Last year my friend Paul Gould mentioned that he keeps an annual book log of what he’s traversed over the year. I thought that was a good idea, being a useful way to recall major checkpoints along one’s intellectual journey. Excluding vague cases (did I finish that?), here’s my 2013 log:
Non-Fiction
- Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schneider (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality Cambridge, 2012).
- James Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).
- Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (Vintage, 2005).
- Anne Field, Delivered From Evil: Jesus’ Victory Over Satan (Servant, 2005).
- Aubrey Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God (University of Wales Press, 1961).
- John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity with A Discourse of Miracles and part of A Third Letter Concerning Toleration (Stanford, 1958; rep. 2005).
- Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty (Fortress Press, 2003).
- Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford, 2011).
- Thomas McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Eerdmans, 2010).
- James McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (Penguin, 2009).
- Richard Muller, Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (W. W. Norton & Co., 2013).
- Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2002).
- C. H. Perelman, Justice (Random House, 1976).
- Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 1995).
- H. Wheeler Robinson, Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Fortress Press, 1980).
- John. A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (SCM Press, 1952).
- Richard Swinburne, Simplicity as Evidence of Truth (Marquette University Press, 1997).
- N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (IVP, 2006).
- N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperCollins, 2008).
- Linda Zagzebski, Omnisubjectivity (Marquette University Press, 2013). Reviewed HERE.
Fiction
- Max Brooks, World War Z
- Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
- Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Shadow
- Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
- C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
- C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
- C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Being able to take in and appreciate a panorama is a skill worth developing. In general, (analytic) philosophy lends itself to analyzing snapshots; most of my time is spent reading so-called “tenure files”: an article here and there in various philosophy journals and volumes obscure to anyone outside a narrow few. Heck, a handful of the above books are little more than glorified articles. This coming year I have a great opportunity to work on my panoramic skills as I review Brian Leftow’s mammoth tome God and Necessity (Oxford, 2012).
My resolution will be to read more (non-fiction) books next year than I did this year.
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