Every year at this time, I kick off the end of the year with my list of favorite books from the last 12 months. Invariably, sometime between now and New Year’s Eve, I will realize that I’ve forgotten one or two and wish I could redo the list. If I waited for a perfect memory, though, this would never get done. Here they are, in alphabetical order by author.
Wendell Berry, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 (Counterpoint)
My great-grandmother lived to be 104 years old. This meant that for literally 20 years, every Christmas we would say to ourselves, “This is probably Grandma’s last Christmas,” until we finally gave up. Wendell Berry, who’s influenced my life more than perhaps any other living writer, is 90 years old (you can read the birthday tribute I wrote for him for the Library of America here). Several times over the years, I’ve thought, “This is probably the last Wendell Berry book I will get to put on the year-end favorites list.” I’m always wrong—and I hope I keep being wrong.
This latest volume is a collection of “Sabbath poems”—verses Mr. Berry writes on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky, each Sunday. The poems get at things those who read Berry will expect—the givenness of nature, the gift of good land, the joys of long marriage, the wisdom of ignorance, the goodness of limits, the follies of hypermobility and consumerism. Berry is a contrarian about lots of things—which is why we love him—and one of those things is what people call “organized religion.” His faith, though, is deep and wide, and his immersion in what Karl Barth called “the strange, new world of the Bible” is too. One with ears to hear will perceive all kinds of echoes of that affection throughout these poems.
For instance, in a poem from 2014 about the techno-utopianism about which Berry has been warning us for over a half-century, he writes: “Will the robotic leader come at last to achieve our objective, feed the hungry, forgive the debtors, heal the sick, give sight to the blind, release the captives, raise the dead? Or do we look for another?” The implied counsel is a mirror image of that given to the disciples of John the Baptist: Yes, we should look for Another.
By definition, poetry must be experienced, not described. So here’s a taste of what’s in this book, from a Sabbath poem in 2015, about what it’s like to grow old:
“What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worded
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.”
My spell checker tells me that regardlessly is grammatically incorrect in the poem above. The computer is wrong, of course, but I’m glad it flagged the word. I could hit “Ignore All” in honor of Wendell Berry and give at least one little protest to the expertise of the machines, knowing that he would have me ignore it all anyway.
Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel (Grove)
Those of you who’ve read this newsletter for a long time know that one of the keys to my philosophy of history comes from a line by the Grateful Dead: “It’s even worse than it appears, but it’s alright.” That’s kind of a summation, really, of Jesus’ words to John at Patmos: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forever, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this” (Rev. 1:17–19, ESV throughout). In other words, a “cheerful apocalypse” is not an oxymoron for me.
For many people, though, the idea of a hopeful dystopia is unnerving. In his Washington Post review of Leif Enger’s new novel, Ron Charles wrote, “Over the past few years, I’ve read so many dystopian novels that I had to look up the plural spelling of ‘apocalypse.’” This beautifully crafted novel is set in just such a conflation of apocalypses: the aftermath of climate disaster, a Fahrenheit 451-ish culture of book-burning, widespread addiction to a mind-numbing drug, and a popular demand for assisted suicide to escape it all.
The bleak setting is one of the ways this book comes slant at the reader—with a taste of joy and a sense of tomorrow. In many ways, hope comes easier here than faith. Enger has a complicated view of the church, as seen in his description of an impromptu community musical band as “what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.” A pastor is described, brilliantly, as “a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error.”
This book, though, offers us Apocalypse—not in the sense of dystopian collapse but in the literal meaning of the word “Apocalypse.” Lark is the one to note that “the word apocalypse originally had nothing to do with nukes or climate but came from a Greek term meaning to uncover. To reveal.” This book apocalyptically shows us that the bleakness of the surroundings is not the last thing to be said.
Much of that is revealed through an emphasis on the creative power of words. In the backdrop is the election of the country’s first illiterate president and Lark, the owner of a beleaguered bookstore, who is searching for a volume, the same title as the novel itself, that she describes as a “covenant with the forthcoming.” One of the characters notes, “Words are one way we leave tracks in the world.” The bulwark against apocalypse is, ultimately, made up of books and of the remembered words of which they are made up.
