Tim Casteel

Thoughts on Leadership and College Ministry

Leaders are Readers

My Top Books of 2022

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For whatever reason, I read a LOT less in 2022. I’m trying to get better at processing the books that I read (reading through all my highlights a few times to try to absorb the wisdom), which takes more time. And I journaled more which is slow but beneficial. But mostly I just read less! Reading is truly a habit that snowballs (and vice versa).

There’s always next year!

The Top Books I read in 2022:

  1. A Non-Anxious Presence by Mark Sayers
  2. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard
  3. Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm
  4. The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa
  5. Bowen family systems theory in Christian ministry by Jenny Brown
  6. Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

A Non-Anxious Presence by Mark Sayers

The days are dark and chaotic and things feel overwhelmingly complex. But it’s times like these when God moves in great ways. He will bring renewal through leaders who experience the presence of God and strike out boldly into the chaos as a non-anxious presence.

Sayers has become my favorite author for two reasons:

  1. He helps me understand the times.
  2. He gives me hope

Sayers is unique among writers in that he nails both the diagnosis AND the cure. Incredibly rare. Many books excel at diagnosis. Very few books offer a practical cure. One in a thousand excels at both diagnosis and cure. [I’m guessing it’s because writers who are smart enough to understand the times are so cloistered in academia and so buried in books that they aren’t connected to real people; they aren’t practitioners, only researchers/writers. Sayers somehow does both. He pastors a church and knows his flock yet still makes time to read, think, and write.]

Even more remarkable: Sayers communicates in simple, clear writing. This wisdom is not buried under dense academic writing.

Sayers is a voracious reader and one of his great gifts to the church is distilling vast amounts of learning into concise, easy-to-digest summaries. Sayers lives in Australia, and is thus more aware of global politics and economics, and better able to critique America.


I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard

I was led down the Girard rabbit hole from reading my favorite book last year: “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life” by Luke Burgis.

Girard was a French philosopher and anthropologist, not a theologian. But Girard found in the Bible (and specifically in Christ) the key to unlock the chains of oppression and strife. Neither “Wanting” or “I See Satan” are Christian books; the authors were secular truth-seekers (I believe both men were atheists until they discovered mimetic desire which led them both to follow Christ).

Girard identified the 10th Commandment as the key problem of all humanity: we want what our neighbor has. Girard called it mimetic (imitative) desire; our desires are shaped and influenced by the desires of others.

What is the antidote to mimetic desire? Girard says it is the imitation of Christ. More than that: “Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible.” We are to desire what Jesus desires – which is to resemble the Father as much as possible.

How does that kill mimetic desire? It breaks the chains of invisible conformity (wanting what our neighbor wants) and replaces it with the freedom of conformity to Christ. 

“The commandment to imitate Jesus does not appear suddenly in a world exempt from imitation; rather it is addressed to everyone that mimetic rivalry has affected. Non-Christians imagine that to be converted they must renounce an autonomy that all people possess naturally, a freedom and independence that Jesus would like to take away from them.”

The second seismic discovery Girard presents:

perhaps our modern world’s only absolute value, a concern for victims, is a uniquely Christian contribution to the world. Christianity is the source of our “concern for the poor, the weak, the disinherited, the lowly… Our [modern] concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.” Much like Tom Holland’s book “Dominion”, Girard argues that human rights “and humanitarianism develop first on Christian soil.”

Ironically, “The concern for victims has became a paradoxical competition of mimetic rivalries, of opponents continually trying to outbid one another.” Girard argues that Satan has co-opted this Biblical idea and turned victimism into an ideology that uses victim status as a way to gain power. 

“Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. The modern concern for victims obligates us to blame ourselves perpetually.”

Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

Published in 1941 by a German seeking to understand the roots of Fascism. REALLY helpful for understanding the anxiety and powerlessness caused by isolation.

Moderns cannot bear the “freedom from”; the burden of isolation and powerlessness of being an individual in an overwhelming world, flooded by disjointed information (very strong Neil Postman “and now this…” vibes), stripped of structure and relationships.

Fromm lists three ways we deal with our aloneness:

  1. Authoritarianism
  2. Destructiveness
  3. Automaton Conformity

We see #1 in Nazi Germany and the modern day rise of populist Nationalism. #2 in mass shootings and rising suicide rates. And #3 in the absolute conformity demanded by our society on really any current topic (LGBTQ, Ukraine, masks, BLM). Those topics are not bad. But it explains our incredibly strong desire to say “I support the current thing”.

Fromm covers the Middle Ages, the reformation, the renaissance- charting the growth of new ideas like efficiency, individualism, capitalism, anxiety. Good (and much easier!) parallel to a Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

I initially gave the book 5 stars but went back and knocked a star off for it’s incredibly poor chapter on the Reformation and really wrong remedies proposed in the last chapter. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that’s such a mix of brilliant insight and bad thinking. But it’s mostly brilliant – 95% meat, 5% bones.

The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa

My favorite kind of book- a short, dense philosophical book that gives you new lenses to see the world better. Hartmut Rosa, a German university professor and sociologist, explains the consequences of a modern society driven by an “incessant desire to make the world engineerable, predictable, manageable… to make the world controllable at every level.”

Two problems with that:

1. A controlled world becomes grayed out, muted, it ceases to delight. (e.g. the dreary, lifeless humans of Wall-E on board the intergalactic luxury cruise ship, The Axiom). We are all Marie Antoinette now – “nothing tastes.” That feeling of being fully alive eludes us; which “leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair.”

