The Lord has brought us once again by a way we did not know to the beginning of another year. After nine long months of having most of my books in storage, we moved into our new home in March and I got to see my friends again.
2023 was a splendid year of reading. These are the best books I read this year, and I enjoyed every last one of them.
My Top 12:
1. The Lord of Psalm 23 / David Gibson
No book is more precious than the Psalter and no Psalm is more precious than Psalm 23. Spurgeon called it “the pearl of the Psalms.” Pastor David Gibson wisely unfolds these six verses penned by another shepherd, pointing us to the glory and grace of our Good Shepherd, in whom we have everything.
“It is in the imagery of the psalm (sheep with a shepherd, traveler with a companion, guest with a host) that we see the tangible, pictorial resonances of union with our Savior. Your being united to Christ is not a doctrine floating somewhere out there in the abstract theological ether, nor is it confined to the pages of dusty systematic theologies. Rather, it is the very essence of what it means to be a Christian and to have the Lord Jesus as your shepherd. You belong to Him– completely, absolutely– and because of who He is, you have everything you need.” (7)
This was my favorite book of the year. Relish the nourishment found in these green pastures and glory in your Good Shepherd.
2. Theoretical-Practical Theology, Vol. 4 / Petrus Van Mastricht
Jonathan Edwards once said that the Theoretical-Practical Theology by the Dutch Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706) was the best thing ever written besides the Bible. (!) The good folks at Reformation Heritage published this volume on the work of redemption in Christ this year. Mastricht’s exegetical and pastoral reflections on the incarnation of the Mediator are worth the price of the book.
“The birth of Christ molds us in thankfulness toward God, who led by pure, unadulterated grace and love for mankind, by the incarnation of His Son, gave us a gift greater than which neither can be thought of, nor exist (Isaiah 9:6; John 3:16; 4:10)… Even when lacking all other gifts, wealth, honors, pleasures, health, we should calmly rest in this one gift (Psalm 73:25; 16:5-6; Phil. 3:7-9).” (330, 332)
Simply glorious.
3. The Holy Spirit / Fred Sanders
Fred Sanders… on the Holy Spirit. Seriously, what else do you need to know? In this volume, Dr. Sanders introduces Christians to Somebody we already know. (Romans 8:9)
“Thinking about the Holy Spirit is like faith looking at its own eyeballs… It is paradoxical to focus our attention on the work of the Spirit in particular, and in isolation, because the work of the Spirit is characteristically connective, consummating, holistic, and synthetic. Even when we focus directly on the Holy Spirit as the object or content of our study, He is always more. He is its motivating force, its context, its presupposition, its condition, its meaningful form, its inner power, its atmosphere, its element, its idiom, its orientation, its governor, its medium, its carrier. He is all this for any doctrine we study: divine attributes, creation, providence, salvation, church, and the rest. In studying any of these, as we focus our attention on a specific theological topic, it is only in and with and by the Holy Spirit that we reach true understanding of each spiritual topic. And then when the time comes to study the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we are at work on something special, because in this doctrine, someone special is uniquely at work within us for knowledge of Himself. That someone is at work within us as we think and write and read about Him. He is the teacher of the lesson that is Himself.” (4, 5)
Sanders infuses a glorious reminder throughout, from the opening page all the way to his stupendous appendix: the study of theology is a sacred task, a holy endeavor. The prayerful and careful reading, reflection, and study of Holy Scripture depends utterly on the illuminating Spirit of truth, the blessed Spirit of grace, the glorious Spirit of Christ. The whole Book is His.
“What we especially need to recognize in order to know the Spirit in Scripture is that all the verses in the Bible are directly superintended by the Holy Spirit. The whole book is His. Think of it this way: There are Bibles which print the words of Jesus in red. But if you tried to make a Bible that printed the words of the Holy Spirit in a special color, you would have to print the whole Bible in that color.” (153)
4. Humility / Gavin Ortlund
How would you define humility? C.S. Lewis described humility like this:
“To get even near [humility], even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert. Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all. If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud.” (128)
Lewis rightly grasped that humility is the joy of self-forgetfulness. Gavin Ortlund gets this too. This delightful little book served me by reminding me of the wonderful news that I’m nobody very special.
“In the places where we are very ordinary, or even below average, we need not panic. Mediocrity is not the end of the world. Your value is rooted in what Christ has done of you. You are loved and treasured by God Himself. Your life is measured by His estimation. You have an ocean of joy awaiting you in eternity. So your happiness and welfare are not dependent on being a big deal. Therefore, you can move among your peers with freedom, offering your best contributions for whatever it is, and appreciating theirs in return. The important thing is not your contribution, but the larger work you are a part of. It is one of the most wonderful moments of life when you are able to say, and really mean it from your heart, ‘I’m nobody very special– and that’s okay!’” (71-72)
5. To the Judicious and Impartial Reader / James Renihan
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith is one of the richest devotional works of theology ever written. Just ponder these words on our gracious adoption in Christ (12.1):
All those that are justified, God conferred, in and for the sake of His only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption,1 by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God,2 have His name put on them,3 receive the Spirit of adoption,4 have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry ‘Abba, Father,5‘ are pitied,6 protected,7 provided for,8 and chastened by Him as by a Father,9 yet never cast off,10 but sealed to the day of redemption,11 and inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation.12
1. Eph. 1:5; Gal. 4:4–5
2. John 1:12; Rom. 8:17
3. 2 Cor. 6:18; Rev. 3:12
4. Rom. 8:15
5. Gal. 4:6; Eph. 2:18
6. Ps. 103:13
7. Prov. 14:26; 1 Pet. 5:7
8. Heb. 12:6
9. Isa. 54:8–9
10. Lam. 3:31
11. Eph. 4:30
12. Heb. 1:14, 6:12
To echo (and alter :) the sage words of “Rabbi” Duncan, the 2LCF is a Christian document, next a catholic document, then a Calvinistic document, fourth a credobaptist document, and fifth a Congregationalist document. And there is no better living guide to this document than Dr. James Renihan. This book is a labor of love and a learned, theological, historical, and devotional commentary on the 2LCF. I highly recommend it.
And don’t miss Dr. Renihan’s 🔥 essay in Appendix B entitled: “A Necessary Distinction: Christ as God and Christ as Mediator: Or, Some Post-Reformational Contributions to the Debate over Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission, and Human Role Relationships.” Here’s the gist: “There is no subordination of the persons of the Trinity ad intra.” (622) Let the reader understand.
6. The Great Gain of Godliness / Thomas Watson
The Prince of Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, had 12,000 books in his personal library. And yet this little book, a devotional exposition on Malachi 3:16-18 by Puritan divine Thomas Watson, was on Spurgeon’s Amazon.com wishlist!
“This would be a great find if we could only come at it, for Watson is one of the clearest and liveliest of Puritan authors. We fear we shall never see this commentary, for we have tried to obtain it, and tried in vain.” (4: 200-201)
I praise God for Banner of Truth for republishing this gem. Watson helps us see that the crown of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. My favorite part features Watson lingering over God’s eternal remembrance of His people, their works, and especially their suffering:
“There are eight things which God writes down in His book of remembrance.