Perhaps the most important quote of the book comes from Lark after she is asked, “How are you feeling?” Her answer: “Probably doomed and perplexingly merry.” That makes sense to me, and this book pulls back the veil of a little apocalypse so we can see it together. When offered this kind of apocalypse, I cheerfully accept.
You can listen to Leif Enger and me as we discuss this book and other topics here.
Brian Fairbanks, Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever (Hachette)
Right before Thanksgiving, our dog Willie snipped at the veterinarian while getting a shot. I didn’t realize that, in the state of Tennessee, that requires a follow-up inquiry from animal control—and a ten-day quarantine from contact with other animals and with people outside the immediate family. I joked that this was due to our little dachshund being named after Willie Nelson (replacing as he did our dog Waylon). The Nashville establishment has always had it in for the Outlaws.
I knew I would want this book, and I knew I would read it, but I didn’t expect to learn anything from it. After all, I’ve been following the Outlaws—Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and (sometimes, depending on how you count it) Johnny Cash—since I was three years old. The book covers familiar territory, such as Jennings’s grief after having given up his seat on Buddy Holly’s plane with the taunt “I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” and it does. The book details the tension between Music Row executives and this form of music that wanted to transcend the rhinestone sameness of the Nashville sound. The book is about more than all that, though.
The religious aspects of these stories aren’t ignored either. Fairbanks discusses how Cash tanked his career—after his conversion to evangelical Christianity—by singing Christian-themed songs, including hymns. When Cash did a three-album set dividing his work into the categories of love, God, and murder, murder outsold God three to one. “Stop going to church and go back to prisons,” one of the executives pleaded with Cash.
What I found most captivating were the stories about these artists as what they were—a group of friends with very, very complicated relationships. His discussion of the Highwaymen—Nelson, Jennings, Cash, and Kristofferson—for instance delves into the political differences—Jennings on the far right, Cash in the center, Nelson on the left, and Kris on the *way* left—without reducing them to avatars of those points of view. The Outlaws fought among themselves constantly—and were divided into the Red/Blue divides of the rest of the country—but still loved each other in spite of it all.
When Columbia dropped Cash from its label, seeing him as hopelessly dated, Merle Haggard told the executive responsible for it, “Let it go down in history that you’re the dumbest son of a b— I’ve ever met.” We all need friends like that. The joy of it could be seen in the gentle jabbing humor Fairbanks records out of each of them. “We marry what we need,” Kristofferson once said. “I married a lawyer, and Willie married a makeup artist.”
The book’s most piercing moment, at least for me, came near the end when Fairbanks discusses the final days of Waylon Jennings. He recounts the lifelong guilt Jennings experienced over the Buddy Holly plane crash, and that this was more than survivor’s guilt. It was about the joke. He lived most of his life hoping no one would ever find out he had said that. I might have teared up a little when Fairbanks writes about Jennings’s late-in-life reconsideration of how vapid all the rivalries were between these artists over the decades.
“All the fussing and fighting over who gets played on the radio or headlines the state fairs don’t amount to much more than a range war,” Jennings said. “I think you just make your music, you do the best you can with that, and that’s what you’ll be remembered for.”
“My friends,” Waylon said. “The town is big enough for all of us.” It really is—no matter which town one has in mind.
The book includes the scene of the last call between Cash and Jennings, right before Waylon’s death. Both men said “goodbye” and “I love you.” Nelson eulogized Jennings by saying: “When it came to taking on the country music establishment, he had the guts and self-confidence to lead the way. If it weren’t for Waylon, I might still be back in Nashville looking to please the wrong people.”
The book closes with the reality that, though the Outlaws arguably saved country music, the downtown streets of Nashville, just a few miles away from me, ignore them. On Nashville’s Walk of Fame, Willie and Waylon are absent. Unspoken, however, is the reader’s conclusion at the end of this book: Who would you rather be? The Music Row executive who fired Johnny Cash? The would-be star next up in line, willing to please all the wrong people for the rest of a lifetime? Or Willie and Waylon and the boys?
Nancy French, Ghosted: An American Story (Zondervan)
I’m the guy who’s supposed to pose ethical dilemmas, but this book posed one for me. The author, who is a friend, asked me to read it and blurb it, and I was tempted to lie. The lie was not the kind that one normally faces in such a situation—the kind that inflates the value of something mediocre. It was just the opposite. As I read this book, I realized about a third of the way through that it was one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read by anybody.
