I am one of those readers who reads with a pen in hand. I almost cannot read a book unless I am underlining statements and scribbling in the margins. This slows down my reading speed significantly, but I think it helps sharpen my mind and interact with the ideas of others.
My goal is to read 4000 books in my lifetime, and this post will keep track of my progress in 2016.
I already own more books than I can read in a lifetime (which I find highly depressing), and so I buy fewer books than I used to, and I have begun to weigh the pros and cons of any book I read. It’s a little crass, but when I consider whether or not I should read a book, I often think of Elaine from Seinfeld wondering if a boyfriend was “sponge worthy.”
Anyway… with that image in mind … here are the books I have read so far:
- Birth-2009 Estimate: 1500 (doesn’t count children’s books)
- 4000 Books 2010: 45
- 4000 Books 2011: 69
- 4000 Books 2012: 52
- 4000 Books 2013: 57
- 4000 Books 2014: 57
- 4000 Books 2015: 55
- 4000 Books 2016: See Comments Below
- Total so Far: 1835
Some of these books make it onto my list of “The Books Every Christian Should Read.” If you haven’t read the books on that list … well, you should.
What books have you read this past year which influenced your life and theology? What books are you excited to read in 2016?
Would that I had your problem. 😉
Our library upgraded to alot more digital media a couple years back. Now they have only about a third as many books and many of those are part (often a middle part) of an incomplete series. AAAARRRRGGGHHHH !!!
That is frustrating! I didn’t know libraries were going this direction.
The Christian book that most effected me in 2015 was your book the Skeleton Church. It encapsulated very nicely what the 21st century church should look like.
Thank you! Very encouraging to hear.
I’ve subscribed to Scribd and Questia so that I can read most of the books I want at no additional cost. At the moment I’m reading ‘Between Rome and Jerusalem’ by Martin Sicker (on Questia). It’s an expensive book to buy and two like this each year more than covers the annual subscription. If there’s anything I can’t get on these, I use Google Books where possible.
And it’s so freeing. I can open a book and begin reading; if I don’t like it I ditch it and it hasn’t cost me a penny.
Hm…Are these books all out of copyright? If not, pity the poor writer.
Some are copyright-free or out of copyright, but most are active and many are still in print. As far as I’m aware they use the Spotify approach. A payment is made each time a book is accessed. It’s a kind of electronic lending library. The user pays a monthly or annual fee and can read as much as they want.
See the Wikipedia article on Questia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questia_Online_Library
And on Scribd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd
Lol! Your OB/GYN friend is the only one acknowledging your Seinfeld joke. I get it and I’m cracking up!
Glad someone got it! Ha!
I didn’t. But then I’ve never watched Seinfeld 🙂
don’t want to boast but a favorite book of mine is one I wrote myself, a memoir of my life in Hawaii. Though it’s my story, it’s all about God’s goodness and grace.
The Kneeling Christian- How to live a victorious christian life.
By an unknown christian.
I don’t know if you guys read this book, but i would reccomend this to everyone.
I will have to check it out. Thanks!
1. God’s Story, by Mark Roncace
2. 1-2 Chronicles, by Eugene Merrill
3. Traversing Babylon by Peter Rouzaud
This book has lots of excellent thoughts and ideas, including some real “quotable” insights. I enjoyed reading it.
This is another “must read” book for those studying mimetic theory, especially if you want to see how Paul talks about mimetic violence and its relation to the cross. When you read this book, you will understand Paul’s terms “sin, flesh, law” quite differently.
This book provided an honest (and humorous) look at many of the texts from Scripture we often ignore or misunderstand. There truly are more naughty texts in the Bible than most of us ever imagined. If you want an interesting read, try this book. The Bible will never be the same book again!
I am always trying to improve my knowledge of writing books and blogs, as well as doing what I can on my blog to help others find what I write and interact with me. I am hoping to move into the area of online courses this year, and this book was helpful as I try to figure this out.
I have a publishing model for my books based on getting as many books out per year as I can. I am a one-man show, however, and so this book gave me some ideas of what I can do to help get my books out faster, better, and into the hands of more people. I love the SPP podcast too!