- The Lord writes down the names of His saints. (Phil 4:3)
- The Lord writes down the good speeches of His people. (Mal. 3:16)
- The Lord writes down the tears of His people. Tears drop down to the earth, but they reach to heaven. (Ps. 56:8)
- God writes down the thoughts of His people. (Ps. 139:2; Isa. 66:18)
- God writes down the desires of His people. (Ps. 38:9)
- The Lord writes down the prayers of His people. (Jonah 2:7)
- God writes down the alms of His people. (Heb. 13:16; Acts 10:4)
- God has a book of remembrance for the sufferings of His people. (Ex. 6:5)” (102-104)
7. Union with the Resurrected Christ / G.K. Beale
Over the years, Dr. Beale has helped me to see again and again how the Bible is full of itself. While he’s never gonna be accused of being Bill Shakespeare, Beale’s writings are chock-full of intertextual canonical connections galore. His latest volume focuses on the glorious benefits that flow to believers by virtue of our Spirit-wrought faith union with Christ, and, wonder of wonders, Dr. Beale has actually included… a visual aid! (See below!) “Our main task is to study in the NT the theme of union with the resurrected Christ as the beginning of the eschatological new-creational kingdom.” (13) If you’re a fan of Richard Gaffin’s Resurrection and Redemption, then you’ll really dig this book because it has the same vibe. In fact, Beale often sounds like he’s just riffing on Calvin:
“How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only-begotten Son— not for Christ’s own private use, but that He might enrich poor and needy men? First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what He has received from the Father, He had to become ours and to dwell within us. For this reason, He is called “our Head” [Eph. 4:15], and “the first-born among many brethren” [Rom. 8:29]. We also, in turn, are said to be “engrafted into Him” [Rom. 11:17], and to “put on Christ” [Gal. 3:27]; for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with Him. It is true that we obtain this by faith. Yet since we see that not all indiscriminately embrace that communion with Christ which is offered through the gospel, reason itself teaches us to climb higher and to examine into the secret energy of the Spirit, by which we come to enjoy Christ and all His benefits.” (3.1.1)
8. The Surprising Genius of Jesus / Peter Williams
I recently preached a sermon on Luke 15 and this book helped me immensely. Dr. Williams does a masterful job pointing out internal connections within Christ’s three-part parable. He also shows numerous OT connections and allusions that surely the Pharisees and scribes would have noticed.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is, of course, not a story about one lost son. It’s a story about two lost sons… and a loving father. Williams helped me to see how these opening stories (Luke 15:3-10) prepare us for this final story (Luke 15:11-32). In the first story the sheep gets lost by going away and in the second story the coin gets lost at home. Then Jesus tells a story where a younger son is lost by going away and an older son is lost at home. There are two kinds of lostness, but only one way to be found!
Williams also draws attention to the three verbs used to describe the father’s joyful reception of his younger son (Luke 15:20). The only other time in the entire Bible in which someone runs, falls on someone’s neck, and kisses that person is when Esau welcomes back his cheating younger brother, Jacob, from the far country!
Gen. 33:4: “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him.”
What is Jesus intending to communicate by way of this subtle allusion to the reunion of Jacob and Esau? If the Scribes and Pharisees don’t share the father’s joy in receiving a younger son who has taken an inheritance and gone away into the far country, if they aren’t willing to welcome sinners just like Esau did for his younger brother Jacob who had taken his inheritance, well, then, they’re far worse than even wicked Esau! Amazing.
9. Echoes of Scripture in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians / Christopher Beetham
While there are no explicit OT quotations in Colossians, the Apostle echoes several OT passages that provide the substructure of key portions of the epistle. Beetham studied under Dr. Beale and he builds upon the work of his doctoral supervisor by arguing persuasively that Paul alludes or echoes eleven OT texts in Colossians: three from Genesis (Col. 1:6; 2:13; 3:10), two from Isaiah (Col. 1:9-10; 2:22), and two from the Psalms (Col. 1:19; 3:1), one from Exodus (Col. 1:12-14), one from Deuteronomy (Col. 2:11), one from 2 Samuel (Col. 1:13), and one from Proverbs (Col. 1:15-20). What difference does this make?
These OT echoes and allusions help to highlight the glorious preeminence of Christ as the exalted Lord both of this age and the age to come. All of Scripture declares that Christ is supreme.
10. Friendship With God / Mike McKinley
John Owen’s Communion with God is an all-time classic of Trinitarian devotion. But Owen can be challenging to read. Mike does a fabulous job of making Owen’s insights into the riches of friendship with God (John 15:15) understandable to non-geniuses.
“My goal in this little book is to mine some of the most precious diamonds of Owen’s spiritual insights and make them available and applicable to you as you grow in your enjoyment of the friendship of the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’ve tried to provide some of Owen’s most accessible and helpful quotes from the book, and if this motivates you to go read Owen on your own, you will be richly rewarded for your time and effort. It is true that some wonderful things are inevitably lost when you take a masterpiece written by a genius and let a (definite) non-genius like me shorten, rephrase, and rework it. But while some of Owen’s brilliance has certainly been lost in the process of creating this book, I do have hope that much good remains to serve you in your friendship with God.” (4)
Get several copies of this book and read it with others and, by God’s grace, you’ll grow in the knowledge of the love of God. On this point, Owen is crystal clear. Nothing is more important for believers than knowing that God loves us:
“Exercise your thoughts upon this very thing: the eternal, free, and fruitful love of the Father, and see if your hearts be not wrought upon to delight in Him. So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in Him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from Him. But if the heart is once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto Him. If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?” (Works, 2: 35-36)
11. Reforming Criminal Justice / Matthew Martens
This courageous book is written by a devoted brother in Christ who is also an accomplished attorney. Matt’s critical assessment of the American criminal justice system is meticulous, trenchant, shocking, and, at times, enraging. After developing a Christian ethic of criminal justice, Matt analyzes topics like plea bargaining, jury selection, assistance of counsel, exculpatory evidence, sentencing, and the death penalty. The argument of this book is not that justice delayed is justice denied. Rather, it’s this: “Justice denied is love denied. And love denied to either the crime victim or the criminally accused is justice denied.” (1)
“The criminal justice system is, by definition, state-sponsored violence. Every criminal law, even a just one, is an authorization for the state to use physical force against an image bearer if he or she fails to comply with the law’s mandate.
Most Christians do not believe that the Bible either forbids or condemns such violence. It is expressly sanctioned by Scripture in several passages, the most notable of which is Romans 13. This means that the sight of the criminal justice system at work, even in entirely appropriate ways, will be often violent. And viewing physical force brought to bear on another human is upsetting. What is disturbing, however, is not always unjust.
The question that has largely gone unanswered in the dialogue concerning criminal justice reform is what biblical framework we should employ in evaluating those uses of governmental force. A few writers have offered an ethical framework for the remedial and punitive goals of the criminal justice system. I have yet to come across any resource that attempts to offer a Christian ethical framework with which to evaluate the system’s day-to-day operation. In the pages that follow, I will propose one.
In short, I hope to demonstrate from Scripture that justice is, most fundamentally, an issue of love. What the Bible teaches is that justice is an act of love. That which is loving is no less than that which is just… Get love right, and you will get justice right. But you will never set the justice system straight without a proper understanding of love.” (4-5)
So, what can we do?
“Each and every one of us can, starting even today, think differently about justice, speak differently in our sphere of influence, work differently if need be, and vote differently when the opportunity presents itself. You are only one, but you still are one. And while you can’t do everything, you can do those things. And a society full of people, or even just a motivated group of Christians with their minds set on justice, might change the justice system as a whole for the better. By God’s grace, I know they can.” (350-351)
12. The Gospel of Jesus / Lorraine Boettner
In the mid-100s, Tatian the Syrian arranged Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into a cohesive narrative called the Diatessaron. Following in this tradition, The Gospel of Jesus is a single complete narrative of the four gospels arranged by Loraine Boettner. I loved reading this book. It uses the Christian Standard Bible translation with full Scripture references to parallel passages listed in the margins. It’s a wonderful resource to have when you’re studying the Gospels.
