A Few Good Books

Current as of December 19, 2022

I fell in love with books before I could even read them. Some of my earliest and best memories are the times I spent in Granny’s lap with Dr. Seuss. And though the good doctor and I don’t get together much these days (our children prefer dragons, Jedi, and The Jesus Storybook Bible), my affection for books has only grown. So after an ill-fated semester as a student in Ancient and Classical History, I decided to ‘specialize’ (if it can be called that) in the humane letters. And having wrapped up another phase of my academic career, I’m glad to be returning to what I know best: the Good Book and the great books.

In previous updates to this list, I included just about everything—if I had read it, it was here. However, I decided to clean house, eliminating about 70 works in the process. To be retained a work had to be good (reading me as I read it), true (both informative and imaginative), and beautiful (a joy to read). And though there are still some hard reads that made the cut, each will hopefully (to paraphrase Kirk) stimulate your heart and mind for the proper study of the human condition, and point you further into “the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10).

So here are the books I’ve read and reread for entertainment and edification. And in case you’re looking for an even shorter list to start with, I’ve marked my top five with an asterisk (*).

Life Together Under the Word
​The Big Story by Justin Buzzard
Churches in the Shape of Scripture by Dan Chambers
Common Prayer, eds. Shane Clairborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove & Enuma Okoro
The Confessions by Augustine
​The Cruciform Church by C. Leonard Allen
Early Christians Speak (esp. Vol. 1) by Everett Ferguson
​*The ESV Study Bible, ed. Lane T. Dennis & Wayne Grudem
Follow Me: A Call to True Discipleship by Kevin W. Rhodes
​The Gospel: How the Church Shares the Beauty of Christ by Roy Ortlund
​The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
Letters to the Church by Francis Chan
*Life Together and Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
On the Love of God by Bernard of Clairvaux
Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas & William Willimon
Simple Church by Thom Rainer & Eric Geiger
Why Trust the Bible? by Greg Gilbert

Stories & the Moral Imagination
The Aeneid by Virgil
Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
​Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
*The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrún by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Moral Imagination” by Russell Kirk
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
​Piers Plowman by William Langland
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, eds. Hermione Granger & Albus Dumbledore
The Theban Plays by Sophocles

Creation & the Wonders of Nature
The Classic Hundred Poems, ed. William Harmon
Dependent Rational Animals by Alasdair MacIntyre
Early Christian Readings of Genesis One by Craig D. Allert
​Embracing Creation by John Mark Hicks, Bobby Valentine & Mark Wilson
Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, ed. J.B. Stump
Galileo’s Commandment: 2,500 Years of Great Science Writing, ed. Edmund Blair Bolles
​Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary and Theological Commentary by C. John Collins
Jesus, Beginnings, and Science by David & Kate Vosburg
The Language of God by Francis Collins
“Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany” by Galileo Galilei
*Surprised by Meaning by Alister McGrath
Thriving with Stone Age Minds by Justin Barrett with Pamela Ebstyne King

Wisdom & the Commonwealth
*The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Counter Culture by David Platt
Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher
Do Morals Matter? Presidents & Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump by Joseph Nye
Flourish by Martin Seligman
God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson
​Grand New Party by Ross Douthat & Reihan Salam
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman
”Letter From a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
The Republic by Plato
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
​Viking Economics by George Lakey
“Washington’s Farewell Address,” with Alexander Hamilton