Soulfood

2023 Reading Recap

Hello all, I’m going to start posting reading lists here instead of on Meta-owned sites. (Hopefully WordPress isn’t owned by Meta and stays that way!) And for 2023, I’m going to have a little more fun with this than usual.

My count reached 50 this year, not quite the book per week I shoot for but still respectable. Instead of my usual fiction/nonfiction/history/devotional/ministry classification I’m going to list them by inspiration. You’ll see what I mean.

Books I read because Brandon Sanderson is my favorite contemporary fantasy-fiction author: The Lost Metal; Tress of the Emerald Sea; The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Surviving Medieval England; Yumi and the Nightmare Painter; The Sunlit Man; The Way of Kings Total: 6 (5 for the first time)

Books I read because I am learning my desperate need for God: A Praying Church (Paul Miller); Praying Together (Megan Hill); Persistent Prayer (Guy Richards); Prayer (Ole Hallesby) (4, all new)

Books I read for leading small group study: A Loving Life (Paul Miller), The Death of Porn (Ray Ortlund), Knowing God (J.I. Packer) (3, all re-reads)

Books I read because I heard about them on The Theology Pugcast (or because I know the guys on the Pugcast): Tree of Salvation (G. Ronald Murphy); The Man Who Was Thursday (G.K. Chesterton); The Coddling of the American Mind (Greg L and Jon H); 32 Christians Who Changed Their World (Glenn Sunshine); The Soul in Cyberspace and Fire in the Streets (Douglas Groothuis); The Household and the War for the Cosmos and Man of the House (C.R. Wiley) (8, all new)

Books I read because I got them free through church from a member who works at Crossway Publishing: Social Conservatism for the Common Good (ed. Andrew T. Walker); The Story of Abortion in America (Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas) (2, both new)

Book I read because I’m friends with the author (but also because the title was intriguing!): The English Reformation in the Spanish Imagination (Deborah Forteza) (1 new)

Books I read because “…Spanish Imagination” spurred my interest in Cordoba Spain, and reading about Cordoba Spain spurred my interest in the history of the Levant: Kingdoms of Faith (Brian Catlos); Black Morocco (Chouki El Hamel) (2, both new)

Books I read because a friend gave them to me (or re-recommended): A Supreme Love (William Edgar, from Hayley Mullins); Inventing Bitcoin (Yan Pritzker, from Jeremy Showalter); The Fire that Consumes (Edward Fudge, from Ron Schemenauer); Adorning the Dark (Andrew Peterson, from Seth Stoltzfus) Glittering Images (Susan Howatch, first recommended by Judy Stoltzfus and then by Alan Strange) (5, all new)

Books I read because Isaac Horn of The Arcadian Wild wrote songs based on them: The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell), Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut) (2, both new)

Book I read because Andrew Peterson exists: The God of the Garden (Andrew Peterson)

Book I read for classes taught by others: Made for Friendship (Drew Hunter, for Sunday School taught by Jamie Stoltzfus)

Book I read because my home-schooled children are getting a better education than I did and I’m trying to keep up: The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius)

Book I read because I support The Davenant Trust: Protestant Social Teaching (ed. Bradford Littlejohn)

Book I read because of Dane Ortlund’s book Gentle and Lowly: Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ (John Bunyan)

Books I read to my children: The Great Brain (John D. Fitzgerald); The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room (Lemony Snicket) (3, 2 new)

Book I read because it’s referenced in pop culture but I’d rather read the book than watch the movie: The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

Books I read to maintain my personality and sanity: The Silmarillion (J.R.R. Tolkien); Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers); Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis); The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) (6, all re-reads)

Books I read because the titles intrigued me: Do Not Follow Your Heart and Impossible Christianity (Kevin DeYoung) (2, both new)

I’ll leave off reviews for now, but if any of these are intriguing to you and you’d like my opinion, feel free to ask me about them in the comments!

stoltzjl1977
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One response to “2023 Reading Recap”

  1. ravenedparticles Avatar
    ravenedparticles

    I wanted to like William Edgar’s book about jazz. I do not think it is an irremediable incongruity that a Presbyterian theologian could write a fine book about the topic.
    The first thing I did when I mooched a loan of my pastor’s copy was to go to the index, straight to the “B” part. A dark cloud drifted with alarming speed across the moon. Somewhere in the distance, an unidentifiable canine howled fallen nature’s griefs upward.

    There was no mention of Bix Beiderbecke.

    A book purporting to be about the history of jazz which omits Bix Beiderbecke is like a book about baseball which omits any references to the Negro Leagues. Even America’s steadfast guardian of uncleansable white guilt, Ken Burns, devoted time to Beiderbecke in his otherwise lamentable PBS series about jazz.

    Dr Edgar didn’t mention Red Norvo; Jack Teagarden and Pee Wee Russell; Bud Freeman, Dave Tough and “The Austin High Gang,” although I think he did mention their crosstown pal, Benny Goodman, in passing. He may have mentioned Artie Shaw. He certainly did not mention The Boswell Sisters, and a book about the history of jazz which snubs The Boswell Sisters is like a book about American domestic life in the 1950s which ignores the existence of hula hoops and green stamps.

    Only the twit of the decade would think blacks exerted no significant influence on the creation and development of jazz. Their influence was disproportionate to their percentage of the population by a factor of about five, but intrinsic to the story though they were, they weren’t the whole story. There is a magnificent book which redresses the blotting out of the contributions of white musicians to jazz’s creation and development Richard Sudhalter’s, “Lost Chords.” It was published by Oxford Press, in 1999, about twenty years too late to avoid being blacklisted ( an unavoidable pun, you know ). I’m amazed that you can still buy a copy. And if you love American music, American history, devotion to research and to detail, and first rate narrative writing, you should.

    Sudhalter begins with New Orleans in the late 19th century. Despite segregation, from the start, the emerging music was open to “cats of any color” who could play. And so you think that after it left New Orleans, jazz went straight to Chicago, don’t you? It didn’t. It may be hard to believe, but Indiana was actually several years ahead of Chicago in becoming a jazz hive. ( Can anything good come out of Indiana? )

    There was another writer, a great one, who didn’t write about jazz with the objective of addressing a grievance, Whitney Balliett, who was The New Yorker’s jazz critic for thirty years. If you love jazz, you owe it to yourself to try to get your mitts of any collection of his work.

    Musicologists have found what might be called “jazz potential” in some works from the Baroque Era, particularly Bach’s. Just as you can sense rock and roll squirming to be born in some of the swing of the late 1930s and early 1940s, you can sense jazz in some of the work of the mid 19th century Jewish New Orleanian composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

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