My Next 12:
13. Niels Lyhne / Jens Peter Jacobsen
Over the years, I’ve known the joys of the blessed alchemy of friendship and reading. My closest friends often recommend what soon become my most treasured books. Scott Bielinski did that for me times without number this year. He encouraged me to read Niels Lyhne and it didn’t disappoint. It’s the best novel I read all year and I’m counting the days until I’ve forgotten enough of it to reread it. I give it the highest compliment I know to give: it’s a book that will break your heart.
Many novels feature a protagonist struggling to keep his Christian faith in a modern world. Niels Lyhne is written by an atheist, and the novel’s protagonist struggles his entire life to keep his faith in his atheism. His love for five different women, his love for the beauty of nature, his love for the wonder of music and poetry all conspire against him and cause him to doubt his disbelief in God.
Here’s a taste of Jacobsen’s splendid prose. One of the women Niels falls in love with grew up in the church, but over time he persuades her to become an atheist. But then she gets deathly sick.
“The pastor came and remained alone with Gerda. He was a handsome, middle-aged man with fine, regular features and large brown eyes. Naturally, he knew of the relationship Niels Lyhne and Gerda had to the church, and he had occasionally heard reports of various anticlerical expressions of the young woman’s fanaticism, but it did not occur to him to speak to her as if she were a heathen or an apostate.
He understood quite well that it was solely her great love that had led her astray, and he also understood quite well that feeling which, now that her love could not follow her any longer, made her fearfully yearn for reconciliation with the God she had known before, and so, as he spoke, he sought primarily to reawaken her slumbering memories, and he read passages from the Gospels and the Psalms which he thought she might know best. And he was not mistaken.
How those words rang out, so familiar and festive, like the chiming of the bells on a Christmas morning, and that land appeared at once before her eyes, the land in which our imagination first felt at home, where Joseph dreamed and where David sang, where the ladder stands that goes from earth to heaven!
With figs and with mulberries it lay there, and the Jordan flashed silver-clear through the morning fog; Jerusalem lay red and sad in the evening sun, but over Bethlehem there was the glorious night with great stars in the dark blue.
How her childhood faith poured forth again! She became that same little girl who had gone to church holding her mother’s hand, and sat and shivered and wondered why people sinned so much. Then she grew up again under the mighty words of the Sermon on the Mount and she lay there like the sick sinner when the pastor spoke about the holy mysteries, about the sacraments of baptism and communion.
Then the right desire won out in her heart— the deep submission before the almighty, judging God; the bitter tears of remorse before the forsaken, blasphemed, and tortured God; and the humble, bold yearning for the new pact of bread and wine with the inscrutable God.
The pastor left; later in the morning he returned and gave her the last rites. Her strength diminished rapidly with a strange flickering, but even in the darkness, when Niels took her in his arms for the last time to bid her farewell before the shadow of death came too near, she was still fully conscious.
But the love that had been the greatest happiness of his life was extinguished in her gaze. She was no longer his; even now her wings had begun to grow; she longed only for her God.
At midnight she died. Those were hard times, the days that followed. Time swelled up into something monstrous and hostile; each day was an endless desert of emptiness, each night was an abyss of memories.
Not until months later, when summer was almost over, did the tearing, foaming torrent of grief wear itself a riverbed down in his soul so that it could flow away like a murmuring, heavily undulating stream of longing and sorrow.” (178-179)
“For the better part of two years Niels Lyhne wandered abroad. He was so lonely. He had no family, no friend who was dear to his heart. But there was a greater loneliness about him than that; for a person may well feel anguished and forsaken if on the whole enormous earth there is not one small place he can bless and wish well, someplace he can turn his heart toward when his heart insists on swelling, a place he can long for when longing insists on spreading its wings; but if he has the clear, steady star of a life’s goal shining overhead, then there is no night so lonely that he is entirely alone. But Niels Lyhne had no star.” (165)
These lines ring heartbreakingly true. Many are the sorrows of the wicked. But even in the face of death, steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts in the LORD.
14. Frederick Douglass / David Blight
I’ve read other biographies as good as this Pulitzer Prize winner, but I’ve never read a better one. No one testified more compellingly about the brutality of slavery than Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). After escaping from slavery in Baltimore, MD, he became a leading abolitionist and one of the greatest orators of his age. I once spent a semester reading his autobiographies and speeches. I still remember where I was when I came across the following passage in which Douglass describes the bitter lamentations of slaves:
“I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul–and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.” (14)
Blight explains:
“Slaves on plantations could not own much of anything– land, tools, the clothes on their bodies, even their own children or their sense of a future. But they could at times and under certain circumstances own the sounds and rhythms, the melodies and lyrics, in the air as the great slave-driven machine of the Wye plantation refueled for the next month’s production. In his vivid childhood memories Douglass felt both within and apart from the creation and the meaning of the songs. One gets the impression that the lonely boy may have been both scared by the collective power of the songs and strangely thrilled to be part of the community performing them. Douglass thought that hearing these songs might do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject. Whether they sang about work and its rhythms, about the God welcomed into every aspect of daily life, about their masters or their intimate companions, or about animals through which they might imagine their own travail, slaves, Douglass argued, gave voice to their sorrow, not their contentment. ‘Sorrow and desolation have their songs,’ wrote Douglass, ‘as well as joy and peace. Slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.’ Whether in the form of moans or shouts, in spontaneous lyrics, or in the stanzas and refrains of a spiritual, slaves were always making their own balm in Gilead.” (32-33)
As a nation, we still have much to learn from this prophet of freedom. He still speaks. Will we listen to him?
15. The Wager / David Grann
I have a very simple policy when it comes to David Grann books. When Grann writes a book, I purchase said book and then I read it. This approach has yet to let me down. Grann’s latest historical narrative reads like a thriller. But it’s all true! The Wager has a bit of everything: a secret mission, a fight for survival on the high seas, a shipwreck, a mutiny, a Lord of the Flies type situation, a flimsy flotilla, and a court martial. All of this is blended with a smattering of delicious literary references to Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick. If you liked Killers of the Flower Moon, you’ll definitely enjoy this one. Get a copy for yourself and get one for your Dad for Father’s Day.
16. Barabbas / Par Lagerkvist
This heartbreaking novel supplies an answer to an unanswerable question: After he was released from prison, what ever happened to Barabbas?
Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release for you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up. Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.” Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified!” And he said, “Why, What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!” So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.” (Matthew 27:15-26)
The novel begins with Barabbas being released. He’s shocked and scared but he can’t keep from watching the man on the middle cross being crucified in his place.