If I write what I really think about this book, no one will believe me, I thought. People will assume that I’m enthusiastic about the book because it’s written by Nancy. No one will know that I would be blown away by this book even if I didn’t know who the author was. I didn’t lie, but I understated my enthusiasm in the blurb.
Understatement will not do here, because those of you who read this newsletter know that I don’t mind telling you what I think. This book is amazing—and it is very, very hard to describe. The reason it’s hard to describe is because it shifts the reader back and forth between laughter and tears but in very unexpected ways. You will find yourself laughing during material that is really dark—and you will find yourself tearing up during descriptions of hilarity.
You’ve probably never run over Mitt Romney on a ski slope. You’ve probably never asked, “What am I doing here?” while backstage at a Donald Trump rally. You’ve probably never had to hitchhike with a neo-Nazi. You’ve probably never had your fortune read somewhere in the Appalachian countryside. You’ve probably not had to deal with your spouse being drafted to run for president of the United States. I’m very sure you’ve probably never suspected your husband of an affair only to find out the women were really looking for Van Halen lead vocalist David Lee Roth. This book will let you feel all of that.
But I’ll bet a lot of you know exactly what it’s like to have someone misuse their spiritual authority over you or to have friends you trusted walk away from you or to worry about the safety of your family. This book takes those everyday fears and frames them in ways you’ve never considered.
The title, Ghosted, has multiple meanings. Nancy is a ghostwriter, someone who helps celebrities and others put their thoughts and ideas into words. The title also refers to those who ghosted her, especially in the conservative Republican world Nancy inhabited, over her stands against Trump and alt-right ethno-nationalism. But it also refers to the ghosts of the past—those moments of hardship and heartbreak that haunt us long after they are gone. The best ghost stories are those that break us out of the denial that there actually is a ghost there, so that we can acknowledge it, ask what it’s trying to tell us, and let it go on its way. This book does that—and does it beautifully.
When you finish this book, you will have laughed and cried and pondered and clenched your fists in vicarious anger and given thanks for things you never knew you loved—and then you will think to yourself something like what I did: “I can’t wait for volume two.”
You can listen to Nancy French and me as we talk about this book, and about marriage, and politics, and many other things here.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin)
I’ve often said here that one of the key problems with the velocity of this era is that there is very little time, when discussing the implications of any technology, between “That’s so out there. We’ll never have to deal with that” and “Well, it’s ubiquitous. What are you gonna do?” The smartphone is a key exhibit in that problem. Most people—including most adolescents—are aware that smartphones are hurting our mental health and our relationships in all kinds of ways. But most of us shrug our shoulders, with the implied, “Well, that’s just life now. What are you gonna do?”
In this book, Jonathan Haidt takes the “What are you gonna do?” and shakes it out of its role as a rhetorical question, hammers it back into place as a sincere question, and then answers it.
I once asked Haidt, when he was working on this book, how it would differ from, say, Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman railing 40 or 50 years ago about television. “When you and I were kids watching too much television, we were not the ones saying it was a problem,” he replied. “The kids themselves are now telling us that it is.”
This book is a jeremiad, but not in the popular use of that word, which often implies an airing of grievances about something that can’t, or likely won’t, be changed. It’s a jeremiad in the sense of the actual prophet Jeremiah—who was unsparing in his honesty about the depths of the problems no one wanted to acknowledge, who pictured a future on the other side of it all, and who delivered the way to live in the time in between those two realities.
Since having Haidt on with me on the podcast several times, I’ve heard from countless parents, teachers, school administrators, church youth groups, and congregations that have adopted recommendations he offers in this book—and they have found them to work. Like his book The Righteous Mind, this volume rewires the entire scope of the debate.
You can listen to Jonathan Haidt and me as we talk about this book and other issues here.
Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity)
Byung-Chul Han stands in the tradition of Jacques Ellul and Christopher Lasch, writing book after book of social commentary, reading any one of which will result in never seeing things the same again. This book does this with categories Han calls “information” and “storytelling.” He defines information as consumable, controllable facts, while a story requires an interplay of knowledge and ignorance, clarity and distance. The information age has thrown us into what he calls a “narrative crisis.”
