» Tuesday, 30 December A.D. 2008
books finished in 2008
What books did I finish in 2008? Roughly in chronological order:
- In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
- The Call by Os Guiness
- A High View of Scripture? by Craig D. Allert
- The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges
- The Prison Letters by N.T. Wright
- Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns
- Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament by Christopher J.H. Wright
- Keep In Step With the Spirit by J.I. Packer
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
- The Good of Affluence by John Schneider
- Faith and Wealth by Justo L. Gonzalez
- The Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster
- The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dosteovsky
- Bill and Dave by Michael S. Malone
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita
- Creating by Robert Fritz
- The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder
- Two Little Girls by Theresa Reid
- The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- Flow by Mikaly Csikzentmitalyi
- Your God is Too Safe by Mark Buchanan
- The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz
- Buying In by Rob Walker
- In Praise of Slow by Carl Honore
- Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker
- Creation Regained by Albert Wolters
- 1602 by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert
- Built to Last by Jerry Porras and Jim Collins
- Words that Work by Frank Luntz
- A Landscape with Dragons by Michael D. O'Brien
- The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan
- Jackson Pollock: An American saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
- Halting State by Charles Stross
- An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg
- Natural Ordermaster by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Which ones particularly stood out? For pure fun, 1602 definitely took the cake; reading about the X-Men as they might have been in Elizabethean England was quite amusing. For the must-continue-reading factor, The Name of the Rose, A Tale of Two Cities, The Brothers Karamazov, and Halting State towered above the rest.
In the I-can't-believe-they-did-this category, we have Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Librarians are hardly the passive custodians of knowledge you think they are. It also offers a pretty good apologia for why using technology is hard and why using open formats is a no-brainer.
I've started to think more about how I can grow as a programmer, which is why I read Creating, The Path of Least Resistance, and The Creative Habit--all books about becoming more effective at creating things. I think Robert Fritz's books offer the best argument for why test-driven development works, even though he doesn't mention a single bit about computer programming.
I think differently about my faith after reading Inspiration and Incarnation and Your God is Too Safe. I was apparently a bit late to the I&I party (Dr. Enns left Westminster shortly after I read the book); I can certainly see why he took some flak for what he wrote, but I don't think he deserved to lose his position over it.
While I enjoyed The Fifth Discipline and Citadel of the Autarch, I need to read both of them again. The former because the ideas in it are simply that big and the latter because I keep reading raves about Gene Wolfe. I enjoy his books, but I don't see him as the towering figure described by the blurbs on his books and the reviews I've read in other places. Along similar lines, I didn't understand why An Introduction to General Systems Thinking received such a glowing review from the person who recommended it to me (my father)...so I have to go back and re-read it. I suppose The Politics of Jesus falls into the same category.
I enjoyed The Return of History and the End of Dreams for a readable, concise summary of modern geopolitics. Seriously, at ~100 pages, I read it in an evening; it's the sort of book of which Thad would approve.
Buying In came with a plethora of positive press, but I wasn't impressed. Jackson Pollock: An American saga was a long, depressing story that only sort of answered the question that I was reading it for. I had read somewhere that Pollock had laboriously prepared his paintings by calculating out arcs and colors and such; this claim is clearly bogus. The book suggests that Pollock traced images in 3-D and his drip paintings are merely 2-D representations...I am inclined to believe this, but I don't think there was any sort of meticulous planning process that went into his paintings.
posted by Nate @ 10:16PM