“Now he was standing up here on the gallows-hill looking at the man on the middle cross, unable to tear his eyes away. Actually he had not wanted to come up here at all, for everything was unclean, full of contagion; if a man set foot in this potent and accursed place part of him would surely remain, and he could be forced back there, never to leave it again. Skulls and bones lay scattered about everywhere, together with fallen, half-mouldering crosses, no longer of any use but left to lie there all the same, because no one would touch anything. Why was he standing here? He did not know this man, had nothing to do with him. What was he doing at Golgotha, he who had been released? If only the end would come! As soon as the end came he would hurry away and never think of this again.… But all at once the whole hill grew dark, as though the light had gone out of the sun; it was almost pitch-dark, and in the darkness above, the crucified man cried out in a loud voice: —My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? It sounded horrible. Whatever did he mean? And why had it grown dark? It was the middle of the day. It was quite unaccountable. The three crosses were just faintly visible up there. It looked weird. Something terrible was surely going to happen. The soldiers had leapt to their feet and grabbed their weapons; whatever happened they always rushed for their weapons. They stood there around the crosses with their lances, and he heard them whispering together in alarm. Now they were frightened! Now they were not grinning any longer! They were superstitious, of course. He was afraid himself. And glad when it began to get light and everything became a little more normal. It got light slowly, as it does at dawn. The daylight spread across the hill and the olive trees around about, and the birds that had been silent started twittering again. It was just like dawn.” (5, 8)
“He thought of the man on the middle cross and of what had happened up there on the gallows-hill. Then he began to wonder about that darkness, and whether it had really happened. Could it be as they said, merely something he had imagined? Or perhaps it was just something up there at Golgotha, as they had noticed nothing here in the city? Up there anyway it had been dark; the soldiers had been scared, and one thing and another—or had he imagined that too? Had he just imagined the whole thing? No, he could not work it out, didn’t know what to make of it.” (20)
To tell any more, especially of the book’s ending, would rob you as a reader. Suffice it to say, walking with Barabbas through his spiritual darkness and devastating despair is a heart-rending experience. Seeing the man on the middle cross through Barabbas’ eyes made me reflect upon the cross of Christ, the providence of God, and the fight of faith. Herman Bavinck puts it better than I ever could:
“In Christ, justice and mercy embrace, suffering is the road to glory, the cross points to a crown, and the timber of the cross becomes the tree of life. The end toward which all things are being led by the providence of God is the establishment of his kingdom, the revelation of his attributes, the glory of his name (Rom. 11:32–36; 1 Cor. 15:18; Rev. 11:15; 12:10). In this consoling fashion Scripture deals with the providence of God.
Plenty of riddles remain, both in the life of individuals and in the history of the world and humankind… But God lets the light of his Word shine over all these enigmas and mysteries, not to solve them, but that ‘by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope’ (Rom. 15:4).
The doctrine of providence is not a philosophical system but a confession of faith, the confession that, notwithstanding appearances, neither Satan nor a human being nor any other creature, but God and he alone—by his almighty and everywhere present power—preserves and governs all things.
Such a confession can save us both from a superficial optimism that denies the riddles of life, and from a presumptuous pessimism that despairs of this world and human destiny. For the providence of God encompasses all things, not only the good but also sin and suffering, sorrow and death. For if these realities were removed from God’s guidance, then what in the world would there be left for him to rule?
God’s providence is manifest not only, nor primarily, in the extraordinary events of life and in miracles but equally as much in the stable order of nature and the ordinary occurrences of daily life. What an impoverished faith it would be if it saw God’s hand and counsel from afar in a few momentous events but did not discern it in a person’s own life and lot?
In all circumstances of life, it gives us good confidence in our faithful God and Father that he will provide whatever we need for body and soul and that he will turn to our good whatever adversity he sends us in this sad world, since he is able to do this as almighty God and desires to do this as a faithful Father.” (2: 618–619)
Who among you fears the LORD
and obeys the voice of his servant?
Let him who walks in darkness
and has no light
trust in the name of the LORD
and rely on his God. (Isaiah 50:10)
17. The Ocean and the Stars / Mark Helprin
This is a majestic tale told beautifully by Mark Helprin that’s really three stories in one: a sea story, a war story, and a love story. Helprin weaves everything together in a satisfying way. Stephen Rensselaer is a Navy captain near the end of his career. He’s a man of principle, a man who obeys his conscience, no matter the cost. For these reasons, he’s not given the opportunity to serve his country as an admiral. Instead, he receives the humiliating command of a one-off prototype, the Athena, Patrol Coastal 15. During the preparations of his ship in New Orleans, he meets Katy Farrar, a brilliant lawyer, and quickly falls in love with her. Right after proposing to her, a hot war breaks out in the Middle East, and Rensselaer, his new vessel, and his crew are sent to patrol the Indian Ocean near the Horn of Africa, where intense fighting ensues. Helprin masterly describes both the technical details of the ship and the ferocity of seven battles fought by the crew of the Athena, some on land, and many on the sea. Even the courtroom scenes in the novel’s conclusion are impeccably written. None of this should surprise us. In addition to being educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, Helprin served for a time in the Israeli defense forces.
Years ago, Andy Crouch penned a beautiful article entitled “Small Screens, Big World,” in which he noted the following about the fiction of Mark Helprin:
“Critics of Helprin are sometimes frustrated by the fact that at decisive moments, his characters invariably do the right thing. In this, too, he is an unfashionable writer. There is plenty of irony and skepticism in Helprin’s work, but there is not one drop of cynicism. His characters choose paths of courage and sacrifice that leave you breathless and shaken at what it takes to live faithfully in this broken world.”
Stephen Rensselaer invariably does the right thing, for the right reasons, no matter the consequences. I find this utterly refreshing. I’m glad for the time I spent getting to know him and to know the story of the Athena.
“Sailors find it hard to explain how they were changed by the sea; how even on a carrier, in the company of five thousand souls, they came to know the ocean’s loneliness, and how war at sea unaccountably bound them to all others in every age who have sailed in fighting ships. The Navy’s stories are different and differently understood. Nonetheless, the stories unfold, and must be told.” (xii)
18. The Scent of Time / Byung-Chul Han
In this book, philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes what he calls “today’s temporal crisis.” It has become nearly impossible to experience time as fulfilling in our hyperactive, hyper-fragmented age of distraction.
“Time is lacking rhythm that would provide order, and thus it falls out of step… The feeling that life is accelerating is really the experience of time that is whizzing without a direction… Life is no longer embedded in any ordering structures or coordinates that would found duration. Even things with which we identify are fleeting and ephemeral.” (vi)
Han summons his readers to pursue revitalizing a life of contemplation, a life consisting of what he calls “the art of lingering.” Our human capacity for reflection and contemplation, for lingering, according to Han, is what separates us from animals. Lingering enables us to fight against this age of haste.
“The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow.” (48)
One practical take away for me from The Scent of Time is to read more poetry. The poets already know the art of lingering by heart. We can learn from them by sitting at their feet and lingering. Mary Oliver, take it away:
THE SUMMER DAY
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?” (316)
19. Empire of the Summer Moon / S.C. Gwynne
Before reading this fascinating tragedy of a book, I’d never even heard of Quanah Parker and I didn’t know much at all about the Comanches. According to Gwynne, the Comanches were the mightiest and most militarily successful American Indian Tribe in history.
“No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.” (3)
The Comanche nation controlled, at one time, a territory spanning some 240,000 square miles. Comanches were famous warriors. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six and full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen to ever ride.
“In a fight with Comanches, dismounting on open ground was like signing your own death warrant. Men on foot against mounted men moving 20-30 miles per hour who could shoot twelve arrows in the time it took to reload a rifle and fire it once was not a fair fight. It was only a question of how long the men on foot might live, and how lucky they might get.” (96)
Who was Quanah Parker? On May 19, 1836, right after the fall of the Alamo, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was taken from her home by Comanche Indians. Eventually, she was adopted into the tribe, married chief Peta Nocona, and gave birth to children, including Quanah, who grew up to become the greatest Comanche chieftain of all time. He became infamous during the Red River War when he led the Comanches in battle against the United States Army. Gwynne notes how technological advancements sped the Comanches’ demise, in particular, the invention of the Colt Revolver and the Sharps .50 caliber.
