2016’s Top Books
There are two kinds of people in the world.
There are some people who, rather than merely “entertaining” themselves, read the most important, the most beautiful, the most challenging, and the most thought-provoking books published each year; and there are some people who don’t.
The list below was created to assist the former.
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Jan 26th – The Confessions of X – by Suzanne M. Wolfe
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Jan 31st – The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters – by Sinclair B. Ferguson
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Feb 2nd – The High Mountains of Portugal – by Yann Martel
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Feb 16th – The Silk Roads: A New History of the World – by Peter Frankopan
From Amazon:
“Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts.
Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.”
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Feb 22nd – On This Day in Poetry History: Poems – by Amy Newman
From Amazon:
“In her newest feat of poetic innovation, Amy Newman wanders the lives of mid-century poetry immortals, including Berryman, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, peeking in from the periphery on personal moments both sensational and mundane, imagining their consequences for the poets, their readers, and their shared American century. Affecting and refreshing, a perfect mix of literariness and pulp, On this Day in Poetry History is the latest accomplishment from a poet of incomparable wit and imagination.”
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Feb 25th – The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction – by Adam S. Miller
From Amazon:
“The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is the first book to explore key religious themes – from boredom to addiction, and distraction – in the work of one of America’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. In a series of short, topic-focused chapters, the book joins a selection of key scenes from Wallace’s novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King with clear explanations of how they contribute to his overall account of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. Adam Miller explores how Wallace’s work masterfully investigates the nature of first-world boredom and shows, in the process, how easy it is to get addicted to distraction (chemical, electronic, or otherwise). Implicitly critiquing, excising, and repurposing elements of AA’s Twelve Step program, Wallace suggests that the practice of prayer (regardless of belief in God), the patient application of attention to things that seem ordinary and boring, and the internalization of clichés may be the antidote to much of what ails us in the 21st century.”
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Feb 29th – What about Free Will?: Reconciling Our Choices with God’s Sovereignty – by Scott Christensen
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Mar 10th – The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick – by Jessica Riskin
From Education and Culture:
“For the object-oriented ontologist, similarly, the old line that ‘to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ is true, not primarily because of certain human traits, but rather because the hammer wants to pound nails. For the proponent of OOO, there are no good reasons for believing that the statement ‘This man wants to use his hammer to pound nails’ makes any more sense than ‘This hammer wants to pound nails.’
Some thinkers are completely convinced by this account of the agency of things; others believe it’s nonsense. But very few on either side know that the very debates they’re conducting have been at the heart of Western thought for 500 years. Indeed, much of the intellectual energy of the modern era has been devoted to figuring out whether the non-human world is alive or dead, active or passive, full of agency or wholly without it. Jessica Riskin’s extraordinary book The Restless Clock tells that vital and almost wholly neglected story.
It is a wildly ambitious book, and even its 500 pages are probably half as many as a thorough telling of its story would require. (The second half of the book, covering events since the Romantic era, seems particularly rushed.) But a much longer book would have struggled to find a readership, and this is a book that needs to be read by people with a wide range of interests and disciplinary allegiances. Riskin and her editors made the right choice to condense the exceptionally complex story, which I will not even try to summarize here; the task would be impossible.”
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Mar 11th – One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of the Mass – by Paula Huston
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Mar 14th – The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity – by Charles Taylor
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Mar 15th – Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate – by Michelle Lee-Barnewall
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Mar 28th – Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays – by Roger Scruton
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Apr 5th – You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit – by James K.A. Smith
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Apr 5th – Night Sky with Exit Wounds – by Ocean Vuong
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Apr 5th – Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams – by Louisa Thomas
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Apr 8th – Work & Days – by Tess Taylor
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Apr 11th – A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? – by Robert W. Jenson
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Apr 12th – Hamilton: The Revolution – by Lin-Manuel Miranda & Jeremy McCarter
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Apr 21st – The Spirituality of Wine – by Gisela H. Kreglinger
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May 3rd – Rescuing the Gospel: The Story and Significance of the Reformation – by Erwin W. Lutzer
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May 19th – The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures – by D.A. Carson
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May 24th – The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism – by Yuval Levin
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May 31st – Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels – by Richard B. Hays
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May 31st – The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction – by Neil Gaiman
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Jun 14th – A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 – by Wendell Berry
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Jun 21st – The After Party: Poems – by Jana Prikryl
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Jun 28th – Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis – by J.D. Vance
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Jun 29th – A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays – by David Bentley Hart
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July 19th – Sacramental Preaching: Sermons on the Hidden Presence of Christ – by Hans Boersma
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Jul 26th – Conversations with Roger Scruton – by Mark Dooley & Roger Scruton
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Aug 2nd – The Underground Railroad – by Colson Whitehead
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Aug 2nd – The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race – edited by Jesmyn Ward
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Aug 2nd – Ruined – by Ruth Everhart
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Aug 22nd – The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future – by John Milbank & Adrian Pabst
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Aug 23rd – Falling Awake: Poems – by Alice Oswald
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Aug 30th – The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy – by Anthony Gottlieb
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Sep 2nd – Radicalism: When Reform Becomes Revolution: The Preface to Hooker’s Laws: A Modernization – by Richard Hooker
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Sep 6th – Improbable Planet: How Earth Became Humanity’s Home – by Hugh Ross
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Sep 13th – Roots to the Earth: Poems and a Story – by Wendell Berry
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Sep 20th – House of Lords and Commons: Poems – by Ishion Hutchinson
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Sep 20th – Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill – by Candice Millard
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Sep 22nd – Emblem of Faith Untouched: A Short Life of Thomas Cranmer – by Leslie Winfield Williams
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Sep 28th – Liturgy and Personality – by Dietrich von Hildebrand
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Sep 30th – Why the Reformation Still Matters – by Michael Reeves & Tim Chester
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Oct 4th – Envelope Poems – by Emily Dickinson
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Oct 11th – Bestiary: Poems – by Donika Kelly
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Oct 11th – Upstream: Selected Essays – by Mary Oliver
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Oct 18th – The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church – by Peter J. Leithart
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Nov 1st – Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life – by Tish Harrison Warren
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Nov 1st – Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey – by Elena Ferrante
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Nov 7th – Aesthetics: Volume I – by Dietrich von Hildebrand
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Nov 14th – Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative – by Alasdair MacIntyre
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Nov 14th – The Bureaucrat Kings: The Origins and Underpinnings of America’s Bureaucratic State – by Paul D. Moreno
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Nov 15th – Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems – by Christian Wiman
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Nov 15th – Swing Time – by Zadie Smith
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Nov 30th – Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents – by Patrick J. Deneen
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Dec 13th – One Man’s Dark – by Maurice Manning
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