2. “Human life [is] defined by uncontrollability.” We can’t control ourselves much less the world. Our own selves are frustratingly uncontrollable: our birth, our death (“Both the beginning and the end of life are uncontrollable”), our desires, our sleep, our subconscious thoughts. And paradoxically, despite amazing progress in subduing the earth through technology, medicine, and science – our modern world has become “increasingly uncontrollable, unpredictable, and uncertain.” See years: 2016-2022. Rosa calls it “The Monstrous Return of the Uncontrollable”. Our efforts to make the world controllable have produced a “radical form of uncontrollability.” And what’s worse, we lack the agency to do something about it. It’s all too overwhelmingly complex. And we’re too depressed to care (see Problem 1.

We can do something about the former problem, the latter must be accepted.

As a Christian, the latter problem has really helped me better understand one of the central themes of the Bible: waiting on the Lord. Trusting Him who is in control: of my individual life AND of the grand sweep of history. “From life’s first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny” – In Christ Alone

But how do we fix things? How do we address Problem 1? Our modern approach is self-optimization. Techniques and To-do lists. Techniques to improve in every area of life: 10 steps to becoming less anxious; 4 things every parent must do; 12 ways to have a better marriage. All of which can be added to our never-ending to-do lists. Yet we never arrive at a place where we can say “that’s enough.”

What is Rosa’s answer? Resonance. We crave transcendence – to connect to something beyond ourselves. [not sure where Rosa comes from spiritually. He mentions that the Judeo-Christian God is “entirely in keeping with resonance theory”]

Beauty and wonder and relational intimacy are what produce “life” or resonance (like a struck guitar string, our hearts reverberate and come alive): a breathtaking sunset, a loyal friendship, a moving concert, a beautiful flower. None of these can be engineered nor controlled. And the moment we try to “capture” them (usually by pulling out our cameras to try to save them for later!), we fail to preserve them AND lose the ability to enjoy the moment.

Most resonant moments are inefficient and can only be “obtained” through slowness. But a never ending to-do list and a relentlessly self-optimized life “leave us no time, space, or breath for resonant encounters.”

“Optimization means achieving the best possible result in the shortest possible time, while maintaining constant control…There is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things.” Rosa sees “the fundamental contradiction at the heart of modernity” as “the basic conflict between our desire for control and our longing for resonance.”

Bowen Family Systems Theory in Christian Ministry by Jenny Brown

Since reading Friedman’s “A Failure of Nerve” and Mark Sayers’ “A Non-Anxious Presence” I’ve been eager to find more Christian application of the secular Bowen framework (which, as a college pastor, I’ve found to be EXTREMELY helpful). This book delivered.

It’s a series of academic papers so it’s a bit clunky. Not difficult to read or too academic, just clunky: “This paper attempts to introduce Bowen family systems theory (here on in referred to as Bowen theory) as a conversation partner in the reading of the text and as a commentator…”

And at the end of every chapter: “This paper has presented a case for the value of generational family research and use of the family diagram as an information generating tool”

Like watching paint dry…

But if you can skim past the dry academic intros and conclusions, there is gold to be found. 5 stars for content. 3 stars for readability.

I’d recommend reading A Failure of Nerve first, then you’ll be ready to jump into this book.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled the Middle East by Kim Ghattas

Fascinating overview of the last 40 years in the Middle East. Ghattas (who was born in Lebanon) argues that the Iranian Revolution set off a “black wave” of authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism that swept through the Middle East. Essentially: Iran and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a four decade long mimetic rivalry to out-Islam each other.

Very well written- Ghattas makes the incredibly complex and (to western readers) very-foreign world of the Middle East understandable.

For more great books here’s my lists from 2021, 2020, best-of-the-decade, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

The Modified M’Cheyne Method – Read the Bible in a Year

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Of all the great plans to read through the Bible in a year, perhaps none is as enduring and well loved as the plan by the old Scottish minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813–1843). The year before M’Cheyne died (at the young age of 29), he created a plan to read through, in a year, the whole Old Testament and twice through the New Testament and Psalms. The M’Cheyne method is the preferred bible reading plan of many Christian leaders including DA Carson, Tim Keller, Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott.

Nothing has been better for my relationship with God than reading the Bible on a daily basis, and yearly reading the entire Bible.

I prefer the M’Cheyne Method because you read from different sections of scripture every day. That keeps you from getting bogged down in more difficult books (I’m looking at you Major Prophets!). M’Cheyne intended that his plan would be split into Family and Secret, with two chapters being read together as a family, and two in private devotions. 

I’ve used this plan for the last eight years with a small modification: the Modified M’Cheyne Method (MMM) I use gets you through the entire Bible one time in a year (instead of the New Testament and Psalms twice), reading only 3 chapters per day (instead of 4). You simply drop the fourth column and just read the first three passages. The MMM assumes that all the reading will be done in private devotions.

For the first 6 years of using M’Cheyne I read both volumes of DA Carson’s excellent For the Love of God Volumes I & II that offer a VERY short devo/commentary on the Bible reading from each day of the M’Cheyne plan. Volume 1 comments on one of the chapters from the first two columns, Volume 2 comments on one chapter from the last two columns. I’d highly recommend buying both volumes – it takes less than 5 minutes to read both.