“The result, the Walker Colt, was one of the most effective and deadly pieces of technology ever devised, one that would soon kill more men in combat than any sidearm since the Roman short sword.” (150)
I do feel compelled to issue a warning. Gwynne’s detailed and accurate narration of the brutal conflict between the Comanches and the Army is the stuff of nightmares. It reminded me of some of the gorier parts of Cormac’s Blood Meridian. If you plan on reading Empire of the Summer Moon, steel yourself.
20. Super-Infinite / Katherine Rundell
Q. Who is John Donne? A: It’s complicated!
“Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London. It’s traditional to imagine two Donnes – Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend – but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that.” (Kindle Location 63)
Q. What was it like to hear John Donne preach? A: Mesmerizing and dangerous!
“The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His words, they said, could ‘charm the soul’. That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated. Word went out: wherever he was, people came flocking, often in their thousands, to hear him speak. That morning, too many people flocked. ‘There was a great concourse of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled. ‘Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.’ There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s likely that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bruised men were carried off and out of sight.” (Kindle Location 60)
Q. What is John Donne’s message for us today? A: Pay attention!
“The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource. The command is in a passage in Donne’s sermon: ‘Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.’ Awake, is Donne’s cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything: attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths. Attention to attention itself, in order to fully appreciate its power: ‘Our creatures are our thoughts,’ he wrote, ‘creatures that are born Giants: that reach from East to West, from earth to Heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once: my thoughts reach all, comprehend all.’ We exceed ourselves: it’s thus that a human is super-infinite. Most of all, for Donne, our attention is owed to one another.” (Kindle Location 3325)
21. The Yearling / Majorie Kinnan Rawlings
When we moved from northern Virginia to northwest Arkansas in 2022, I often joked with the folks here in Fayetteville that my only real exposure to the culture, people, and land of the Ozarks came through this wonderful game, and these two wonderful books: the exquisite True Grit and the heart-wrenching Where the Red Fern Grows. I’ll never forget listening to Mrs. Fox read this latter story aloud to us in the fifth grade. When she finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Until reading The Yearling, I hadn’t encountered a novel that better epitomizes the love between a child and a pet.
Twelve-year-old Jody Baxter adopts an orphaned fawn. I was hooked from the opening scene. Jody is supposed to be doing his chores, but, like most 12-year-old boys, he’d prefer to ramble on over to the glen and rest for a spell.
“He had passed the big pines and left them behind. Where he walked now, the scrub had closed in, walling in the road with dense sand pines, each one so thin it seemed to the boy it might make kindling by itself. The road went up an incline. At the top he stopped. The April sky was framed by the tawny sand and the pines. It was as blue as his homespun shirt, dyed with Grandma Hutto’s indigo. Small clouds were stationary, like bolls of cotton. As he watched, the sunlight left the sky a moment and the clouds were gray. ‘There’ll come a little old drizzly rain before night-fall,’ he thought.
The down grade tempted him to a lope. He reached the thick-bedded sand of the Silver Glen road. The tar-flower was in bloom, and fetter-bush and sparkleberry. He slowed to a walk, so that he might pass the changing vegetation tree by tree, bush by bush, each one unique and familiar. He reached the magnolia tree where he had carved the wild-car’s face. The growth was a sign that there was water nearby.
It seemed a strange thing to him, when earth was earth and rain was rain, that scrawny pines should grow in the scrub, while by every branch and lake and river there grew magnolias. Dogs were the same everywhere, and oxen and mules and horses. But trees were different in different places. ‘Reckon it’s because they can’t move none,’ he decided. They took what food was in the soil under them.
The east bank of the road shelved suddenly. It dropped below him twenty feet to a spring. The bank was dense with magnolia and loblolly bay, sweet gum and gray-barked ash. He went down to the spring in the cool darkness of their shadows. A sharp pleasure came over him. This was a secret and a lovely place.” (3-4)
I reckon all pet stories are sad. The Yearling is a sad story. But as we like to say in my family, it’s a happy kind of sad. It was also fun to learn that Jody has a dog named Rip. The Roarks have one of those too. His name is Ripper. And while our Rip isn’t a bulldog, he is dearly loved. As you can see, he’s a very good boy.
22. The Lords of Discipline / Pat Conroy
If you find my writing style florid and rhetorically over-the-top, with an ever-present undercurrent of grandiosity and melodrama, please know I can’t help it. I place much of the blame for this oddity on my imbibing vast quantities of Pat Conroy from a young age. In the Roark family, reading Conroy was and is a rite of passage. He’s been a constant literary companion for most of my reading life. I find him capable of crafting sentences beautiful beyond all conveyance. He’s a Southern writer through and through, who spent much of his life in the Carolina low country. His soul grazed like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides.
But Conroy isn’t for everyone. He’s definitely an acquired taste. His novels feature fractured families full of alcohol and abuse, of mayhem and the macabre. Autobiographical shrapnel from his own tortured upbringing pierces nearly all of his fiction. Conroy often suffered a mental breakdown after completing his work on a novel. The Lords of Discipline was inspired by his own four haze-filled years at the Citadel, where he majored in English lit and started as a guard on the basketball team. After The Lords of Discipline was published, Citadel authorities banned the book! It’s a horrifying tale, a fictional exposé of racism and brutality in a Southern military college called The Institute. The narrator, a graduate of the college, tells us at the outset why he hates the school and loves the school.
“My parents had trained me exquisitely in the fine art of obedience. Because I was Southern, the military school seemed like the place for a final honing, the polishing of the rough spots. I would emerge glossy and shiny from the Institute as a man to serve my country in any way I could, but with absolute devotion and forthrightness. A Southern man is incomplete without a tenure under military rule. I am not an incomplete Southern man. I am simply damaged goods, like all the rest of them. At first, I thought I had wasted my college years, but I was wrong. The Institute was the most valuable experience I have ever had or will have. I believe it did bring me into manhood: The Institute taught me about the kind of man I did not want to be. Through rigorous harshness, I became soft and learned to trust that softness.
Through the distorted vision of that long schizophrenia, I became clear-sighted. Under its system, a guerrilla was born inside me, and when the other boys rushed to embrace the canons of the Institute, I took to the hills. Whenever I look at photographs of myself in the cadet days, I stare into the immobile face of a stranger. His name is mine and his face seems distantly related, but I cannot reconcile the look of him. The frozen, unconvincing smile is an expression of almost incomprehensible melancholy. I feel compassion and unspeakable love for this thin, fearful ancestor. I honor the courage he did not know he possessed. For four years he was afraid. Yet he remained. A lifetime in a Southern family negated any possibility that he could resign from the school under any conditions other than unequivocal disgrace. Yet I know what he did and what he said, how he felt and how he survived. I relive his journey in dreams and nightmares and in returns to the city of Charleston. He haunts me and remains a stranger.
Once while they were doing pushups on a shower-room floor, a classmate, too exhausted to turn his head, threw up on him. The upperclassmen made all the freshmen roll in the vomit of their classmate until nothing was left on the fetid tiles. He remembered the moment often, not because of his disgust or humiliation, but because it was then that he had the first premonition that someday he would tell his story, tell what it was like to be at the Institute, an eyewitness report on the contours and lineaments of discipline. Amidst the dark hearts of the boys around him, he felt a magnificent radiance. He would roll in vomit again, but the next time the symbolism of the act would be clear to him.
