20 books John plans to read in 2010

Jean inspired me with her list of books to read in 2010.

Four novels:

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 22nd January - 4th December

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin 6th - 14th March

My brother will probably be surprised that I haven't read this... but I received it as a Sinterklaas present from Kara, so I have no excuse now.

Bachelors Anonymous by P. G. Wodehouse 7th - 8th January

This is one of ten Wodehouse books that Kara brought into our marriage. :)

Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle 7th - 11th January

I've been getting back into Sherlock Holmes lately - maybe as a result of the recently released film. I read all the short stories when I was a kid, but I hadn't read this novel.

Four books of theology or Biblical studies:

Four Gospels, One Jesus: A Symbolic Reading by Richard Burridge 3rd January - 11th February

Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament 14th February - 16th May

This will be the third book I've read in Zondervan's Counterpoints series - and this is an important subject.

The Drama Of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach To Christian Theology by Kevin Vanhoozer Commenced 5th September

Deep Exegesis by Peter Leithart 27th May - 2nd July

I've read half a dozen books by Leithart now, and enjoyed every one.

Four books to help me in my work as a pastor:

Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do about It by Julia Duin 1st - 10th May

Preaching That Speaks to Women by Alice Mathews 16th May - 30th June

This looks like a book that's worth reading, but I really don't know if I will agree with it at all. After all, Steve Schlissel says, "Preaching should be self-consciously directed to the men of the covenant... Preach to women, have women; preach to men, have men, women and children."

Church and the Older Person by Robert Gray and David Moberg 7th November - 15th December

Questioning Evangelism by Randy Newman 13th November - 9th December

No, this isn't a book that discusses the need for evangelism - rather, it examines how we can evangelize by asking questions. "It worked for Jesus; it will work for you," proclaims the back cover.

Four more Christian books:

Wages of Spin by Carl Trueman 11th June - 18th July

I really liked Trueman's Minority Report, which I read a few months ago. I also heard Trueman speak in Melbourne last winter, and he was excellent.

Through Painted Deserts by Donald Miller 7th - 30th January

This is by the author of Blue Like Jazz, which was great, and Searching for God Knows What, which was pretty good. I also read Miller's blog.

The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life by Joan Chittister 24th January - 20th March

This is a review copy from Thomas Nelson's Book Review Blogger scheme.

Brave New Family: G. K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family 9th April - 19th June

This will be, I believe, the 18th book I've read by GKC. It's a fairly recent compilation of essays.

Four other books:

The Diary of Anne Frank Commenced 20th December

The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow 30th July - 13th August

The two cultures Snow refers to are the humanities and the sciences. He argues that our society's intellectual life is characterized by a division between the two.

Poincaré's Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math's Greatest Puzzles by George Szpiro Commenced 12th November

It's been a while since I've read a book on mathematics. This is about the Poincaré conjecture, the only one of the so-called Millennium Prize Problems to be solved.

The Unprejudiced Palate: Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life by Angelo Pellegrini 1st February - 30th April

Now that I live on gourmet food, I thought I might as well read about it. According to the back cover, this book "inspired a seismic culinary shift in how America eats."

Book giveaway at Kingdom People

Trevin Wax at Kingdom People is having his annual book giveaway at the moment. Trevin is giving away his ten favourite books of 2009 to one lucky winner. With interesting titles like The God Who Smokes and unpronouncable authors such as Tullian Tchividjian, this stack is a treasure trove for Reformed Christians.

To enter, subscribe to Trevin's blog, and send him an email.

John's December Reading

Currently Reading:

My Soul Magnifies the Lord: Meditations on the meaning of Christmas by Martyn Lloyd-Jones

This book consists of four expositions on the Magnificat - Mary's song in Luke 1. I've been reading one chapter in each Sunday of Advent.



Powers by John B. Olson

I received a copy of this as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers scheme. Stay tuned for the full-length review coming soon.