Where to find MMM:

  • I put together a pdf you can print and keep in your Bible with the 2023 MMM plan
  • Carson’s For the Love of God tells you what today’s reading is from M’Cheyne. I just wake up, open up For the Love of God on my Kindle to today’s date; it tells me what to read, and then gives me a brief commentary on what I read. It’s almost always insightful, and always short. For the Love of God is also available for free online.
  • M’Cheyne is also available on your Bible app on your phone.
  • Or this is REALLY helpful: Customizable Bible Reading plans – just plug in which plan (M’Cheyne!), timeframe (3 mo or 1 or 2 yr or “by Dec 31” or whatever), and what days of the week you want to skip (tsk-tsk), and it will spit out a plan for you.

All of those (except my pdf) will offer the four readings (NT and Psalms twice). To read the Bible once, simply drop the fourth reading.

May God bless you as you daily read and apply His Word.

Rewarding Beach Reads

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updated summer 2022

These books are rewarding in that you don’t have to sacrifice substance for enjoyment. You can have the best of both worlds – learn something about the world while being entertained. 

Because everyone has different aims for reading, there are five lists (each is ranked, starting with my favorites):

  1. Easy, fun nonfiction books (This is my favorite genre- narrative nonfiction. Nonfiction that reads like a novel- easy to read, and hard to put down).
  2. A little more challenging nonfiction books
  3. Classic Fiction that are actually good AND not too hard to read (these classic books have stood the test of time and really stick with you, even change you)
  4. Life-changing self improvement books
  5. Understanding our modern world
  1. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson – fascinating true story of the US Ambassador’s family in Nazi Germany (much of it focused on the Ambassador’s daughter’s trysts with Nazi officers -and even a date with Hitler) and how slow everyone was to see the absolute evil of the Nazis.
  2. 1776 – my favorite book by David McCullough – Truly miraculous how the Revolution succeeded when most of 1776 looked VERY bleak and the chance of success infinitesimally small. God Bless America.
  3. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood – Trevor Noah (this one, you HAVE to listen to the audiobook; it’s one of my favorite all-time audiobook; lots of language, so be warned)
  4. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – Candice Millard – the best book by one of my favorite authors. Exiting the presidency as one of the most popular of all times, what did Teddy Roosevelt choose to do? Risk his life exploring a previously unexplored section of the deadly Amazon river.
  5. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE – Knight is incredibly honest, not skimming over his regrets and mistakes. I was surprised by the amount of spiritual searching throughout Knight’s life. The audiobook is particularly good. Have recommended this to many and all have loved it.
  6. Wright Brothers – McCullough. Inspiring and captivating story. The Wright Brothers captures the American can-do spirit.
  7. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis – captivating and heartbreaking look at poor whites in America. Makes sense of much of the wave of outrage that Trump rode into the White House. Fair warning – coarse language throughout!
  8. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania- Erik Larson – Larson is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read everything he’s written.
  9. Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill – Candice Millard – miraculous hard-to-believe-it-is-true story of Churchill. It’s as if God saved his life so he could save the world.
  10. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History – S.C. Gwynne – Engrossing (and balanced) story of the Old West. Especially interesting for those who have lived in Dallas or West Texas as much of the book takes place in North and West Texas.
  11. Open Andre Agassi – Brutally honest and fascinating book. Deep dive into insecurity and identity and validation.
  12. Becoming Elisabeth Elliot“ Ellen Vaughn – 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. 
  13. Educated – Tara Westover – Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Crazy, true story. Really well written.
  14. The Blood of Emmett Till (NOT light in subject matter, but a very good and important read)- The story of the horrific death of a young black boy, and more widely, the birth of the civil rights movement.
  15. When Breath Becomes Air – VERY well written memoir of a neurosurgeon who gets terminal cancer
  16. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety – It’s only by God’s grace that we haven’t nuked ourselves into a nuclear holocaust by now.
  17. The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football – Jeff Benedict – Great (and shocking) read for any college football fan. Basically the story of how deeply flawed young men act when given absolute power. 
  18. The Boys in the Boat – the unlikely triumph of nine small town boys over the world’s best rowers in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany
  19. Becoming – Michelle Obama – A great memoir- Michelle Obama is a very good writer. Interesting to see the inner workings of the campaign trail and White House.
  20. Wild Swans – three generations of women trying to survive the brutality of 20th century China
  21. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory – Peter Hessler – fascinating look at a rapidly changing China in the early 2000’s, as seen in the colorful lives of average small-town Chinese people.
  22. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II – Sonia Purnell
  23. Where the Wind Leads: A Refugee Family’s Miraculous Story of Loss, Rescue, and Redemption Vinh Chung
  24. Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival – Peter Stark – good companion book to the story of Lewis and Clark (listed below)
  1. The Hiding Place – Easy read. But I couldn’t bring myself to put it in the section. I can’t think of a more important book to read during these chaotic days. A true story of Christian bravery and hope in a dark world.
  2. Founding Brothers – This Pulitzer Prize winning book is one of my favorite historical nonfiction books of all time. My favorite type of book – where the author puts in the work to comb through vast amounts of research to present a short, insightful summary.
  3. Man’s Search for Meaning – Profound book that chronicles Frank’s time in a concentration camp and his attempt to unravel what caused some people to survive and others to give up hope. He finds: man has to have meaning and purpose.
  4. Churchill – Paul Johnson – from what I researched, this is the best one volume biography of the man who saved the world (and it’s really short!). Not a hard read, 
  5. Team of Rivals – well written biography of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Almost brought me to tears when he was (spoiler alert!) killed. How different would our nation be if he could have guided us through reconstruction following the Civil War?
  6. Alexander Hamilton – Ron Chernow – This one is especially fun if you love the Hamilton broadway play like our family does, as this is the book that inspired Lin Manuel Miranda!
  7. Darkness at Noon (not nonfiction, but might as well be) –  Outstanding novel based on real events in Communist Russia in the 1950’s.
  8. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration – Isabel Wilkerson – How the Jim Crow south forced southern African Americans to migrate to the north and west. Long but really eye opening.
  9. Undaunted Courage: Lewis and Clark and the Opening of the American West – Stephen E. Ambrose – Name a more iconic duo. Now name one fact about them other than that they were the first to explore the west. I knew nothing about this famous duo before reading this. Their passage across the virgin west is enchanting – their discoveries, their courage, their leadership. The ending of the book was shocking. I won’t spoil anything but I was truly shocked- mostly that I had not heard any of it before.
  1. To Kill a Mockingbird – Not much I can say about this classic that hasn’t already been written. I thought classic novels would be difficult and dry. They’re Classics for good reason. They have great plots and great writing. And this is the best of the best.
