Once again, in a completely haphazard manner, I’ve collected my five favorite books of the past year. These books were not necessarily published in 2013 – though three of them were – but they were among the books I most enjoyed during the year. I read about thirty books in 2013 and I don’t hesitate to recommend these five to you. Please leave a comment if you can recommend to us any books from your past year’s reading list.
A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, Paula J. Giddings (2009)
After I finished Gidding’s biography about Ida B. Wells, I felt compelled to make the short pilgrimage to her Chicago home. I parked off of King Drive, looked up at the old home, and tried to imagine the frenetic activity that house experienced at the hands of its famous occupant. Despite almost single-handedly championing the anti-lynching campaign at the turn of the twentieth century, most of us are woefully ignorant of this critical figure in the early Civil Rights Movement. Giddings points out some of the reasons for our ignorance.
Most obviously, Wells was a woman in a man’s world. While the older Fredrick Douglas was generally an ally and advocate for Wells, her contemporary, W. E. B. Du Bois, was mostly ambivalent to her work, going so far, according to Wells, as to leave her name off the list of the founders of the NAACP. Despite this, Wells worked tirelessly as an author, journalist, and speaker despite very real risks to her life and the lives of those close to her.
Another reason we forget about Wells is that she lived before what most of us think of as the Civil Rights Movement and the gains she and her contemporaries made (whether related to race or gender equality) don’t seem as spectacular as the accomplishments of those who came a generation or two later. A Sword Among Lions is a small step toward reminding us of this American hero. Ida B. Wells should should never be forgotten; her insight and courage in the face of such hostile circumstances cannot relegated to the past.
My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman (2013)
Christian Wiman wrote the most beautiful book of the year. Not the most beautiful of the books I read but of any book published in 2013. (Go ahead, find a more beautifully written and expressed book. I’ll wait.) Wiman was, until recently, the editor of Poetry Magazine and his way with words is evidence of his poet’s vocation. This is a memoir about Wiman’s return to Christianity after a long absence from the rollicking faith of his family. The ways Wiman talks about faith seem equally informed by his poetry, his location as a modern person (as he understands that), his love for his wife, and a devastating experience with cancer.
It’s the last one that features most visibly throughout the book, though Wiman is far too careful a writer to ever use his illness to manipulate the reader. Instead we feel the author’s doubt, grief, and physical agony even while we’re surprised with him at faith’s quiet return. I’ve written on this blog about stages of faith and the tendency to experience these transitions as God’s absence or as the erosion of faith’s foundations. This Bright Abyss is a book I will recommend not only for it’s beauty, but also for the view it provides of a faith that exists not only in spite of doubt, grief, and uncertainty, but because of them.
And They All Sang, Studs Terkel (2005)
I’m predisposed to like this book. When he was attending the University of Chicago’s law school, Studs Terkel would take the train through Bronzeville and make stops at some of the clubs and record stores. I spend a lot of time in Bronzeville and I sometimes try to imagine the neighborhood as it was when Studs made those stops- the people he met and the music he heard.
Studs was one of the first to play the great Mahalia Jackson on his Chicago radio show and this book is filled with conversations he had over the years with equally notable sings and musicians. Studs did more over the course of his life than most of us will, but he’s remembered for telling the stories of ordinary people in his collections of interviews organized around different themes: work, war, race, etc. Any collection of Studs’ interviews is an entry into other times and places; the man had the ability to ask the right, generally succinct question, and then get out of the way. He allowed his subjects to speak from their own very specific locations, trusting that the reader would make their own connections.
The result in They All Sang is collection loosely organized by genre that covers music people I’d never heard of, along with some I had, talking about subjects and times I was sometimes familiar with and other times not. It’s all made accessible and interesting by Stud’s insatiable curiosity and the belief that everyone has a story worth hearing.
Unapologetic, Francis Spufford (2013)
In his Books and Culture review, Alan Jacobs calls Unapologetic a ”sweary and funny and lovely book.” Francis Spufford’s non-defense of Christian faith is certainly more than these but also not less which makes the book such a surprise. Have you ever read a book about Christianity’s validity that begins (and mostly ends) with emotion? The author’s cheeky British wit and irreverence toward certain taboos and sacred cows only add to the pleasures this book contains. I’m not an apologetics guy.
Books that claim to defend Christian faith hold almost no interest for me, nor do I usually understand the need to defend faith in the ways these books attempt. Christianity, as I understand it, requires God initiated faith, something that is impossible to defend or explain with language and assumptions outside of the faith. Also, Christianity contains it’s own internal logic, what might be described as the ethics of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a logic that, at many points, will be out of step or unintelligible to those who’ve not stepped into the Faith.
I understand the importance of showing Christianity’s historical place and consistencies, not to mention the constant need to locate the Bible in it’s cultural context. However, the impulse to convince people who don’t share Christianity’s assumptions about how the world works that Christianity best explains how the world works seems a generally fruitless exercise.
And it’s the opposite of what Spufford does in Unapologetic. Instead, he mixes his own encounters with faith with retellings of the Christian story to show the emotional resonance of Jesus and his story. Emotions here are not the opposite of intellect; rather, Spufford shows how Christian faith resonates with his entire personhood. There are a few assumptions here that I didn’t agree with, but I these didn’t take away from Spufford’s surprising and necessary non-apology.
Reading for Preaching, Cornelius Plantinga (2013)
I try to choose books for this list that will appeal to most readers of this blog. I actually don’t think this book about preaching is an exception. Cornelius Plantinga is theologian and seminary president who doesn’t write like either. This is a book about reading and preaching that isn’t overly-serious about its subjects. Plantinga clearly cares about preaching and he makes the case well that preachers ought to be thoughtful readers, yet he approaches these things with warmth and a light hand. This sort of book could make a preacher feel guilty for what he or she is not doing in preparation for that weekly appointment in the pulpit.
There is not guilt in Reading for Preaching, just a gracious invitation to the world of sentences and stories for the benefit of the preacher and hers or his congregation. As much as Plantinga cares about good preaching, he’s equally taken by reading and this is where the book will be enjoyed by readers who’d rather die than preach. All types of reading are discussed in these pages; the author doesn’t privilege codex over reading online or so-called literary fiction over a newspaper article. All of these have their place in the life of the reader and Plantinga helps us see why and how we might consider these different forms of writing more thoughtfully.
After all, most of us read and mostly forget. We live in the author’s world for a few minutes or a few weeks and then, aside from an anecdote or two, we move on. Plantinga wants preachers to recall more of their reading, to find ways of interacting with facts, ideas, and imaginations such that the other Book comes alive. His thoughts about how to do this are helpful to readers who want the books they read to be more than temporary distractions.
