Soulfood

I finished 14 more books over the summer (July-September) to bring my total for the year up to 46. It’s a bit off the pace I was hoping for but still on track for my base goal (60).

This year I’ve been tracking the age of the books I read. While I’m not quite able to read 2 old books for every 1 new book (because I have so many new books I want to read!), the average publication date for the books I’ve read so far this year is 1960 with quite a few very old books pulling that date backwards.

In the field of history, I read White Gold by Giles Milton. It’s a little-told story about the northern Europeans captured and enslaved by West African Islamic societies. It’s worth reading if you’ve been told that only Europeans practiced slave trading, or that the Crusades and other European incursions against Islamic societies were driven by evil religious fervor rather than practical concerns (like rescuing enslaved compatriots). Or if you just want to learn more about the great civilizations of Western Africa. I’m not sure how I only managed one history over the summer, but I’m remedying that in Q4 having already finished an audiobook history of the European attempts to find the source of the Nile, and being knee-deep into a history of the Sackler family as well as one about D-Day. But that’s looking ahead to Q4…

I read (listened to) a biography of John Bunyan called The Life of a Pilgrim by Brian Crosby. I also read a semi-autobiographical work by a woman named Brea Baker called Rooted. It was interesting…and saddening on many levels.

I read a rather dated work by Tim Challies about technology and Christians called The Next Story. There are some good principles there but 2012 is a long time ago relative to technological progress. I would always recommend it, though, over the Reinke book (God, Technology, and the Christian Life) that I read in Q1 as Challies isn’t as starry-eyed in his view of technology as Reinke. I tend to be more skeptical so the Challies book was more helpful to me. Challies spent a lot more time in Scripture than Reinke, and that matters.

I finished reading book 5 of John D. Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books (The Great Brain Reforms) out loud to my youngest daughters. We promptly started book 6, The Return of the Great Brain, which I doubt we will finish before January. But we’ll try!

I’ve been working on adding more poetry to my reading diet, and to that end I finished J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Wendell Berry’s A Small Porch in Q3.

Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World was enchanting and thought-provoking. Christ doesn’t invite us to eternal rest, but to eternal life.

Thomas Watson’s The Art of Divine Contentment was quite encouraging and helpful, and I highly recommend it (see my post on it The Art of Divine Contentment by Thomas Watson – Soulfood).

Somehow I have never read Brother Lawrence’s classic work The Practice of the Presence of God, until this past September. Now I have! I’ll come back to it again, it is excellent!

I listened to audiobook editions of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequels The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and Sunrise on the Reaping. They are good novels and I enjoyed them.

As part of research and preparation for a Sunday School class I led this summer on the apocrypha, I re-read F.F. Bruce’s The Canon of Scripture. I also re-read most of The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? but not enough of it to count it as having read it all the way through this time. I read both of these works back in college.

And finally, I didn’t *quite* finish this book in Q3 but I very intentionally left the last 4-5 chapters to finish on October 6th, the day the story ends in the book with the timeless exhortation that the whole of Christian life is summed up by the words “wait and hope.” Of course, I am referring to Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, which is in my humble opinion the finest Christian novel ever written. I don’t even know how many times I’ve read it at this point, but it’s somewhere between 15 and 20. If you’ve haven’t taken my recommendation to read it yet, there’s always another chance…