  2. Fahrenheit 451 – This classic dystopian book illustrates the devastating effects and societal breakdown caused by the rise of technology and decline of reading.
  3. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe – Can’t recommend this book enough. It is good on so many levels: 
    • It changed the world. When President Lincoln met Stowe, he remarked: So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war!”
    • It’s a great novel
    • Stowe powerfully shows both sides of Christianity as it relates to slavery: it’s complicity in slavery (and how that is out of line with true faith) and as the source for emancipation and the brave endurance of countless Christian slaves. Both her villains and her heroes profess Christ. But her villains are sophisticated fools and are shown to be false Christians who have a superficial knowledge of the Bible. Her heroes are unsophisticated, brave, sacrificial and true followers of Christ who are rooted in the Bible and compelled by a deep faith in a just and merciful God.
  4. Jayber Crow – Wendell Berry (a modern classic) – This book was good for my soul. I value efficiency and speed and productivity. Wendell Berry describes community in an age before the TV/internet. A life of slowness and anti-efficiency. I think I want what they had. It truly made me consider what life is about work/productivity or relationships. Like Jared Wilson said, “Reading this book is like laying in cool grass under a spring sun by a lazy brook.”
  5. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – I personally enjoyed the Hobbit a bit more- it’s funnier and more compressed.
  6. Animal Farm – Funny and incredibly insightful. Though written before Mao’s rise in China, this book reads like a history of Communist China.
  7. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Incredible plot, scores of memorable characters, and full of great moral truths and justice. Such a deep meditation on the value of loyal friends over the empty pursuit of worldly gain. Incredible virtuous characters to emulate and foolish characters to learn by. And one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.
  8. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair – Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin- a book that shows the power of the pen. Teddy Roosevelt read The Jungle and made sweeping changes to improve life for millions of suffering workers. As a Christian, one thing that stood out to me is how churches failed to lead the way in fighting inhumane conditions for immigrants. In The Jungle, Socialism is man’s only hope while the church is nowhere to be seen.
  9. The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy – What a depressing, profoundly moving little book. Tolstoy is so gifted at articulating the inexpressible; in this case: the inner thoughts and swirling turmoil of a dying man. 
  10. The Great Gatsby – my college daughter just re-read this during the quarantine. It’s one of her all time favorites. Great story. Even greater meaning behind the story, as recounted by Alan Noble in Disruptive Witness: First, the American dream of attaining wealth, fame, and romantic fulfillment through hard work is a deadly illusion. Second, idealizing a romantic interest will always let you down.”
  11. The Devil – Leo Tolstoy – Another short story on the power of lust to destroy a life.
  12. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – a fun (and often laugh out loud funny) rolicking adventure
  13. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson – A familiar story but incredibly insightful re human nature. It’s a vivid depiction of Romans 7-8. What if we could simply split off our sinful nature (into a separate person) and just keep the good part of us?
  14. Jane Eyre – one of the reasons we read is to see a new world. There is power in stories. In creating the ideal of how the world should be, how people should be, they convey the nature of reality. If even, by showing the opposite – like the miserable treatment for an orphaned child in Jane Eyre.
  15. All Quiet on Western Front – Man. What a great, gripping & thoroughly depressing book. 
  16. The Road – Cormac McCarthy (another modern classic) – This one might come in handy in these dark days. Inspiring and really dark. A father and son trying to survive (and do good) in an apocalyptic world of bad people. This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.
  17. The Good Earth – Pearl Buck – moving story of the brutal life of a peasant in 1800’s China. Oddly, The Good Earth really helped me understand the ancient world of the Bible- suffering, oppression, famine, and even how fine fabric communicated wealth (e.g.- Prodigal Son or Joseph). For most of the world, life in the 1800’s was more similar to Biblical times, than to our modern world.
  18. Brave New World – as summed up in the Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death: people come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance and that we would become a trivial culture.
  19. Pride and Prejudice – OK, so this one is a bit hard to read. But well worth it. 
  20. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe – A searing critique of imperialistic Christian missionaries that rip apart the family structure of an African village (though the village is rooted in witchcraft and abusive patriarchy). It’s a tragic story and great novel.
  1. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos – Jordan B. Peterson – One of my top books of the decade. Peterson is essentially asking – How can one live the good life? Though not a Christian, Jordan Peterson gets so much right. Incredible wisdom packed into this very readable book.
  2. Atomic Habits – James Clear – We are what we repeatedly do. Atomics Habits gives very practical ways to make small changes that will yield big results.
  3. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life — Luke Burgis – best book I’ve read in the past few years. 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). It’s a secular book but I think the author is now a follower of Jesus.
  4. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix – Edwin H. Friedman – best book I’ve read on leadership. 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.
  5. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport – The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.
  6. 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.
  7. Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions – Russell Brand – a vulgar, brutally honest, modern day Ecclesiastes; with Brand, a self-described half-wit King Solomon. Brilliantly insightful into the human condition and very helpful re how to escape the bondage of desire. Fair warning: TONS of cussing!
  8. The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel – The best short book I’ve read on finances and investing. VERY helpful and concise.
  9. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker – What a remarkable Swiss Army knife of health and wellness sleep truly. There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don’t get enough). Sleep enhances our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
  10. The Next Story by Tim Challies – Distraction is the enemy of deep thinking. A distracted life is a shallow life. I believe that more information is what I need. When in fact, more information may lead to less wisdom. I need to take in less information and seek more wisdom.
  11. The Power of Habit – Why habits are life changing.
  12. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win – Jocko Willink – Best book on leadership I’ve read in a long time. Makes for a great audiobook (because Jocko sounds just like you think a Navy Seal named Jocko would sound like).
  13. Fast. Feast. Repeat.: Intermittent Fasting – Gin Stephens
  14. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking – Introverts! The internet age is our time to rise!
  15. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B. Cialdini – Our brains don’t function well with overwhelming input. And our modern world has created an environment so complex we are reverting to animal like instinctual autopilot decisions. Which is not good. We’re making unthinking decisions. This book will make those techniques visible so you can fight them.
  16. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – Nir Eyal – the ablity to focus is a superpower that is the most important skill for the twenty-first century.
  17. The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson – entertaining and informative overview of each part of your body.

