Overall, here are the Top 10 Books I read in 2021:
- Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life – Luke Burgis
- A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix – Edwin H. Friedman
- You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World – Alan Noble
- Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World – Tom Holland
- I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power – Brené Brown
- Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith – Jen Pollock Michel
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity – Douglas Murray
- How to Break Up with Your Phone – Catherine Price
- Encouragement: The Key to Caring – Larry Crabb
- Becoming Elisabeth Elliot – Ellen Vaughn
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life – Luke Burgis
What do you want? And through your life, what do you help others want? This book gives you new lenses through which to see the world. And once you start to see through the lens of Wanting, you’ll see it everywhere.
Wanting is the journey of a Tech start-up CEO, his crisis of meaning, and attempt to “understand the desires that had led me to those choices in the first place–the navigation system behind my ambition…What was the force behind my tenacious and never-satisfied striving?”
Our modern ethos is do what you want, because what you want is good. “Wanting” argues you are enslaved to what you want (and what you want is only a desire because you saw someone else want it – thus the power of Instagram Influencers).
I’m now convinced that the primary way we change is through models of desire – “people…that show us what is worth wanting.”
It’s a secular book but I think the author is now a follower of Jesus. Wanting has so many connections to great Christian books like James KA Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, A Secular Age (thin vs thick desire; immanent vs transcendent), and Piper’s Desiring God.
A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix – Edwin H. Friedman
We are a chronically anxious nation: “a society progressing technologically [while] regressing emotionally.” Why? “Anxiety escalates as society is overwhelmed by the quantity and speed of change.”
Like Wanting, this book will help you better see reality- to truly understand dysfunctional families, workplaces, and nations (that we all live in!).
Worth reading if just to understand how to be “a non-anxious presence” in a world gone mad. Written in 2007 by a Jewish rabbi, this book resonates all the more since it’s a bit distanced from the current chaos.
This a book is about leadership in an anxious society; every bit as helpful for marriage and parenting as it is for the workplace. The key: to focus less on fixing or motivating those who are not capable of self-regulation. Focus instead on becoming self-regulated, a non-anxious presence.
A few gems:
- Most crises cannot…be resolved (that is, fixed); they must simply be [endured thru a focus on] self-regulation and the management of [your own] anxiety instead of frantically seeking the right solution.
- The children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation.
- Chronic anxiety in American society has made the imbibing of data and technique addictive precisely because it enables leaders not to have to face their selves.
- A society cannot evolve, no matter how much freedom is guaranteed, when the citizenry is more focused on one another than on their own beliefs and values.
- Children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents.
- Our [companies and] communities adapt themselves to the least mature and…who lack self-regulation.
You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World – Alan Noble
Such a helpful book for understanding our modern world of anxiety, isolation, depression and exhaustion. “This is the fundamental lie of modernity: that we are our own.” The antidote: understanding how we belong to God.
Beyond its main theme, this was the first book to help me question my core belief in efficiency. Since college, few things shape me more than a drive for efficiency. I was wrong. “Efficiency is not a human virtue. It’s not a traditional virtue at all. It’s a metric for machines.”
“Efficiency demands that we always pursue the best option available. It asks: Can you use this time more productively?” Efficiency is the antithesis of sabbath, beauty, slowness, relationship, wonder, and awe. “A life of unending…self-improvement through increased efficiency and optimization is overwhelming, depressing, and unsatisfying.”
A few gems:
- Unlimited desire and consumption always leave us exhausted and empty.
- No matter how much we consciously affirm that our existence is already justified through God, virtually every other voice we interact with will tell us, “No. Keep striving. You haven’t done enough. If you quit now, your life will be a waste. Do something else to make it worthwhile.”
- We might cover more ground, but we don’t seem to run any less than our ancestors. And if you never stop running, does it matter where you are going?
- One reason society fails to fulfill its promise is that a society premised on the sovereign self has no discernable ends, only an ever expanding and ever demanding number of means.
- Belonging necessitates limits. If we belong to ourselves, then we set our own limits–which means we have no limits except our own will. If we belong to God, then knowing and abiding by His limits enables us to live as we were created to live.
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World – Tom Holland
A secular church history. Super long but written in narrative, so it’s an easy read. Written by an atheist historian trying to find the roots of our modern human rights- that “all men are created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” His troubling findings? They are by no means self-evident. They are not rooted in philosophy; they are only found in Christianity. Our modern world is under the Dominion of Christ – “the formidable–indeed the inescapable–influence of Christianity.”
Tim Keller on Dominion: “It is hard to overstate the importance of Holland’s book Dominion. He makes a readable and extraordinarily well-documented case that the central values and priorities of modern, Western, secular culture have actually come from Christianity.”
