December 20, 2021
My end-of-the-year book list
It’s that time of the year: for book lists! Congratulations to some wonderful books recently honored at The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, and the Englewood Review of Books: Brett McCracken’s The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World; Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, and Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Subversive Witness: Scripture’s Call to Leverage Privilege. As a regular listener of The Book Review podcast hosted by Pamela Paul of the New York Times, I’d also encourage you to learn about other notable books in the episode on their top ten books of the year.
I’ve struggled to put together my own 2021 best-of book list. I started an MFA program a year ago, which has me reading books that may not be of wider interest here. I’ve also been reading for my current book project, In Good Time, so again, this research makes for some niche reading.
I’ve decided that for my own end-of-the year list, I’ll simply capture the books I will remember most from this year, either because they’ve taught me something profound or immersed me in a beautiful and haunting narrative. Here they are, in no particular order. As a caveat: these are not books published in 2021, simply books I’ve read this year.
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987). This is the first time I’ve read Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. That feels a bit embarrassing to admit. Beloved is the haunting story of a slave woman who escapes Kentucky across the Ohio River. She settles down, at the home of her mother-in-law, to make a new life in Cincinnati with the children she’s sent ahead and the baby she’s birthed along the way. But Sethe has escaped only after having been violently beaten and abused. The wounds on her back cut the figure of a tree, which a vagrant white woman describes when meeting her on the run: “It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it, in bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder.”
Notes from a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955). I’m also embarrassed to say this is the first time I’ve read Baldwin, one of the finest American essayists of the 20th-century. As a black man in America, Baldwin managed to write about his embittered experience while also rejecting hatred: “Hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose,” he argues. In this collection, I noted that many of the images Baldwin uses to describe racial rage include fever, affliction, and infection, and these metaphors remind me that racism is something to be healed in America, not simply unlearned or punished and certainly not ignored.
A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene Peterson by Winn Collier (2020). In the opening scene of this wonderful book, Eugene’s young son, Eric, is sent to fetch his dad for breakfast. He runs down the stairs and finds his father in his basement office, wrapped in a prayer shawl with a Bible open in front of him. The late Peterson is one of my favorite writers (I return again and again to The Jesus Way and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction), and I think Collier was just the man to attempt the task of writing his vita. (I love Collier’s epistolary novel, Love Big, Be Well.) Reading this book reminded of the day in college I stepped inside Dr. Lyle Dorsett’s office, and he sent me away with the titles of two biographies: No Compromise, the biography of Keith Green, and No Chance to Die, a biography of Amy Carmichael. “Christian biographies will change your life.”
On Immunity by Eula Biss (2014). I read this book initially for my MFA, and it artfully weaves together literary, historical, sociological, and scientific evidence with Biss’s personal narrative. Biss is a mother who gave birth in 2009, just months before the WHO declared the H1N1 virus a pandemic. Though she chooses to vaccinate her son against the virus, her book isn’t a polemic for vaccination. It’s a much more interesting exploration on human vulnerability and collective responsibility. A friend tells Biss that her interest may not be in immunity, but in munis, a Latin root which lies at the meaning of immunity. Munis means “service or duty.”
Becoming Friends of Time by John Swinton (2016). This is a book I read for my current book project, In Good Time,and Swinton, a professor at the University of Aberdeen, explores how we’ve come to our modern assumptions about time: “as fragmented, commodifiable, scheduled, and, above all, instrumental.” Early in the book, Swinton sets up his task in terms of practical theology: thinking well about time in order to be faithful in bodily life. What makes his book particularly interesting is his past experience, as a nurse, working with the cognitively disabled, the aging, and those suffering dementia. I think this is a must-read for pastors and ministry leaders in order to understand how our assumptions about time exclude those who don’t move at the modern world’s speed.
A Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich (14th century). There are lots of different translations of Norwich’s visions, but I read The Writings of Julian of Norwich, edited by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins and published by the Pennsylvania University Press. This particular text includes both A Vision Shown to A Devout Woman as well as A Revelation of Love. Let me simply say that this book came into my life at the very moment I needed it: when I groped to understand God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s patient heart toward humanity. It’s strange to say that this might be considered a parenting book, but I think it is, especially given Julian’s lengthy meditations on the motherhood of God. What Julian helps readers to see, in her vision of the crucified Christ, is that God loves his people and keeps this by his own power, that his love is far more plentiful and powerful that we might dare to imagine or ask. (As a companion to this, read Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, which I’m slipping in here as an honorable mention.)
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020). I’m sure I’ve confessed to you that I don’t read as many novels as I’d like, and usually, when I am reading a novel, I’m actually listening to it on Audible. This was the case with Hamnet, which was on the NYT’s list of best books in 2020. As is typical with me, I was late to this party—and not disappointed when I finally arrived. The novel is exquisite. I feel like I can still see the motes of dust settling on the stone floor of the home Shakespeare and his wife shared in Stratford, England, in the late 1500s. In this home, they lose their young son, Hamnet, to the bubonic plague, and the novel explores grief: for a mother and also a marriage. It’s 12 hours, 42 minutes if you’re interested to listen to it, and Daisy O’Donovan is a wonderful narrator.
Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner (1991). You can’t judge a book by its cover maybe, but the first three pages of any book can give you a good sense of it. By that accounting, this slim memoir (Buechner’s third) is very worthwhile. This is the opening sentence: “One November morning in 1936 when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my younger brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat down on the running board to wait for the exhaust to kill him.” As a suicide survivor myself, this book was especially powerful for me. Also, Buechner delves into some of his struggles with parenting a daughter who nearly died of anorexia. I know all this sounds horribly depressing—and maybe it’s just the kind of gritty conditions that call for faith.
Glittering Vices by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung (2020). Although DeYoung is a scholar, this is an accessible book on the “Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies,” as the subtitle suggests. During the pandemic, I’ve gotten quite interested in the sin of acedia, or sloth, as it might otherwise be known, and I found DeYoung’s work in the course of that research. This book looks more broadly at all of the sins—vainglory, envy, sloth, avarice, wrath, gluttony, lust— and argues that understanding these familiar temptations helps us engage practices (habits!) to counter them. I passed the book to Ryan, who might have even loved it more than me.
Carved in Ebony by Jasmine Holmes (2020). I’ve written about this book in Post Script, but it just recently struck me how bold the subtitle is: “Lessons from the Black Women Who Shape Us.” This us is something I might have initially taken for granted, but now I have the curious voice of my MFA mentor, Susanna Paola Antonetta, in my head. “Who is the we?” For Holmes, this we isn’t simply black women or even black Americans. It’s all Americans—because these ten women have put their hand to the civic plow in some way, working against the oppression that has been part of our common national inheritance. This we is also all Christians—because these women have done that work as worship and service to God. It’s a wonderfully researched book, wonderful written book.
Stay tuned next week for my end-of-the year list of “What’s Worked and What Hasn’t” in 2021. I’ve borrowed those prompts from Emily P. Freeman’s end-of-the-year podcast, and as you’re getting into a reflective mode, you might want to listen to that episode or even want to pick up a copy of her The Next Right Thing Guided Journal.
And may I also say that if you’ve never bought one of my books, I’d love for you to consider doing so, especially A Habit Called Faith which released this year. I’ve deliberately chosen to offer these weekly letters for free, even if the work of writing them is not actually free to me. You support my work by buying my books—and I’m grateful.
Merry Christmas!
Jen