These books are all pretty easy reads and each pull back the curtain on how our modern world works.

  1. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less – Barry Schwartz – This book explains so much of our modern world. We are the most prosperous land that has ever existed, yet Americans are less and less happy. The cause? The overabundance of choice. Choices are exhausting and make us less happy.
  2. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – Neil Postman – Written in 1985, Amusing could not be more relevant to 2018 and humankind’s endless appetite for distraction.
  3. The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place- Andy Crouch – packed with wisdom.
  4. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads – Tim Wu – A surprisingly spiritual, deep (though not difficult) read. The Attention Merchants are the best and brightest minds in America who spend billions seeking to gain more of our attention. They do not have your best interests in mind. No one will legislate the Attention Merchants. We each must choose to take back control of our attention. 
  5. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – Nicholas Carr – pretty dated (pre Instagram) but, nonetheless, is packed with relevant wisdom and insight re how technology works to scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious.
  6. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure – Greg Lukianoff
  7. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World – Tom Holland – A secular church history. 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. Super long (so maybe better as an audiobook) but written in narrative, so it’s an easy read.
  8. iGen – Jean Twenge – Along with Coddling, this is THE book on understanding GenZ. Twene found there is just one activity that is significantly correlated with anxiety, loneliness, and depression: Screen Time (and girls are more affected by this than boys).
  9. The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance – Ben Sasse – How do you turn children into adults? Senator Sasse is incredibly accurate on his diagnosis AND his prescription [Sasse was a student leader in Cru at Harvard and his wife used to be on staff with Cru].
  10. The Second Mountain – David Brooks pursued achievement in work, succeeded, and found it lacking. Worth reading if only for his chapter on his Christian conversion (from secular Judaism). It’s beautiful & profound.
  11. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion – NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt wants to show you that an obsession with righteousness is the normal human condition. We’re born to be righteous. Haidt is a lifelong Democrat and Atheist who is VERY fair-minded and unbelievably aligned with Biblical truth. His conclusion: The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people that we like.
  12. Just Mercy – Bryan Stevenson – hopefully you’ve seen the movie by now. If not, read the book then rent the movie! The true story of a lawyer laboring in the deep south to bring justice to death row.

My Top Books of 2021

By

Overall, here are the Top 10 Books I read in 2021:

  1. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life – Luke Burgis
  2. A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix – Edwin H. Friedman
  3. You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World – Alan Noble
  4. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World – Tom Holland
  5. I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power – Brené Brown
  6. Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith – Jen Pollock Michel
  7. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity – Douglas Murray
  8. How to Break Up with Your Phone – Catherine Price
  9. Encouragement: The Key to Caring – Larry Crabb
  10. 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

For more great books here’s my lists from 2020, best-of-the-decade, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

My Top Books of 2020

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I love when others take the time to share their book recs (and brief write-ups so I can see if the book interests me). So in the spirit of Do Unto Others…

I’d highly recommend all of these books listed below. They’re all good. I’ve ranked them (so you can read the best first!) and put them in categories to make it easier to find something you want to read- whether it’s growing in your faith, reading for fun (fiction!), learning more about Race, or reading to to understand our chaotic world.

Overall, here’s the Top Dozen Books I read in 2020:

  1. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Carl Trueman
  2. Gentle and Lowly – Dane Ortlund
  3. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose
  4. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation – James K.A. Smith
  5. Leisure: The Basis of Culture – Josef Pieper
  6. Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World - Tara Isabella Burton
  7. Black Rednecks and White Liberals – Thomas Sowell
  8. The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath – Mark Buchanan
  9. The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
  10. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads – Tim Wu
  11. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
  12. A Secular Age – Charles Taylor

And here they are, ranked in order of amazing-ness, by genre (all links are to my full Goodreads review).