I have been doing a lot of reading and writing on the subject of the violence of God in the past 5 years, and this is one of the books I read. The author basically takes the “multivocal” approach to Scripture, which is that the Bible contains various voices from various streams of thought about God, and these streams are in dialogue and discussion (and even disagreement) with each other.
I especially appreciated the idea in the book that often the so-called violence of God is actually just the violence of humans projected onto God (p. 70). This is the same approach I took in my book “The Atonement of God” and was glad to find another author who argued similarly.
I have really benefited from much of what Lazar Puhalo writes online, and have REALLY enjoyed a lot of what Brad Jersak writes. So I was expecting much from this book. I am not sure what happened, but I struggled all the way through it understanding what Lazar was even talking about. I knew I was in trouble when the second word of the book was “shant.”
Then I just didn’t care about most of the topics of the book. Christian Existentialism? Gender as Prophecy? Science and Theology as Empirical Quest? The Aesthetics of Reality?
I don’t know if it is just due to the differences between Western mindsets (me) and Eastern Orthodoxy (Puhalo) that caused this, or if I was expecting something more similar to what I have read from both men elsewhere, or maybe it was the title that led me astray (I still do not understand what the title had to do with the rest of the book).
Anyway, not the best book I have read this year…
I read this book as part of my research for my One Verse Podcast, in which we are currently studying through the opening chapters of Genesis. Niehaus has some interesting insights into the role of the temple and the priesthood in the Ancient Near East, and this helps us understand the role of the Garden and Adam in Genesis 2.
I have been doing a lot of reading and writing on the subject of the violence of God in the past 5 years, and this is one of the books I read. I found the book relatively helpful, but was not to keen on the overwhelming number of references to movies.
The book almost should have been subtitled: “How issues of love and violence are seen in modern movies.”
I also was not fond of his references to God as “God the Father/Mother.” I know that God isn’t “male” but “Father/Mother” is just strange…
I read the book because I am a huge fan of C. S. Lewis, and I know that he and Dorothy were friends.
Some s in this book were absolute gold, such as “The Dogma is the Drama,” but the majority of them I didn’t care to read at all, such as “Toward a Christian Esthetic.” The book still had some great insights and is worth reading.
In this book, Beck proposes that death is the cause of sin. Christian theology usually argues that the relationship between sin and death is the other way around. I am not sure I fully agree, but its an interesting concept to consider.
I loved how the book ended though. Here is the quote:
“When we can hear the voice of God crying out against us in the voices of those we ignore, marginalize, victimize, exclude, ostracize, harm, and kill, we know that God has been set free. The radical, prophetic freedom of God is fully realized when we see the face of God in our victims and our enemies” (p. 122).
14. Dodging the Parenting Trap by Adam Ericksen
This may be the best book on parenting I have ever read. This is because it doesn’t provide tips, ideas, or principles on how to parent, but instead provides the psychological and theological foundation for why people behave the way they do, and how we can recognize these foundational truths in our own lives and in our children.
You can get this book free by subscribing to the Raven Foundation email newsletter.
I have been doing a lot of reading from Rene Girard for the past 5 years or so. When I saw this book come out, I was excited to read it. Though the written interview format for this book is a little strange to read, it is one of the better summaries and explanations of mimetic theory and scapegoating. Even more importantly, the book shows how Girard’s thinking helps us understand Scripture.
As I write my own books and teach Scripture and theology to others online, this book will be of immense help.
Time to update this thread … but I don’t have time to write reviews of the books I have read. You can read more about each book by clicking the links.
16. Christianity and the Problem of Human Violence (Become a member of RedeemingGod.com, and get this book for free in one of the emails I will send you).
17. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
18. Voyager by Diana Gabaldon
19. Church Refugees by Josh Packard
20. Jesus Speaks by Frank Viola and Leonard Sweet
21. The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred by James G. Williams
22. They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They? by Patrick F. McManus
23. Sin Reconsidered by James Gaffney
24. Sharing Jesus: He Wanted a Bride by Amy Zema
25. To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink
26. Your First 1000 copies by Tim Grahl
27. Scatter by Andrew Scott
28. Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Volume 1
29. The Grand Canyon and the Flood in Scripture and Science by Carol Hill and Gregg Davidson
30. Unchurching from Christianity by Richard Jacobson
31. Commentary on the Psalms by Allen P. Ross
32. Old Testament Parallels by Victor Matthews
33. Numerous Commentaries on Genesis for my One Verse Podcast. I didn’t read entire commentaries, but only the sections on Genesis 1-4 from 32 different commentaries, so I figure that counts as 1 book… I also read dozens of journal articles … Click the link for this post to see the archives for the podcast episodes. Each podcast episode includes shownotes showing some of these books.
34. Earth’s Earliest Ages by G. H. Pember
35. The God of Creation by Theodore Epp
36. In the Beginning by Henri Blocher
37. In the Beginning, We Misunderstood by Miller and Soden (One of the top 5 books on the opening chapters of Genesis!)
38. Seven Days that Divide the World by John Lennox
39. Genesis Unbound by John Sailhamer
40. Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context by John Walton
41. The Babylonian Genesis by Alexander Heidel
42. The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels by Alexander Heidel
43. Creation and Fall by Bonhoeffer
44. The Lost World of Genesis One by John Walton (One of the top 5 books on Genesis 1)
45. The Lost World of Adam and Eve by John Walton (One of the top 5 books on Genesis 2-3)
46. The Eden Narrative by Tryggve Mettinger
47. Genesis 1-4 by John Collins
48. Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser
49. What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden by Ziony Zevit (One of the top 5 books on Genesis)
50. The Genesis Debate by Youngblood
51. The Genesis Questions by Hugh Ross
Kenneth Briggs is a great writer. This book reads like a history book and a novel combined. The stories and prose read like a narrative, but the book is quite informational as it explains what has happened to the Bible in modern America. A great read!
The section starting on p 138 was my “favorite.” *wink wink*
I read this book as part of my research for my online course “The Gospel Dictionary” in which I define 52 key words related to the Gospel (available in 2017). Anderson show how the Old Testament concept of sin as a burden transitions into the New Testament concept of sin as a debt.
When sin is viewed as a burden, people want to be relieved of this burden, and so this leads them to send it away through sacrifice. But when sin is viewed as a debt, people want to be relieved of their debt, and so this leads them to pay for it through good works.
I am not sure I agree with Anderson’s approach on this, especially since it leads him to support Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement, in which Jesus “paid” our “debt of sin” to God. This reading of Jesus’ work on the cross is what led Anderson to understand sin as he does.
I read this book as part of my research for my online course “The Gospel Dictionary” in which I define 52 key words related to the Gospel (available in 2017).
This is one of the best books on “sin” I have ever read.
It is not often that one enjoys reading a book about sin, but I enjoyed this book because I found it incredibly insightful. I have been teaching through Genesis 2-3 in my One Verse Podcast, and was pleased to discover that the ideas I have been teaching there are also found in this book.
I did disagree a bit with some of what he wrote (such as on pages 23-27, and 75-94), but really appreciated his take on Romans 1-7, and his view that sin is basically trying to be “more than human” which only leads us to be “less than human.”
Great book. Reading it will help you understand Scripture and why Jesus came.
This is the best book about Christian living that I have ever read.
Paul Marshall shows that living the Christian life is not about prayer, Bible studies, and church attendance, but about living the way God wants us to live as human beings in this world.
We were not made for another world, but for this world. We were not made for heaven, but for earth. We live as God wants us to live, not by waiting to die so we can go to heaven, but simply by living this life as fully as we possibly can.
I read this book with an eye toward expanding, revising, and updating my book “Christmas Redemption.” If I ever update my book, I am sure that I will use some of the ideas gleaned from this book.
This book is about the historical, cultural background to the birth narratives of Jesus in the Gospels. This background information is critically important if we are to properly understand these narratives, and properly apply and understand them for our own time and culture today.
If you are preaching, teaching, or writing about the birth narratives in the Gospels (Matthew 2, Luke 1-2, etc), this is a book you absolutely must read.