Science and Christianity: Four Views edited by Richard F. Carlson

This book is published by IVP, in apparent imitation of Zondervan's Counterpoints series. I'm reading this in preparation for a workshop I will be running at PYV Summer Camp on "Can I be a Christian and believe in science?"

The Faithful Sayings in the Pastoral Letters by George W. Knight III

I am in the middle of a series on the faithful sayings in the Aspendale evening services. Five times in the pastoral epistles (I & II Timothy and Titus), Paul says "this is a faithful [or, "trustworthy"] saying. The first one in particular is a great Christmas text: "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief," (1 Timothy 1:15)

Finished Recently:

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc

Rather than being the story of Belloc's conversion (he was a life-long Catholic), this is a travel book, written in 1902. Read the book online here.

Belloc undertakes to walk from Toul (in France) to Rome. He does end up cheating, however - twice he catches a train, and twice he hitches a ride on a cart. Here is a Google map of Belloc's trip - I would love to follow in his footsteps one day. By car, of course - it's a 22 hour trip:



Dark Fire by C. J. Sansom

This is the sequel to Dissolution, which I read on my honeymoon. There are currently four books in this series of historical mystery novels, featuring a hunchbacked lawyer as the hero. "Dark Fire" is another name for Greek fire, the long-lost formula of which, in the book, has apparently been rediscovered.

Bound for Glory: A Practical Handbook for Raising a Victorious Family by R. C. Sproul, Jr.

This is the fourth and probably the best book I've read by R. C. Sproul Jr. This has some challenging things to say about Christian family life - and although I have read a fair bit on this subject, I found much in the book that I hadn't thought about before. For example, Sproul argues that a church Session can function as a sort of "court of appeal" for a wife (p. 93):

My wife and I have a dispute. We are not agreeing. I am asking her to do something she doesn't think we ought to be doing. So she goes to court. The court she comes to however, is the church, not the state. That I am not Jesus is painfully apparent. But here, in a church that is willing to exercise discipline and recognizes its rightful calling in these circumstances, she has protection.

The Old Church Book by Robin Langley Summer

This is coffee table book of churches in North America. Although it was a bit frustrating that not all the churches discussed were pictured, I was particularly interested in what it said about revival styles (Greek, Gothic, Romanesque), since they are also to be found in Australia. So, for example, when Kara and I visited Hobart last month, we saw St George's, Battery Point (left) whose pillars are clearly Greek revival. Notice the (architectural!) similarities to the United First Parish Church, Quincy, Massachusetts (right) which is one of the churches featured in the book:

John's November Reading

Currently Reading:

Face to Face: Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality by Steve Wilkins

I'm reading this with Kara. We're both keen on extending our hospitality over the next few years, and hopefully this book will help us to think theologically about the subject.

Preach or Perish, edited by Donald Howard

I like usually to have a book of preaching on the go, and this is a good one. Most of the contributions come from Sydney Anglicans, but there are a few Presbyterians in it as well.

1 Samuel by David Jobling

I've been preaching through 1 Samuel in our evening services at Aspendale, and this book has stimulated my thinking. Jobling provides us a good example of where liberal assumptions can take us in biblical interpretation - if the Bible is only a fallible record of human experience, there is no reason to believe it contains an accurate portrayal of God. Sure enough, Jobling believes that 1 Samuel portrays God as childish and irrational (p. 84). Despite this outrageous statement, Jobling raises some important questions that do need to be answered. For example, why does David remain king despite all his sin, whereas Saul is rejected after a trifling offence? Jobling puts it down to God's inconsistency, but there is a better explanation: the LORD made an everlasting covenant with David (2 Samuel 23:5), whereas he did not make one with Saul. All in all, this is a potentially dangerous book, and not one I can recommend to readers of this blog.

Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style by Harvey and Laurie Bluedorn

This is a classic example of a controversial book. It has 29 reviews on Amazon: 17 give it five stars, while 10 give it 1 star.