Christian Devotional Books

  1. Gentle and Lowly - Dane Ortlund
    • Definitely the book I recommended the most in 2020. Very accessible yet incredibly deep. An instant Christian classic.
    • “This book is written…for those whose Christian lives feel like constantly running up a descending escalator.
    • Matthew 11 tells us explicitly who qualifies for fellowship with Jesus: “all who labor and are heavy laden.
    • You don’t need to unburden or collect yourself and then come to Jesus. Your very burden is what qualifies you to come.”
  2. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation – James K.A. Smith
    • Still chewing on this book because it’s so counter to my nature. Smith argues that we are not thinking things. We are primarily desiring, worshipping things. So the way to change is not through information. But by re-forming our desires through new habits. And I think he’s right.
  3. The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath – Mark Buchanan –
    • I read this book in January pre-quarantine and it prepared me for the chaos of 2020. Really helped me understand Sabbath. Sabbath is not something we do when we’ve finished our to-do list. “Sabbath is a reprieve from what you ought to do, even though the list of oughts is infinitely long and never done…at the heart of worship is rest–a stopping from all work, all worry, all scheming, all fleeing–to stand amazed and thankful before God and his work. There can be no real worship without true rest.”
  4. Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness – Michael Card –
    • Inexpressible is the kind of book where you get more than you bargained for. Michael Card is full of wisdom, and profoundly understands the Bible. So you learn about Hesed, but in the process you learn to better read the Bible (which is my favorite kind of book).
  5. The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ – James Bryan Smith
  6. Evangelism as Exiles: Life on Mission as Strangers in our Own Land – Elliot Clark
  7. Is the Bible Good for Women? – Wendy Alsup
  8. Another Gospel – Alisa Childers
    • Would have been higher if I liked apologetics. And if she would have not been so focused on critiquing progressive ‘christians’. It’s the most accessible, succinct apologetics book I’ve read (but I rarely read on apologetics!).

Understanding the Times 

(once again this year, this was my favorite category!)

  1. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Carl Trueman
    • This is not an easy read. Trueman traces the philosophical roots that made the phrase “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” a normal phrase in 2020. One of Trueman’s great gifts to us as readers is taking very dense philosophical writings and explaining them simply: Writers/thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Marcuse and Freud. “Put simply (or as simply as possible, given that this is Hegel and Marx)…”
    • “Understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times. And understanding the times requires a knowledge of the history that has led up to the present.”
  2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
    • Two atheists (who are pro gay rights) fear that Theory is destroying Western Civilization. Theory cannot build up, it can only tear down: “Equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal.”
    • This relatively concise book covers a lot of ground re Theory: Gender, Queer, Critical Race, Post-Colonialism, Ableism, and the shift from individual rights to identity groups. The authors do an admirable job explaining the intentionally cryptic writing of Theory (one of the beliefs of Theory is that embedded in language are unjust power structures, and therefore language itself is suspect and should be queered (made fluid and incoherent))
    • Theory= THE truth that cannot be argued with. A metanarrative that denies all metanarratives. A radical skepticism that assumes power inequality.
    • After reading, I feel like I finally have a grasp on things like the distinction between Sex/Gender/Sexual Orientation.
  3. Leisure: The Basis of Culture – Josef Pieper
    • Published in 1948, Leisure could not be any more relevant to the “Achievement Society” of 2020.
    • Leisure is the best kind of book – brief, dense but accessible, a secular academic work but deeply religious, and packed with gold. I mean, TS Eliot wrote the introduction. You know it’s gonna be profound.
    • True leisure is the antidote to what ails our “total work” world (where we only have worth if we are getting things done). Our common experience as moderns – boredom, anxiety, exhaustion, and despair – are all rooted in the “absence of leisure, for only someone who has lost the spiritual power to be at leisure can be bored. And then Despair, the sister of Restlessness, rears its hideous head.”
    • “Be at leisure – and know that I am God” is the antidote.
  4. Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World – Tara Isabella Burton
    • A friend of mine put it well: Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self explains how we got to now. Strange Rites vividly depicts what now looks like. A deep dive into the non-spiritual ‘religions’ of 2020 – LGBTQ, Wiccan, fitness groups, fandoms, incels, etc.
    • Lesslie Newbigin prophetically wrote in the 1980’s:
      • [There is no such thing as] “a secular society in which…there are no commonly acknowledged norms. Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place.”
    • Strange Rites enumerates the many American idols that have taken the place of traditional religion.
    • Written before the chaos of 2020, Burton predicted two likely candidates to become the predominant American secular ‘religions’:
      • Social Justice
      • Right Wing White Supremacy
  5. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads – Tim Wu
    • Such a helpful and enjoyable book. A surprisingly spiritual, deep (though not difficult) read. 
    • Tim Wu really is a remarkable writer- not only giving a very readable “how we got to now” history of the attention economy (advertising/marketing and the rapid progression of radio–>TV–>smartphones) but also digging deeper into the Faustian bargain we strike in all the “free” apps we use. Wu builds a case that the Attention Merchants are not evil, but they do control you.
    • The best and brightest minds in America are spending billions seeking to gain more of our attention. They do not have your best interests in mind. No one will legislate the Attention Merchants. We each must choose to take back control of our attention. 
    • “As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
  6. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
    • “Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.”
    • “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.”
  7. A Secular Age – Charles Taylor
    • A sprawling epic of 900 dense pages that explains how we got from a world in 1500 where belief in God was all but inevitable to 2000 where belief in God is unlikely. This is what I call a Source book. A fountainhead book from which hundreds of other books flow. Worth trudging through, even if much goes over your head. I’d recommend reading How (Not) to Be Secular by James KA Smith first. Then read A Secular Age. Then read Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble and Our Secular Age. How Not To will give you the framework needed to understand and digest Taylor’s massive tome. Disruptive and Our Secular will help you apply it (and, especially if you are Protestant, to interpret it).
  8. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World – Cal Newport
    • Digital Minimalism was written to help us find a way “to be fully human.” The main obstacle= our phones. Super helpful book.
  9. How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor – James KA Smith
    • A brilliant distillation of Taylor’s A Secular Age. But if you’re looking for the SparkNotes to A Secular Age, keep looking.
    • This is not a light read. Here’s a sample sentence: “In other words, hermeneutic phenomenology’s critique of foundationalism and correspondence theories of truth should also underwrite a critique of closed spin.”
    • Thanks James KA. I know EXACTLY what you mean.😂
    • Usually when someone write “in other words” you’re about to get a more understandable version…
  10. How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missionary Encounter – Tim Keller
    • So much wisdom in this short little book. Worth reading if only for the footnotes – to see which books have been most helpful to Keller in understanding the collapse of Western Civilization and the decline of American Christianity.
  11. Facing Leviathan: Leadership, Influence, and Creating in a Cultural Storm – Mark Sayers
  12. Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents – Rod Dreher
    • Dreher is a bit Chicken Little “the sky is falling!” for my tastes. But I did find his logic compelling as he sounds the alarm re progressive Orwellian speech control. This book (and Jordan Peterson!) made me want to read and understand Gulag Archipelago. To understand totalitarianism and understand what might be happening in our country. Whether you think Twitter et al were justified in silencing right wing insurrectionists, Dreher’s book predicted the danger of tech corporations controlling free speech (and raises the alarm re a surveillance state). Most helpfully, he highlights the faith and courage of Christians from Eastern Europe.
  13. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life – Nir Eyal
    • Nir Eyal wrote the book on how to make apps that suck up all your time. Literally, Eyal wrote the book used by Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
    • So Eyal wrote the antidote, Indistractable, to help us fight back against the distraction of our phones, a superpower Eyal calls the “the most important skill for the twenty-first century.”
    • Indistractable is surprisingly spiritual. Eyal spends the first 1/5th of the book digging into the question: “Why are we perpetually restless and unsatisfied?”
    • “In the future, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who let their attention and lives be controlled and coerced by others and those who proudly call themselves ‘indistractable.”
    • “Being indistractable means striving to do what you say you will do. If you care about your work, your family, and your physical and mental well-being, you must learn how to become indistractable.”
  14. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics – Ross Douthat
  15. Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age – Tony Reinke
    • A deep dive into how images effect us spiritually.
    • Some good insights on boredom and our zero-sum attention. “We are creatures shaped by what grabs our attention — and what we give our attention to becomes our… reality. We become like what we watch.”