Information is about problem-solving techniques, while narration is about wisdom, which requires stability, tradition, and continuity. With disconnected facts, we have mere survival, but a narration is necessary for hope. The information age, Han writes, empties the magic from the world and renders things and experiences mute. They do not “speak to us.” The hunger for myth—what Han defines as “ritually staged narratives”—is not satisfied as easily as we might think.
Instead, Han argues, it opens up a market for what he calls “storyselling,” which seeks to mine narrative for the emotions required by stories. This is manipulated by marketers and politicians who use story not to create community but to manipulate consumers.
I wrote earlier this year about how the “crisis of narration” problem should be addressed by confronting rampant biblical illiteracy—especially the kind that believes itself to be biblical by mining the text for doctrinal systems and worldview principles while remaining dead to the biblical narrative itself.
John Hendrix, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (Abrams Fanfare)
Many of you have heard me speak about last year’s phenomenal graphic novel about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Faithful Spy (not assassin, don’t get me started). Some of you have heard me say that the ending of that book—Bonhoeffer dreaming of swimming beneath the water to see two hands above pulling him upward—moved me in ways that stay with me all the time.
The same author/illustrator is back with a biography of the relationship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The artwork is amazing, but the storytelling is just as good. Even those of us very familiar with the Inklings and the goings-on at the Eagle and Child will be captivated by the way this book seems to take us right there to the Rabbit Room, to the Kilns, even off for a bit into Narnia and Middle-earth. The book expertly defines the word myth in the sense that Tolkien and Hugo Dyson meant it, showing why that matters for the here and now.
The main force of the book, though, is not about mythology or literature. In this sense, it’s similar to the undercurrent of the book on the Outlaws. If you never imagined Waylon and Willie meeting Jack and Tollers, stay with me for a moment.
Like the Highwaymen, the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien was fractured, filled with genuine disagreement and probably unarticulated rivalry. We all know that Tolkien hated the Narnia stories, but Hendrix takes us further up and further in to the disdain, arguing that Tolkien didn’t understand what Lewis was trying to do—to enter back into the tin toy garden he created as a child. Middle-earth was a different kind of threshold to cross.
Hendrix shows us how, after the friendship fractured, the two would sometimes get together after Joy Davidman’s death for a pipe and a drink. “But they avoided the Deep wounds,” he writes. “Neither man could bring himself to bridge that great divorce.”
And that leads to my favorite part of the book, one not rooted in real history but in an imagined ending for Lewis and Tolkien—one in which they forgive each other. “I still object to Father Christmas,” the Tolkien character says (IYKYK). The imagined Lewis says, “So many years trying to find joy … when all along it was a signpost—pointing to a greater country.” The ending of these two enjoying a final kettle of tea before crossing the ultimate threshold wrecked me.
“When somebody you’ve wronged forgives you, you’re spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience,” Frederick Buechner once wrote. “When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other’s presence.”
This book gives us a feeling of this, even if that reconciliation is in imagination and not in reality. But as soon as I type this, I can feel myself at the Eagle and Child, peering through the pipe smoke to see Lewis and Tolkien and Owen Barfield and hearing one of them say, “And who says imagination isn’t real?” True enough.
Russ Ramsey, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive (Zondervan)
When my friend Russ Ramsey told me that his next book, a spiritual sequel to his work Rembrandt Is in the Wind, was centered around Vincent van Gogh, I almost made a stupid joke about cutting off one’s ear. I’m glad I didn’t. The book convinced me that the joking about that incident is not only reductionistic but downright cruel.
I know no one who can get at art like Russ can, even for those who don’t know enough about art to explain why they like what they like. As a matter of fact, as I read this book, I realized it is about much more than art. It’s about human beings and human stories.
The book concludes with this meditation:
Vincent van Gogh said of his art, “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” Many artists live at the river’s edge. Their work explores the perilous seam where suffering falls off into despair, where affection wells up into passion, where the winds of heaven blow through the stuff of earth. They provide high-relief compositions of the ordinary and matter-of-fact portrayals of the transcendent. They help us see the wonder of being alive and the inevitability of having to die. They read our story back to us, and we, in turn, ask to see the pictures.
In this book, Russ guides the reader through a spectrum of human realities and emotions, each through the grid of a particular piece of artwork—from Leonardo da Vinci to Norman Rockwell and beyond. It is the closest one can come to walking around an art museum with Russ Ramsey, hearing not just a penetrating examination of the artwork but an explanation of what it means to live and to die and to question why. This book is even better than Rembrandt Is in the Wind—and that is saying something.
