Books of 2013

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

1. Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schneider (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality Cambridge, 2012).
2. James Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).
3. Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (Vintage, 2005).
4. Anne Field, Delivered From Evil: Jesus’ Victory Over Satan (Servant, 2005).
5. Aubrey Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God (University of Wales Press, 1961).
6. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity with A Discourse of Miracles and part of A Third Letter Concerning Toleration (Stanford, 1958; rep. 2005).
7. Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty (Fortress Press, 2003).
8. Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford, 2011).
9. Thomas McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Eerdmans, 2010).
10. James McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (Penguin, 2009).
11. Richard Muller, Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (W. W. Norton & Co., 2013).
12. Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme Harmony of All: The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Eerdmans, 2002).
13. C. H. Perelman, Justice (Random House, 1976).
14. Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 1995).
15. H. Wheeler Robinson, Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Fortress Press, 1980).
16. John. A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (SCM Press, 1952).
17. Richard Swinburne, Simplicity as Evidence of Truth (Marquette University Press, 1997).
18. N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (IVP, 2006).
19. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperCollins, 2008).
20. Linda Zagzebski, Omnisubjectivity (Marquette University Press, 2013). Reviewed HERE.

Fiction

1. Max Brooks, World War Z
2. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
3. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Shadow
4. Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
   
5. C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
6. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
7. C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
8. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
9. 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.