Race

  1. The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
    • Written around the turn of the century (early 1900’s), it is heart-breaking that this book is just as relevant as the day it was written: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
    • Brilliantly insightful and gut-punchingly honest:
      • “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife…He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
  2. Black Rednecks and White Liberals – Thomas Sowell
    • I’m guessing this book is controversial. But two things that stood out:
      • Why did Slavery, an accepted reality in EVERY civilization since the beginning of recorded history, disappear in a matter of 100 years? The ability to see slavery as evil could only could be found in Christianity. And it was the might of the British navy that forced other cultures to see things their way: “It was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery.”
      • He believes it a debilitating message to “treat the history of blacks as the history of white people’s treatment of blacks”.
  3. Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope – Esau McCaulley
    • A hopeful and insightful book. Particularly helpful: McCaulley shows how conservative black theologians have felt stuck between liberal white/black churches (that are talking about issues that matter to black people) and conservative white churches (that have good theology but totally ignore black issues).
    • Worth reading alone for the chapters on “The Bible and Black Anger” and Slavery
  4. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism – Jemar Tisby
    • I’ve read 40 books on racism/justice and this book might move to the top of the list as the first book I’d recommend reading to begin to understand racism in the American church.
    • Tisby achieves the admirable feat of synthesizing 400 years of history (and thorough Doctoral research) into a very readable 200 pages.
    • Despite the negative picture (which I think is right, and needed) I appreciate Tisby’s obvious love for the church. “My concern for the church and for the well-being of its people motivates my exploration of Christian complicity in racism. The goal is to build up the body of Christ by ‘speaking the truth in love,’ even if that truth comes at the price of pain.”
  5. Being Latino in Christ: Finding Wholeness in Your Ethnic Identity – Orlando Crespo
    • Beneficial for any ethnicity to learn from (like me: I’m a middle aged white man). Hopeful and honest.
    • The “Ethnic Identity/Assimilation Grid” alone is worth the price of the book! VERY helpful, especially for ethnic minorities (or anyone that cares about ethnic minorities).
    • I appreciate Crespo’s balance between giving attention to understanding our ethnicity “without falling into idolatry of ethnicity.”
  6. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Harriet Ann Jacobs
    • The brutal autobiography of a slave girl in the 1800’s.
  7. The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best – Irwyn L. Ince Jr.
    • Deeply theological.
  8. Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery – Mark Charles
    • Charles, a Native American, pens a scathing critique of white American Evangelicalism. I disagreed with a lot in this book. But I always appreciate unfiltered truth and honesty.