My only negative word about this book is the title of one chapter: “I Don’t Like Donatello, and You Can Too”—but only because I think he should have saved it for the title of volume three of what definitely should be a trilogy.
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap)
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age revolutionized the way both secularists and Christians think about secularization, noting that it is not just that some societies become less religious over time but that the very experience of religion is different from what it once was. This book, I would argue, is just as important. The present age relates differently not just to God but also to what moderns would call “nature.” What’s left is a sense of absence—of longing, the sort of “everydayness” that Walker Percy described in his “The Man on the Train” essay.
Taylor traces this trajectory in poetry, arguing that the poetic form is itself an attempt at “re-connecting” with the rhythms of the cosmos, a cosmos ordered by Word. In so doing, Taylor provides piercing analysis of poets ranging from Shelley and Keats to Eliot and Miłosz.
Many of you will be tempted to skip this book because it’s massive (around 600 pages), and that’s especially true of those of you who don’t know much about poetry. Even if you only read the very beginning and the very end, the book is more than worth your time at figuring out a diagnosis and some proposed remedies for the “deadness” and “muteness” of the world as it seems to be right now.
This is not a nostalgic narrative about the tragic loss of “enchantment,” looking backward to the myth of an idyllic agrarian yesterday. Taylor sees genuine moral steps forward, for instance, on human rights and self-government. In such matters, Taylor argues, we now ethically demand of all people standards once expected for persons of exceptional moral strength.
The longing for cosmic connection, Taylor argues, points to a kind of “interspace” between a human observer and the universe. As the Romantics pointed out, sometimes a sense of awe and wonder comes flooding in, but, as Eliot warned, the experience is fleeting and ambiguous.
Taylor writes: “The great advances of the natural sciences over the last three centuries, which in recent decades have accelerated, have (understandably but wrongly) helped create a mindset which refuses to take any knowledge claim seriously which cannot meet the validation conditions of these sciences—unless they be about everyday observable realities (How many chairs are in this room? How many people attended the meeting?)” The ongoing need for cosmic connection, though, does not go away. Taylor argues that’s because it is necessary to what it means to be human.
This book is necessary for those of us who wish to see a resurgence of historic, apostolic Christianity because we see all around us the wreckage of attempts (both “fundamentalist” and “modernist” and otherwise) to build doctrinal systems or to mobilize movements without answering that longing that calls from deep unto deep.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Zondervan)
A couple of years ago, I was meeting with some friends in a church fellowship hall in Washington, DC. Two rabbis and I arrived early, and we walked around the old sanctuary, looking at the stained-glass windows. The rabbis recognized all of the scenes depicted from the life of Christ, with the exception of one: the transfiguration of Jesus, which happens to be one of my favorite accounts in all of the Bible. So I told the story.
When I said, “And then Moses and Elijah appeared,” one of the rabbis yelled, “No way!” with the kind of surprise I hadn’t heard since Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield showed up on the screen in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
I loved telling that story to people who knew the Hebrew Scriptures but had never heard about the Transfiguration, because I could kind of hear it all over again for the first time, listening through their newness to it.
I thought of that moment as I read this excellent book. In some ways, I regret the title because, for many Christians, “hermeneutics” reads as the cerebral act of examining the text for meaning. This book is about more than that. The author, theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, poses the question “What do I love when I love the biblical words as the word of God?” The book engages debates with scholars, alive and dead, about how, for instance, to interpret Christ in the Old Testament, but it goes beyond that, demonstrating how the readers of the text—you, when you give attention to the Bible in front of you—are addressed by God.
The best part of the book is the last third, in which Vanhoozer deals specifically with the event at Mount Tabor and the biblical references that point forward and backward to it in the rest of the Bible. He argues that the apostle Peter is intentionally showing us how to read Scripture when he ties the words “more fully confirmed” with the voice he heard on “the holy mountain” (2 Pet. 1:18–19). “Peter urges his readers to pay attention to the prophetic word ‘as to a light shining in a dark place,’” Vanhoozer writes, “and the best way to do that is to recall the role of the transfiguration in the economy of light.”
This book will help you interpret the Bible as a “mere Christian,” but more importantly, it will focus your attention on the truth seen in a moment on that mountain: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
