you suspect that wallpaper may actually be a longing for a lifestyle that included hired help and want to figure out why we have couches, you’ll enjoy this book.

What can a body do by Sarah Hendren (2020). This book was a master class at bringing a reader into a sophisticated topic by deploying engaging examples throughout. Hendren’s work lends itself to this- she writes about the built world and how it inhibits or expands the possibilities of living for people living with disabilities. There is just enough theory beneath the surface that Hendren tells a sophisticated story without boring anyone. This is incredibly hard to do. Additionally, I will think forever about the memory care community in Europe that is staged like a small village.

*One more update, I read through all of Gil Schaefer’s design books, including the new Home at Last (2024). Schaefer is a giant in the architecture and interiors world, and just a casual glance at his updated historic design will tell you why. I’m asking for one of these for Christmas.

Books on tech and other minds

I continued some of the reading I began in 2023 on tech. Three notable titles were David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1999), The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2011) and The Ordinal Society (2024). All of this is for the book.

*Edit to add: I forgot to mention Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure (2003):This book is a more popularized version of Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984). It is helpful to dip in and out of the latter because Power Failure does not always define its terms, but the first has some really keen insights into religion and tech that were very illuminating. For a general reader- for any reader, really- my money is still on Neil Postman’s Technopoloy (1992), which really holds up.

*Books I read In Search of a Metaphor (an update)

This year I got really into maps, in part for this piece. I really enjoyed Mark Monmonier’s Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy (1994). Maps are prudential judgments that have come to claim for themselves an authority in regard to space that they don’t have. It was a mind bending and exciting read. For the same set of questions I read Christina Thompson’s Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. I wanted initially to learn more about dead reckoning, the ancient navigational skill that predated even the clock- but I kept reading because it is a fascinating history of a part of the world that I know little about.

*For a chapter I am writing on supersessionism:

I read Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews which was lyrical and devastating (2022). The book collects essays Horn has written on anti-semitism and religious violence, as well as reflections on reading and Jewish identity. I also read Ilana Kurshan’s If All the Seas were Ink (2019), which is a memoir of daily Talmud study and divorce. I loved it. In addition, I read Paul Griffith’s Israel: A Christian Grammar (2023). Griffiths is infuriating and exhilirating all at once. He moves some concepts around in regard to Israel and the Church that make conceptual space for clarity regarding who is in search of whom. I did not agree at every turn, but it was a wonderful read.

Reading in Theology

Put me out of my misery, I know, but I continued to read and reread the same books- George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (1984) and Hans Frei’s The Identity of Jesus Christ (1975). I also reread much of David Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence (2009). I can’t overstate how devoted I remain to the postliberal theologians, and how desperately I wish we could revive their method. My new book could be described as a lightly veiled commentary on Kelsey, though I hope it reads more like an invitation to a different form of life. Jesus, you see, makes theologians self conscious. We bracket our inquiry to “the historical Christ” or make his patronymic a proper name “the Son of God” or go with the more formal proper name “Jesus Christ”, as if the title were a surname.

The postliberals are not self conscious about Jesus. They do make other mistakes- their love for prologomena means that the joke about “throat clearing” was made in their direction- but they at least set out to talk about God as if he mattered. Lindbeck wanted to find a way to understand ecumenical disagreements that still allowed for shared claims about God (imagine!). Frei’s book started as a series of essays that tried to say what it mean that Jesus Christ owned his presence- that he was with us. It is a book about who Jesus is that actually tries to answer the question. I could write an entire book of essays about this book, especially regarding how Frei’s response is uniquely positioned against an existentialist brand of religion that I think has been traded for a social and political form, in our day. Maybe more on that later.

And Eccentric Existence (2009), you had me at hello. This book is 1112 pages including notes. My volumes are so full of notes and annotations you can hardly discern what is important. I reread much of it this year as I was writing my book. A few theses, at least: the world we have is all we have, and so (not yet!) God loves it. Life with God is promised in this world (eschatology is bracketed in some important ways that Ian McFarland takes up in his new book, The Hope of Glory, 2024. I was a McFarland student so I’m biased, but everything he writes I read as if it were the year 2000 and it was the next Harry Potter novel). Our lives are given by God and so “eccentric”, and our flourishing in this life is nested with the recognition that we are not our own, but given to be ourselves, for the sake of the flourishing of the quotidian.

It’s a beautiful book that desperately needed an editor. If I still had a classroom, I’d be tempted to spend a whole year with it. It is one of the five books that has most shaped my thinking.

I also read and benefited from Lucy Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot, a Life (2023) (which I wrote about here and here), Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (2024) which wasn’t my cup of tea (more later, perhaps), and Felipe do Vale’s Gender as Love (2023), which I reviewed for an academic panel. I also read Kate Manne’s Unshrinking (2024) which I killed an essay on, but may revive as a New Year’s treat.

Right now I just picked up John Ruskin, thanks to

L. M. Sacasas

, and Terry Eagleton’s Hope without Optimism (2015), and How Data Happened (2023). I have on order Lynne Rudder Baker’s The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: an Essay in Practical Realism (2009), because I am trying to figure something out. Wish me luck, and happy reading.

A quick update because I forgot to include one of the year’s surprise hits:

*In novels, the best I read this year were by Stephen King. This is not a giant change for me, with my love of mystery novels overall, but I only picked up King because I found a clean copy of Mr. Mercedes at a thrift store before a trip. Knowing nothing about it, I took it along and read it almost in one go- and then imagine my happiness with the next book was sitting for me on our rental’s bookshelf. If you are getting started with King, I’ve enjoyed his short stories- particularly If It Bleeds (2020). I loved Holly (2023), but its not for sensitive readers.

*I have not and will not read All Fours, but it seems that every other woman in my age group did.