Kara and I are planning to homeschool our kids, and this book looks like it's going to be very useful in helping us plan a curriculum.


Finished Recently:

Aussie Pilgrim's Progress by Kel Richards

This book is almost better than the original. I avoided getting Richards' Aussie Bible, but at just $3 at Borders, this was too good to pass up. I read it to Kara, and had the dual pleasure of sharing a devotional book with her, and teaching her the Australian language.

At a couple of places, Richards makes some positive theological adjustments to Bunyan's text. In Hopeful's account of his conversion, Richards includes an explanation of the Big Swap. In the original version, Hopeful has to wait for Christ to reveal himself to him, which he does in a special revelation to his soul, but in Richards' version, all Hopeful (or "Trusty", as he is now) has to do is pray a short simple prayer and really mean it, and he has made the first step on a lifelong journey.

The Sermon on the Mount: An Evangelical Exposition of Matthew 5-7 by Don Carson

I've just finished preaching through these chapters in our morning services, and this book was quite helpful. Not Carson's best, (that would be A Call to Spiritual Reformation) but still very good.

The Deceiver by Frederick Forsyth

Another spy novel, better than the one I read last month.

Miniatures and Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen by Peter Leithart

As the subtitle suggests, this book doesn't just look at Jane Austen from a Christian perspective - it actually argues that her novels are Christian. It has be admitted, however, that we don't know much about Austen's personal faith.

I must confess, I did not read all of this book - just the introductory chapter, and the two chapters on the two Jane Austen books I have read: Pride and Prejudice and Emma. But Leithart has encouraged me to keep on reading through the Austen corpus. Next stop: Mansfield Park, which Leithart claims is Austen's most theological novel.

Two literary tools

I've been playing around with two book-related websites. The first is Amazon, which is so much more than just a place to buy books. I've been posting some old book reviews there - a couple are taken from my old blog, a couple are reviews I wrote for periodicals, and the rest are pared-down versions of book reviews I wrote at college. Anyway, here is my list of reviews on Amazon.


The second website I have been playing with is LibraryThing. I've listed my books there, having imported them from weRead. All the books, that is, that I both own and have read. Anyway, LibraryThing has some great tools on it, and one of them is the capacity to construct a word cloud from any given list. So, here is the author cloud of my personal library.

Kara's September/October Reading

Currently Reading:

The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond by G. K. Chesterton

Mr. Pond is an odd character. He's always saying things that just don't make sense...at first. Take this from the first story, "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse" : "... Grock failed because his soldiers obeyed him. Of course, if ONE of his soldiers had obeyed him, it wouldn't have been so bad. But when TWO of his soldiers obeyed him--why, really, the poor old devil had no chance."

And then there were the two doctors who "came to agree so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other..."

I'm enjoying this book. :)

Her Father's Daughter by Gene Stratton Porter

I've only just begun this title, but expect it will be an enjoyable, if somewhat flowery read. Porter's interest in birds and plants again comes to the fore in this story of a young girl living on the outskirts of 1920's Los Angeles.

Recently Finished:

The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out by Mark Driscoll

This book took me a while to finish, simply because I found it hard to get past Driscoll's tone. I found it both overly familiar--this diminished after the first chapter or so-- and times abrasive. However, now that I've made it to the end, I find myself wanting to read it again. There are many things he says about evangelism and culture that make me uncomfortable. But this is a good thing, because I am forced to ask myself "why?".

One thing in this book that I appreciate is the emphasis on evangelism through hospitality. This is an area I would like to grow in. Here are a few other things I've been thinking over:

"The way to avoid sin is not to avoid sinners but to stick close to Jesus." (p. 40)

"As long as Christians fail to repent of self-righteousness, we will continue to speak of evengelism in terms such as outreach, which implies we will not embrace lost people but will keep them at least an arm's length away." (p. 78)

"Jesus told us that the kingdom will be filled with joy, and so we make it a habit to take God very seriously and everything else very lightly." (p. 187)

My husband has written a review which covers the contents of this book more in depth.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

A mark of a good book of historical fiction is that it makes you want to read some real history. Even better if a bit of mystery is in the mix. This book fits the bill. It's a criminal investigation held hundred of years after the suspect(s) and victims are dead. On trial: Richard III.

