This is, hopefully, my last year to have my reading list and favorite books completely dominated by academic sources. Grad school’s great and all, but you don’t get to read a lot of fun stuff. I still found a few gems, and if you’re into academic theology, there’s a few other good ones as well.
10. It’s a Bird…, Steven T. Seagle – In my view, no top 10 books list is complete without at least one comic book—though of course you can’t put it too high. Seagle’s work is a thoughtful exploration of hope, virtue, and cultural expectations in the face of death and inherited disease. Seagle’s autobiographical protagonist can be obnoxious, but that’s by design. My only real complaint is the art (by Teddy Kristiansen). There are some interesting creative choices, but I couldn’t help but thinking throughout: I could do better than that, and I’m a hack amateur.
9. Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction, Fergus Kerr – This is a pleasant enough introduction to Aquinas, but where it really shines is in Kerr’s articulation of the grammarian and communitarian themes in Aquinas’s theology and his anticipation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
8. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – I’m a little embarrassed to include this on here, but mostly because it marks three works in a row that hardly qualify as “books.” The Communist Manifesto is remarkably easy to read and engaging, and by far its best section is the first in which the authors lay out the cultural plague they take capitalism to be. I’m sure I’m late to the party, but even as someone not terribly sympathetic to their solution—Proletarians of the world, unite!—it is nonetheless striking how perceptive and prophetic Marx and Engel’s diagnosis is.
7. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman – I read this with a friend, on his suggestion. The book is about the choice modern women face whether or not to have children, and I assumed it was because my friend and his wife were wrestling with whether or not they wanted children. So imagine my surprise when he told me they were expecting—and already knew they were when he chose the book. In any case, I wasn’t a big fan of What Are Children For—it is mostly a survey of anything that has ever been said about motherhood, and always with a tone of criticism. The book comes out of a political and cultural context that shares few of the same assumptions and virtues that I do. What I did find in the book’s favor came nearer the end, namely in the authors’ discussion of behaviors that are in-and-of-themselves worth doing, the brief reflection on the identity of motherhood, and an anecdote in the final chapter of a stranger’s joyful willingness to worry about their children.
6. With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology, Stanley Hauerwas – Two of the figures this book majors in I knew little about or had little interest in before reading: William James and Karl Barth. (I’ve never been much of a Barth guy, but I suppose I should start giving him a chance.) Its third primary figure, Reinhold Niebuhr, I have much more interest in, but the book is explicitly critical of him. Yet, even with these features working against the book, Hauerwas won me over—as he often does. His argument is simple: to do ethics, we must do theology, and to do theology, we must listen to how God has made himself known. In Hauerwas’s own words: “If what Christians believe about God and the world could be known without witnesses, then we would have evidence that what Christians believe about God and the world is not true. All that is, all that is creation, is a witness to the One alone who is capable of moving the sun and the stars as well as our hearts. If we and the world existed by necessity, then no witness, no story of creation, would be required. But God did not have to create, much less redeem; yet we have it on good authority that God has created and redeemed. Creation and redemption constitute the story necessary for us to know who we are. Such knowledge comes only through the telling of this story.”
5. Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable Body: A Theological Engagement, ed. Devan Stahl – I’m a little biased, because I got to help with the editing of the book. But I think even if I hadn’t, I’d be able to recognize the contributions in how each of these chapters wrestles with the implications of emerging technologies for the most vulnerable among us. My favorite chapters from this anthology include Devan Stahl’s reflections on our eschatological imagination, Brian Brock’s piercing criticism of the companies involved in developing enhancement technologies, and Jonathan Tran and Jeffrey Bishop’s friendly conversation on ontology.
4. Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein, eds. Jeffrey L. Stout and Robert MacSwain – This is the second time Aquinas and Wittgenstein have shown up on this list, and they lie just out of sight for at least three others. What can I say? They’ve infiltrated my brain. That’s the consequence for reading and writing about these guys for a year.
3. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams – I could take or leave the plot, but this is, without a doubt, the funniest book I have ever read. I didn’t think it was possible to laugh out loud that often when reading a novel. And much of the time, you knew the joke was coming; you get use to, over the course of the book, exactly where and how Adams will make a joke—and yet somehow the punchline always catches you by surprise. (There’s also something to be said for how sophisticated some of the science-fiction and philosophy is for this radio show turned novel.)
2. A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick – Again, we’ve got a funny one here. But A Scanner Darkly is also suspenseful (perhaps finding PKD at the height of his prose) as well as thematically rich, bringing Kafka to bear on drug-culture specifically and the modern condition more broadly. And whatta title! Nothing else so accurately and woefully captures the nature of how we see others—and see ourselves—than Paul’s reminder, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.”
1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen – This was my first foray into Jane Austen, on the page at least. I expected her work to be enjoyable, but I could not have guessed how funny and sophisticated it was going to be. To be sure, there were times when I was taken out of the book when the characters overanalyzed their interactions (in a less Seinfeldian way and more autistic manner), but to Austen’s credit, in half those occasions, the characters would acknowledge their overthinking. Additionally, Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of Austen colored my reading, drawing my eye to the intricate moral rules dictating the community of the book. This is most notable in the final chapters in which the climax revolves around a sister eloping with a solider, a climax depicting family reaction that hardly makes sense in a modern context. (As a bonus: enjoying this book helped me understand better how I think about book adaptations and why I often prefer their movie counterparts. It became clear, reflecting on the Keira Knightley adaptation, that what I value is the craft of editing and reducing—which obviously favors movies over books.)