This was the story he would tell: At the Institute the making of men was a kind of grotesque artistry. Yet I am a product of this artistry. And I have a need to bear witness to what I saw there. I want to tell you how it was. I want precision. I want a murderous, stunning truthfulness. I want to find my own singular voice for the first time. I want you to understand why I hate the school with all my power and passion. Then I want you to forgive me for loving the school. Some of the boys of the Institute and the men who are her sons will hate me for the rest of their lives.
But that will be all right. You see, I wear the ring.” (5-8)
Friend, believe me when I tell you: this book also contains the single greatest chapter ever written about a college basketball game. You see? I did it again.
23. Snow / John Banville
I’m brand new to Banville but I appreciated his skillfully executed murder mystery that’s written in the Graham Greene-style of “entertainments,” seasoned throughout with literary references to Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. The tale begins in a humdrum fashion. It’s Christmastide 1957, and like a game of Clue, a body is discovered in the library of a ramshackle mansion in County Wexford, Ireland. A Roman Catholic priest has been butchered, his body mutilated. Dark motives, family secrets, and potential suspects abound. But young Irish detective, St. John (pronounced “Sinjun”) Strafford, is on the case. Banville paints a pretty picture, especially of the snow. Treetops have strips of snow “that glistened like granulated sugar.” The snow finally stops falling, “but from the big-bellied look of the sky it was certain that there was more to come.” A foreboding sense of dread hangs in the wintry air.
Banville seems to relish mimicking the Agatha Christie mystery format. Instead of a happy resolution, he makes his tale darker and darker still. His approach to the crime novel is “if something can go wrong, it will” because for such stories “it is the sense of awful and immediate reality that makes them so startling, so unsettling, and so convincing.” I enjoyed Snow, but I do prefer the worldview of another mystery writer: the great P.D. James. Banville says: “The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.” But Baroness James tells us in her novel, A Taste for Death:
“The house alone, thought Dalgliesh, must be worth at least three-quarters of a million, probably considerably more, given its position and unique architechtural interest. He recalled as he so often did the words of an old detective sergeant when he, Dalgliesh, had been a newly appointed DC: ‘Love, Lust, Loathing, Lucre, the four L’s of murder, laddie. And the greatest of these is lucre.’” (115)
Always follow the money.
24. Libra / Don DeLillo
I read JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas and since I was in already in a JFK conspiracy mood, I thought it was high time to pick up this ripping novel that’s basically Don DeLillo’s take on the Kennedy assassination. It’s a wild ride that feels, at times, a lot like King’s 11/22/63. If you’re a JFK assassination nerd or conspiracy weirdo, I’m confident you’ll dig this book. The Don is such an amazing writer. He captured back in 1988 the ethos, the constellation of vital phenomena, that animates the present-day captivation with conspiracy theories: “There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren’t telling us.” (321)
“There is a world inside the world.” (13)
“We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.” (15)
“The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.” (68)
“The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal.” (218)
“A fact is innocent until someone wants it; then it become intelligence.” (247)
“The Oswald shadings, the multiple images, the split perceptions— eye color, weapons caliber— these seem a foreboding of what is to come. The endless fact-rubble of the investigations. How many shots, how many gunmen, how many directions? Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies. The simple facts elude authentication. How many wounds on the President’s body? What is the size and shape of the wounds? The multiple Oswald reappears. Isn’t that him in a photograph of a crowd of people on the front steps of the Book Depository just as the shooting begins? A startling likeness, Branch concedes. He concedes everything. He questions everything, including the basic suppositions we make about our world of light and shadow, solid objects and ordinary sounds, and our ability to measure such things, to determine weight, mass and direction, to see things as they are, recall them clearly, be able to say what happened.” (300)
“Facts are lonely things.” (300)
“Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.” (339)
“God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.” (379)
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.” (440)
My Final 12:
25. The Ferryman / Justin Cronin
Utopia, of course, is no place at all. Justin Cronin’s latest ripping sci-fi dystopian novel tells the tale of the archipelago of Prospera, a place founded by the mysterious genius known as the Designer. Prospera is an island paradise separated from the rest of the world. After long and pleasure-filled lives, Prosperans “retire.” They embark on a ferry ride to another island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh. Proctor Bennett handles these end-of-life transitions. He’s a ferryman. But then one day, he is tasked with retiring his own father. And that’s when Proctor’s entire life and even the very fabric of reality begins to unravel. The Ferryman tastes like a smoothie made from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Matrix, Ready Player One, and Interstellar. Delicious.
26. All the King’s Men / Robert Penn Warren
I try to reread this spectacle of a book during presidential election years because Robert Penn Warren’s novel remains prescient. Set in the 1930s, we meet the larger-than-life Willie Stark and follow his rise and fall amidst the sordid scene that is Louisiana politics. I initially picked up All the King’s Men years ago just to meet Stark. I came for Stark but I stayed for the writing. Few can match Penn’s pen. Even his prose is poetry.
Here’s his lyrical description of a football game:
“An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the turf which was arsenical green under the light from the great batteries of floodlamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena. Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pairs of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets hurled themselves against men in blue silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion. Which was: The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like agony, the silence, then one woman-scream, silver and soprano, spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward, flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.” (305)
Here’s his summary of Stark’s approach to politics:
“What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that—”
“Yeah,” Willie said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ’em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.” (108)
Here’s his account of a dude sitting in the back of a car that’s driving down the road:
“I lay back in the seat and closed my eyes. The gravel sprayed on the undersides of the fenders, and then it stopped spraying and the tail of the car lurched to one side, and me with it, and I knew we were back on the slab and leveling out for the job. We would go gusting along the slab, which would be pale in the starlight between the patches of woods and the dark fields where the mist was rising. Way off from the road a barn would stick up out of the mist like a house sticking out of the rising water when the river breaks the levee. Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning its head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-Almighty or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods. But I wasn’t standing there in the field, in the dark, with the mist turning slow around my knees and the ticking no-noise of the night inside my head. I was in a car, headed back to Burden’s Landing, which was named for the people from whom I got my name, and which was the place where I had been born and raised. We would go on between the fields until we hit a town. The houses would be lined up along the street, under the trees, with their lights going out now, until we hit the main street, where the lights would be bright around the doorway of the movie house and the bugs would be zooming against the bulbs and would ricochet off to hit the concrete pavement and make a dry crunch when somebody stepped on them. The men standing in front of the pool hall would look up and see the big black crate ghost down the street and one of them would spit on the concrete and say, ‘He reckins he’s somebody,’ and wish that he was in a big black car, as big as a hearse and the springs soft as mamma’s breast and the engine breathing without a rustle at seventy-five, going off into the dark somewhere. Well, I was going somewhere. I was going back to Burden’s Landing. We would come into Burden’s Landing by the new boulevard by the bay. The air would smell salty, with maybe a taint of the fishy, sad, sweet smell of the tidelands to it, but fresh nevertheless. It would be nearly midnight then, and the lights would be off in the three blocks of down-town then. Beyond the downtown and the little houses, there would be the other houses along the bay, set back in the magnolias and oaks, with the white walls showing glimmeringly beyond the darkness of the trees.” (54-56)
Imagine being able to write like this.
27. Christianity & Liberalism / J. Gresham Machen
It beggars belief that this book was written 100 years ago. It remains utterly relevant. The thesis of the book can be perceived by the “&” in the title. There is Christianity and there is liberalism. Machen demonstrates how the latter fundamentally differs with historic, biblical Christianity on the doctrine of man, the doctrine of Scripture, the doctrine of Christ, the doctrine of salvation, and the doctrine of the church. All of this matters because doctrine matters.