Overall a great read, even though I was quite irritated at some historical revisionism regarding the Covenanters. Seems a bit much to marginalise them as simply political radicals, none of whom actually died for their faith.


From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple

A travel book in which Dalrymple retraces the steps of John Moschos, a 6th century monk who traversed Byzantium in its declining years, and then wrote a book called the Spiritual Meadow . I suppose what I liked best about the Holy Mountain was how I could learn ancient and modern history simultaneously. I was fascinated by the accounts of many strange sects, such as the Stylites, ascetics who lived on top of pillars. This book gave me a greater understanding of the difficulties that Christians face in the Middle East, and of the complexity of the issues behind conflict in the Holy Land.

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis

One of the most intense books I've read. Probably wasn't a good idea to pick this up right after finishing Fahrenheit 451! Lincoln's Dreams is the story of a young researcher who meets a girl who is having very strange dreams. He soon concludes that they are not actually her dreams, but the dreams of Robert E. Lee, somehow transferred across the years (an idea I found quite disturbing). He sets out to help her, and soon finds himself in a bit of a predicament. There is a twist to this story that in retrospect I should have picked up on sooner. A very strange story.

John's October Reading

Currently Reading:

The Compass Rose by Ursula Le Guin

This is a book of short stories that seem to linger in the grey zone between science fiction and fantasy. I'm starting to develop a taste for Le Guin...

Primeval Saints by James Jordan

I've read a fair bit of James Jordan over the years (mostly on the Biblical Horizons website) and he's always stimulating. In this book he looks at the patriarchs in Genesis. My wife read it a while ago, and now it's my turn.


A Passion for Books by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan

A modern classic in the books about books genre. The subtitle says it all: "A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Love and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for and Appreciating Books."

Scientific Mythologies by James Herrick

This is a true "Science and Christianity" book, but it's also "Science Fiction and Christianity". Herrick examines the interplay between science and science fiction over the past century, and some of the myths that have arisen in both. I think this book has a really cool cover:


Finished Recently:

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre

This is a gritty, "realistic" spy thriller, not at all like the James Bond books I read as a kid.

Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport by Richard Mouw

The idea of this book comes from a scene from the 1979 film Hardcore (which I have not seen) in which a Dutch Reformed elder from Grand Rapids attempts to explain the five points of Calvinism to a prostitute at Las Vegas airport. Which raises a whole lot of questions, that this book attempts to explore: How does TULIP relate to everyday Christianity? Is Calvinism more that just the five points? Do we refer to the "Reformed distinctives" when we explain the gospel to non-Christians? I really enjoyed this book up to chapter 8, when Mouw's inclusivism bubbled to the surface.

Travel with Robert Murray McCheyne by Derek Prime

Note the non-standard spelling of M'Cheyne's surname. Still, this is a solid contribution to a worthwhile series. It is a biography combined with a travel guide, which means the reader is treated to some lovely, if somewhat gratuitous, pictures of Edinburgh, Dundee and Jerusalem.

Minority Report by Carl Trueman

I heard Carl Trueman speak in Melbourne a few months ago. Hearing him was great and reading him better. This book has several shorter pieces from his Wages of Spin column on the reformation21 website, as well as four longer pieces. Two themes emerge from his writing. The first is the necessity of studying (and understanding!) church history. Not all that surprising, really, given that Trueman is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at WTS. The second theme is a bit more surprising: he critiques the "mere Christianity" popular in modern evangelical circles, which thrives at the expense of a robust confessional orthodoxy. Trueman's perspective comes out most clearly in his review of Is The Reformation Over? by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom. Thought-provoking stuff.