Holland is part of the new Christian-leaning secularists (I’d put Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke, Luke Burgis, David Brooks, Tara Isabella Burton in that group). Some have come to Christ. Most are merely intrigued and seeking truth that STRONGLY aligns with Christianity.
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) – Brené Brown
A deep dive into women and shame. This sentence impacted me and has stuck with me: “You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.” Also: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
This is super helpful- a key way to identify which issues particularly lead to shame is by how you’d finish this sentence:
- “I would never want to be seen as…” (a loudmouth, pushy, etc)
- “I don’t want people to think I’m…”
“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” Shame happens when others say, by words or action, “I can’t imagine doing THAT! I’m over here and you’re over there.” We overcome that isolation by sharing with others and hearing “You too? I thought it was just me!”
For women, Brown says the three biggest areas of shame are:
- Body image (almost universal among all women)
- Caregiving
- Motherhood
[her research on shame has almost exclusively been focused on women, but her brief insight on men is profound: men mostly experience shame related to this issue: “I would never want to be seen as weak”]
Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith – Jen Pollock Michel
Such a challenging book. A great follow up and application to Wanting (though it seems to be a true follow up to James KA Smith). “Following Christ is about reorienting our loves and desires toward his kingdom. We need not just be convinced of Christ. We need to be captivated by him.”
The goal= to conform our desire to match the desires of God. That is what it means to follow the will of God. Which, of course, is easier said than done.
“We simply can’t ignore desire. We get out of bed, go to work, get to the gym, marry (or not), have babies (or not), write books–follow Jesus–because in some measure, we want to. To be human is to want…wanting is the earliest language we learn.”
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity – Douglas Murray
We are living through a period “in which all our grand narratives have collapsed” and “just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to suggest that things had never been worse.” Murray, a “hopeful agnostic”, is a gay, British man. As such, he is able to say things that others would be cancelled for.
His four chapters are:
- Gay – “being gay is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try to base any form of group identity”
- Women (among other things, on the biological facts of the difference between the sexes)
- Race
- Trans
How to Break Up with Your Phone – Catherine Price
This is the first book I recommend to students because it’s an easy, short read and applicable to a wide range of phone addictions.
“if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired, if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption, and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you’d likely end up with a smartphone.”
Encouragement: The Key to Caring – Larry Crabb
This book would be more accurately titled: “How to be others focused.” The best kind of book: short and packed with deep understanding of human nature (yet easy to understand).
Our primary barrier to being others focused: our feeling of emptiness, wondering “if I’m always pouring into others who will pour into me?”.
The answer – life is hard and you will always be alone! So stop waiting for others to pour into you. But that loneliness is the pathway to intimacy with God (which is what you ultimately want). And ultimately connecting deeply with others is a side effect of 1) depending only on God and 2) focusing on others.
Pairs nicely with Tim Keller’s the Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. Crabb’s book quickly (and, somehow, deeply!) dives into how to live that out.
Becoming Elisabeth Elliot – Ellen Vaughn
Few people have influenced me more than Elisabeth Elliot. Her books shaped my life.
Hearing in new detail, the story of her life, and especially her decision to go back (WITH her small child!) to live with and serve the tribe that killed her husband deeply impacted me. The way she loves and follows God is almost hard to fathom. Incredibly challenging.
And super interesting to hear the real trials of missionary life- mostly team conflict!
Along with these Top 10, here are others I read this year that I would highly recommend to you (under each heading, listed in order of how much I liked them!).
Christian Devotional Books
- The Weight of Glory – C.S. Lewis
- A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 – W. Phillip Keller
- Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture – Lesslie Newbigin
- The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love That Reorders a Life – Seth Haines
- The Imperfect Pastor – Zack Eswine
- The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family – C.R. Wiley
- Motherhood Redeemed: One Woman’s Journey from Radical Feminism to Joyful Motherhood – Kimberly Cook
NonFiction
- Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom – Jonathan Haidt
- The Road Less Traveled – M. Scott Peck
- Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life – Jordan B. Peterson
- Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything – B.J. Fogg
- Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World – Maryanne Wolf
- I Will Teach You to Be Rich – Ramit Sethi
- Fast. Feast. Repeat.: Intermittent Fasting – Gin Stephens
- The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss – Jason Fung
- The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion – Rodney Stark
- Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious – Timothy D. Wilson
- A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas – Warren Berger
- Business for the Glory of God – Wayne Grudem
History/Biography
- Open – Andre Agassi
- A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II – Sonia Purnell
- Where the Wind Leads: A Refugee Family’s Miraculous Story of Loss, Rescue, and Redemption – Vinh Chung
- The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz – Erik Larson
- The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West – David McCullough
- Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland – Christopher R. Browning