“The disciples of Jesus had evidently been far inferior to their Master in every possible way; they had not understood His lofty spiritual teaching, but even in the hour of solemn crisis had quarreled over great places in the approaching Kingdom.
What hope was there that such men could succeed where their Master had failed? Even when He had been with them, they had been powerless; and now that He was taken from them, what little power they may have had was gone.
Yet those same weak, discouraged men, within a few days after the death of their Master, instituted the most important spiritual movement that the world has ever seen. What had produced the astonishing change? What had transformed the weak and cowardly disciples into the spiritual conquerors of the world?
Evidently it was not the mere memory of Jesus’ life, for that was a source of sadness rather than of joy. Evidently the disciples of Jesus, within the few days between the crucifixion and the beginning of their work in Jerusalem, had received some new equipment for their task.
What that new equipment was, at least the outstanding and external element in it (to say nothing of the endowment which Christian men believe to have been received at Pentecost), is perfectly plain.
The great weapon with which the disciples of Jesus set out to conquer the world was not a mere comprehension of eternal principles; it was an historical message, an account of something that had recently happened, it was the message, “He is risen.”
But the message of the resurrection was not isolated. It was connected with the death of Jesus, seen now to be not a failure but a triumphant act of divine grace; it was connected with the entire appearance of Jesus upon earth. The coming of Jesus was understood now as an act of God by which sinful men were saved.
The primitive Church was concerned not merely with what Jesus had said, but also, and primarily, with what Jesus had done. The world was to be redeemed through the proclamation of an event. And with the event went the meaning of the event; and the setting forth of the event with the meaning of the event was doctrine. These two elements are always combined in the Christian message.
The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. “Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried”—that is history. “He loved me and gave Himself for me”—that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.” (28-29)
Machen issues a clarion call to the church of the living God to hold firm and hold forth sound doctrine so that we might adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in everything.
“Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus’ name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven. And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world.” (184)
28. Come, Lord Jesus / John Piper
This book helped me meditate on the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ so as to increase my love for His glorious appearing. Piper takes his cue from Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 4:7-8:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved His appearing.”
I found the most edifying portion of the book the opening part where Piper lays out several biblical reasons to love Christ’s appearing. “We pray for His appearing, because we love His appearing. The prayer ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ is rooted in something deeper: ‘I love Your appearing!’” (11)
29. From Prisoner to Prince / Samuel Emadi
One of the best works of biblical theology I read this year is this banger of a book in which Sam wonderfully unpacks the Joseph story in Genesis 37-50 and then wisely teaches us how to read this narrative in light of the entire canon of Scripture. Sam argues persuasively that the Joseph story resolves the plot of Genesis. His chapters tracing the themes of kingship, seed, land, and blessing are spectacular. Sam helped me to see more clearly that Joseph’s story is the Bible’s story in miniature.
“I began this work by puzzling over Joseph’s prominence in Genesis. My contention is that Moses focuses on Joseph to highlight God’s sovereign faithfulness to his covenantal promises. God uses Joseph to turn back the effects of the curse and accomplish, in part, his promises to Abraham. God stacks the odds against himself and then demonstrates his power by using an imprisoned slave exiled by his own family to keep his promises. Perhaps Moses spends so much time on Joseph to show us that God can pull off the impossible – even through a seemingly insignificant Jew rejected by his own brothers. Perhaps Moses spends so much time on Joseph so his people will anticipate a coming Joseph who will finally reverse the curse and fulfil the promises. Joseph’s story is the story of the whole Bible. It is the story of glory through suffering, exaltation through humiliation. It is the story of the cross and the crown.” (148-149)
I pray Joseph’s story and this convincing guide will help me to become a wiser reader of Scripture.
“When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him. The king sent and released him; the ruler of the peoples set him free; he made him lord of his house and ruler of all his possessions, to bind his princes at his pleasure and to teach his elders wisdom.” (Psalm 105:16–22)
If you’d rather hear Sam make his case, then listen and subscribe to the Bible Talk Podcast led by my boy Alex Duke.
30. Reading for the Love of God / Jessica Hooten Wilson
I love reading books about reading books written by bright believers who love God and love reading books, especially the Book of books. Dr. Wilson is the kind of reader who, like David Copperfield, reads “as if for life” itself. (59) Instead of thinking of reading as a mere hobby, she encourages us to approach all of our reading as a spiritual act for the love of God. She illustrates this way of reading from spiritual guides and thinkers like Augustine, Frederick Douglas, and Dorothy Sayers.
“The Bible is weird. And lovely. And awe-inspiring. It is like no other book that has ever been written. It is the Book of books, the foundation of every story, and the lens through which Christians see all other books. If we were to read the Bible on its terms, we would become different people, converted by the practice. Christ’s vision would become our vision. Why and how we read matters as much as what we read. If we are poor readers, an encounter with the Word will not do much to make us his people. Plenty of people have read the Bible without so much as an eye twitch toward faith. And too many Christians who read the Bible every day forget what love and justice and hope should look like in practice. When a religious teacher tested Jesus on the law, Jesus responded, ‘How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). It is not enough to read the Bible; you must eat the book. You must delight in its honey. Suffer in your gut. And then prophesy. If you want to know how to eat the book, learn how to read– not only the Bible but other great books as well– as a spiritual practice. In reading other books, we practice reading the Bible; and in reading the Bible, we read other books by that lens.” (2-3)
Perusing her “Appendix C: Reading Lists of Great Books” will help you consider wonderful reads for those in the nursery to those in adulthood.
31. The Genesis of Gender / Abigail Favale
Abigail Favale is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. This book is her attempt to expose the philosophical and spiritual bankruptcy of what she calls the “gender paradigm,” (30) the worldview that says gender is simply a state of mind rather than a bodily reality. The gender paradigm says that there is no givenness to human nature. Favale critiques this paradigm and offers a biblical response. I found Favale’s history of gender (Chapter 6) to be the most insightful part of the book. But perhaps what makes this book unique is how Favale weaves her personal story of a spiritual and intellectual pilgrimage that led her from being raised as an evangelical Christian, to embracing postmodern feminism and queer theory in college, and then leaving the Christian faith altogether in graduate school, only to make her way eventually to Roman Catholicism. While I differ with Favale on some important points (several of those disagreements may be found in this extended review), I found much in this book to appreciate. This is a very brave book written by a very bright woman.
32. Service of All the Dead (Morse #4) / Colin Dexter
I love spending time with the charming and abrasive and brilliant Inspector Endeavour Morse as he solves violent crimes throughout Oxford. In Service of All the Dead, Morse is supposed to be on vacation. But murder comes calling when the body of a church warden is discovered at St. Oswalds. Max, the trusty pathologist, informs Morse that the church warden was dead before a letter opener was plunged into his chest. So, an apparent open-shut case has now become a quite open investigation. And as Morse begins to dig into the lives of the parishioners of St. Oswalds to find the murderer, the bodies continue to pile up.
33. The Running Grave / Robert Galbraith
Inspector Morse (see above) is marked by having “the maddeningly brilliant facility for seeing his way through the dark labyrinths of human motive and human behavior.” (279) This is also an apt description of Cormoran Strike, Robert Galbraith’s (aka J.K. Rowling) complex private detective. The Running Grave is the seventh installment in the Strike series and I believe it’s the best of the bunch. Corm and Robin are hired to rescue a man in the idyllic Norfolk countryside who’s trapped in a religious cult called The Universal Humanitarian Church. I found this perilous undercover operation unputdownable.