NonFiction

  1. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker M.D.
    • Fascinating. Partly because we still understand so little about sleep. And partly because what we DO know is that sleep is a “remarkable Swiss Army knife of health and wellness.”
    • Sleep helps you in ALL areas of life: physically (athletes who sleep more, perform better), emotionally (sleeping is like a free counseling appointment every night as your brain is washed with soothing hormones, helping you cope with the stress/trauma of the day), and mentally (cognitive ability is directly tied to amount of sleep).
    • “There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don’t get enough).
  2. Gulag Archipelago (abridged) - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    • Gulag is worth reading for Solzhenitsyn’s insights into the roots of evil. It’s essentially a 500 page meditation on evil. Where does it come from? How do we prevent the Gulag-kind-of-evil that makes Hitler’s concentration camps pale in comparison?
  3. The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson
    • “Most of the best technology on earth is right here inside us.” Bryson makes learning fun. A fascinating tour through the wonder of the human body and medical history (which leads me to worship, even if the author is staunchly atheist).
    • “Until 1900 you had a less than 50% chance of a doctor helping you rather than hurting you.”
  4. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory – Peter Hessler
    • Fun way to learn about a rapidly modernizing China. Hessler is a great storyteller.
  5. The Psychology of Money – Morgan Housel
    • The best short book I’ve read on finances and investing. VERY helpful and concise.
  6. The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene
    • How to murder, steal, and lie your way to the top. No hyperbole. The positive role models set forth are admirable folks like Mao Zedong (who likely killed more people than Hitler) and Empress Wu (who smothered her own baby to frame/kill her nemesis and ascend to the throne).
    • 5 stars for fascinating stories, great writing, and often-brilliant psychological insight.
    • 1 star for evilness.
  7. The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
    • Maybe the most horrifying book I’ve ever read. Perhaps eclipsing the concentration camps or Gulags, the Rape of Nanking was pure evil. Like Gulag, this book is “a personal exploration into the shadow side of human nature.” I’ve been to the Nanking Massacre Museum a couple times, so this book was especially poignant.
  8. Rich Dad, Poor Dad – Robert T. Kiyosaki
    • A few nuggets of gold in this classic investing/personal finance book.
  9. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life – Scott Adams
    • A very uneven book- brilliant practical wisdom on how to succeed, mixed with bizarre beliefs (“The Secret”-esque Affirmations- “if you believe it, it will happen”; we are all holograms created by aliens, etc), cheap shots at religion, and 100% wrong views on human nature (happiness comes from being rich and famous and consuming feel good entertainment- at all costs: avoid depressing books/movies – Adams would NOT like my book list!). 
    • But it’s the most fun you’ll have while learning about leadership and success!
  10. A Prayer for Orion: A Son’s Addiction and a Mother’s Love – Katherine James
  11. The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 – Garrett M. Graff
  12. Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It – Gina Kolata

Fiction

  1. The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy
    • What a depressing, profoundly moving little book. Tolstoy is so gifted at articulating the inexpressible, in this case: the inner thoughts and swirling turmoil of a dying man. 
    • We are all a rock dropping from the sky, increasing in speed, hurling toward an impact with the earth.
    • So how should we then live?
  2. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
    • This is the first Dickens book that I’ve read and I’m joining the Dickens fan club. Such a clever, talented writer. I really think he’s going to be big someday!
    • Incredible plot, scores of memorable characters, and full of great moral truths and justice. Such a deep meditation on the value of loyal friends over the empty pursuit of worldly gain. Incredible virtuous characters to emulate and foolish characters to learn by.
    • And one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.
  3. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
    • Many consider it the greatest novel of all time. Not for the faint of heart. Full of amazing writing. But parts of it are a slog…
    • I rarely will underline as I read fiction books but I underlined 100 different passages in Anna Karenina- mostly because of the beauty of the prose, sometimes because Tolstoy articulated so well something I’ve felt but never seen put to words.
  4. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1) – J.R.R. Tolkien
    • Read this with two of my boys. Such fun.
  5. The Devil – Leo Tolstoy
    • Another short story – on the power of lust to destroy a life.
  6. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
    • Not the easiest book to read. The writing is wooden (the opposite of Dickens/Tolstoy) and difficult to follow (I would read the Spark notes after most chapters to make sure I understood what was happening!).
    • But the plot is incredible and moving. Its themes have been constantly on my mind since I’ve been reading it- the devouring effects of hidden sin, the pharisaical hypocrisy of the self righteous, the humility and empathy that stems from an awareness of your own sin.
  7. The Stranger – Albert Camus
    • Helped me understand Existentialism, one of THE predominant modern beliefs (and the message behind Pixar’s new movie Soul). Such a depressing worldview/book.
    • “Since God does not exist and man dies, everything is permissible. One experience is as good as another; the important thing is simply to acquire as many as possible…all values collapse”
    • I can’t think of a better summary of Instagram in 2020: life is found in acquiring as many as experiences as possible.
  8. Ready Player One – Ernest Cline
  9. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne (bit of a slog – but worth it, to read a sci-fi classic)
  10. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
  11. A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Would love to hear from you – what were your favorite books you read in 2020?