The following are books I read this year that struck and continue to strike me deeply. The list is ordered by when the books were read. The bolded books are my “Top 5 Books of the Year”:
Deep Work
The Remains of the Day
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Into Your Hands, Father
Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
Four Thousand Weeks
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Why Boredom Matters
Seven Story Mountain
Dark Passages of the Bible
A River Runs Through It
For the 2nd half of this year, I was on a “reading streak” I’ve never experienced before. It felt like so much (and at one point, all of) what I read was powerful in a truly life-changing and paradigm-shifting sort of way. Beginning with the two books I read while on our 15th anniversary in the Dominican (The Remains of the Day & A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), I read 10 books I can safely say “blew me away in real and significant ways.” I’m still unsure if I happened to stumble upon a slew of incredibly awesome books─or if I was in an emotional and psychological state in which the ideas and spirits of books had direct access to my spirit and psyche. At this point, I think it must be a little of both.
The other fascinating thing is that, out of the 11 books that knocked me out of the water, only 4 of them were narrative, and only 2 of them were unequivocally novels. In short, it was the year of nonfiction for me. I don’t know if I’ll read more nonfiction than fiction this upcoming year, or ever again; I have no idea. However, I do know I’ll be reading more nonfiction than I did in the past. One reason, I think, is age. In my 40s now, ideas, even historical facts, can appear to me as fascinating as, in the past, only narratives did.
My Top Five
I began Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day on the plane to our 15th-anniversary celebration in an all-inclusive in the Dominican Republic. This is a very good time to begin any book. Interestingly, though, I was initially put off by what I labeled as “the overdone Britishisms of the classic butler,” but the narrator and his style ─ and his perspective and worldview ─ grew on me pretty quickly. It was his voice (and by extension his worldview) as well as the history the book covers (an interesting take on the time between WW1 and WW2, as well as the real end of the British aristocracy) that made the content alive for me─and, to be honest, it’s a sort of love story. Hauntingly beautiful.
Wilfred Stinissen’s Into Your Hands, Father is a book of Catholic theology that claims, forcefully but brilliantly, that the whole spiritual life─and by extention, the whole of life itself─hinges upon our willingness to trust that God is good, that He loves us, and that we can and should, if we care about our peace and happiness, trust that everything we encounter is part of God’s will for our life─and that He is loving us intimately through it. It is equal parts challenging and beautiful.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks was a profound look into the problems with many productivity books, taking a rather philosophical look at time and being human. The book could seem depressing; for example, he thinks the main reason we’re not as productive as we’d like is that we fail to accept our finitude (note that four thousand weeks is about the lifespan of a human). But it is also liberating─especially if you read it from a Christian standpoint. Ironically, the author thinks he’s anti-religious, but for almost every reason he states he’s against Christianity, he’d actually jive with it, if he understood it in any real and intellectual sense. I’ll say that the ideas of this book have played a profound role in helping shape and guide my current perspective on life.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death needs to be read by everyone in our current digital and image-laden age. The entire book is an argument for a single idea: A world in which text is the main medium of communication produces a world entirely different than a world/worldview from a world/worldview resulting from the image as the medium of communication. Words assume meaning and cohesion, and they produce a world of rational argument. Images assume none of these things, and they produce a world that has no relationship with rational argument. Whether you agree with Postman or not, his book is a perfect example of rational argument.
I only recently finished the semi-autobiographical novella “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean, but I ended my reading of the book with a specific prayer I’ve prayed after finishing only a small handful of books, all of which remain my favorite books of all time: “Please, please God, tell me there are more books like this.” But, as with every other time I’ve prayed this prayer, I’m met with the unassailable conviction that, no, there are no other books like it. (A Month in the Country and Gilead are other books I finished with such a prayer.) Maclean is sentimental without any sense of artifice, spiritual without any heavy-handedness, and philosophical without condescension. The book is Annie Dillard and Hemingway mashed together, while the experience of reading is more akin to Marilynne Robinson.