34. The Shadow of the Wind / Carlos Ruiz Zafon (trans. Lucia Graves)
I’ll always remember my first visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinth of a library, hidden in the heart of Barcelona. Young Daniel is taken there by his father and we get the pleasure of tagging along.
“Night watchmen still lingered in the misty streets when we stepped out of the front door. The lamps along the Ramblas sketched an avenue of vapor that faded as the city began to awake. When we reached Calle Arco del Teatro, we continued through its arch toward the Raval quarter, entering a vault of blue haze. I followed my father through that narrow lane, more of a scar than a street, until the gleam of the Ramblas faded behind us. The brightness of dawn filtered down from balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light that dissolved before touching the ground.
At last my father stopped in front of a large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Before us loomed what to my eyes seemed the carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows. “Daniel, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see today. Not even your friend Tomás. No one.” A smallish man with vulturine features framed by thick gray hair opened the door. His impenetrable aquiline gaze rested on mine. “Good morning, Isaac. This is my son, Daniel,” my father announced. “Soon he’ll be eleven, and one day the shop will be his. It’s time he knew this place.” The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in.
A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above.
A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked. “Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel.” I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library’s corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father’s, fellows of the secondhand-booksellers’ guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study.
My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets.
“This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?” (4-7)
Daniel finds and keeps a novel from the Cemetery of Forgotten Books called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. This rare book brings danger and love and mystery and heartbreak and death into his life. But Daniel’s perpetual solace is found in the magic of books.
“Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.” (8)
I just finished Volume 2 in this series and I’m eager to dive into the rest of the stories (Volume 3 and Volume 4) this year.
35. O Come, O Come Emmanuel / Jonathan Gibson
Dr. Gibson has created yet another wonderful resource for personal and family worship. Be Thou My Vision is a liturgy for daily worship. O Come, O Come Emmanuel is a liturgy for daily worship that focuses on the time from Advent to Epiphany. The prayers and the sermon excerpts in this volume are glorious. They helped me to live between the two advents of our Lord and long with the hymn writer: “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.”
“We preach not one advent only of Christ, but a second also, far more glorious than the former. For the former gave a view of His patience; but the latter brings with it the crown of a divine kingdom. For all things, for the most part, are twofold in our Lord Jesus Christ: a twofold generation: one of God, before the ages; and one, of a virgin, at the close of the ages; His descents twofold: one, the unobserved, like rain on a fleece; and a second, His open coming, which is to be. In His former advent, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger; in His second, He covers Himself with light as with a garment. In His first coming, He endured the cross, despising shame; in His second, He comes attended by a host of angels, receiving glory. We rest not upon His first advent only, but look also for His second. And as at His first coming, we said, ‘Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord,’ so will we repeat the same at His second coming; that when with angels we meet our Master, we may worship Him and say, ‘Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord.’” (Cyril ofJerusalem) (41)
36. The Divine Comedy / Dante Alighieri
Why should you consider reading one of the greatest poems ever written? L. Michael Morales explains the key to understanding Dante’s masterpiece is none other than the exodus:
“Penning a letter to his benefactor, Dante Alighieri explained the significance of the exodus in Scripture and for the Christian life. In doing so, he was offering the key for understanding his Divine Comedy, one of the greatest poems ever written. Referring to the opening line of Psalm 114, ‘When Israel went out of Egypt,’ Dante wrote that while historically the verse refers to the children of Israel’s exit out of Egypt under Moses, this exodus prefigured the redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ. The exodus, he continued, also describes the soul’s conversion out of the estate of sin and misery and into the grace of salvation. Finally, the exodus even points us to the church’s consummate deliverance out of the enslavement of this corrupt old creation as God’s people are brought into the glories of the new Jerusalem in the new creation.
In a brilliant passage of his poem (Purgatorio, 2), Dante unveils his biblical theology with multiple layers of exodus symbolism streaming together onto a single scene. Having emerged from the pit of Sheol onto the shores of the afterlife, his face washed of death’s grime, Dante the pilgrim watches as a divinely navigated ship draws ashore, bearing the souls of the redeemed who have recently died. The souls are singing Psalm 114 in Latin (Psalm 113 in the Vulgate): In exitu Israël de Aegypto, a song that, as we learn from Dante’s letter, bears testimony to the historical exodus of Israel out of Egypt even as these singers are themselves undergoing an exodus, their deliverance out of corrupt creation into glory. Meanwhile Dante the pilgrim is himself experiencing spiritual conversion, symbolized by his emergence out of Sheol while still a living mortal. This scene, moreover, takes place at the dawn of Easter, celebrating the resurrection out of the grave of Jesus Christ, in whose footsteps the pilgrim follows. Resolving the ultimate exile, Dante’s exodus leads to his reentry of Eden on the summit of God’s mountain (Purgatorio, 27-33), and his spiritual conversion is described as his being granted to come from Egypt to behold Jerusalem (Paradiso, 25.55–57).
Even the threefold structure of the poem follows the pattern of the exodus story: Inferno relates to Israel’s exodus out of Egypt, symbolic of Sheol; Purgatorio, centering on a great mountain and dealing with themes of sanctification and perseverance, relates to Israel’s wilderness experience with Mount Sinai as its focus; and Paradiso relates to Israel’s dwelling in the land with God, a foretaste of paradise. Dante’s theological journey—his spiritual conversion— traces the route both of Israel’s historical exodus out of Egypt and Jesus Christ’s path of death, burial, and resurrection— even his ascension into heaven. The end of redemption is not to live a bodiless, ethereal existence in the afterlife of heaven but rather to be raised up in glory with a real, new-creation body for a life of unending joy with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All of God’s people from every nation will be ushered into a renovated heavens and earth— the final exodus, which is only (but surely) anticipated in Dante’s poem.” (1-3)
This poem repays all the attention you can give it. And I’ll let Dante have the closing words to this post that has gone on for far too long.
“If, reader, I’d more space in which to write,
then I should sing in part about that drink,
so sweet I’d never have my fill of it.
However, since these pages now are full,
prepared by rights to take the second song,
the reins of art won’t let me pass beyond.
I came back from that holiest of waves
remade, refreshed as any new tree is,
renewed, refreshed with foliage anew,
pure and prepared to rise towards the stars.” (Purgatorio, 33.136-145)
Now may the God of peace grant you perfect peace, and living hope, and glorious grace, and steadfast love with faith, through Jesus Christ our Lord, until the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
As always, happy reading and Happy New Year!
–Nick Roark
ps. I can’t help myself. Here are twelve more books that I’m planning to devour in 2024 DV.
My Future 12:
- Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 / Stephen Wellum / February 15, 2024
- The Transfiguration of Christ / Patrick Schreiner / February 27, 2024
- Reformed Systematic Theology, Vol. 4 / Beeke and Smalley / May 28, 2024
- Ruined Sinners to Reclaim / Eds. The Gibson Boys / April 30, 2024
- Numbers 1-19 (AOTC) / L. Michael Morales / May 16, 2024
- Delighting in the Old Testament / Jason DeRouchie / February 13, 2024
- Slow Productivity / Cal Newport / March 5, 2024
- Supercommunicators / Charles Duhigg / February 20, 2024
- Red Sky Mourning / Jack Carr / May 14, 2024
- The Hunter / Tana French / March 5, 2024
- The Demon of Unrest / Erik Larson / April 30, 2024
- You Like It Darker: Stories / Stephen King / May 21, 2024
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