Midway through the solar Persian year of 1388, I started keeping tracks of the books that I read (in connection with this discipline). Motivated party by nostalgia, partly by a desire to see what stuck with me, and partly by pretentiousness, I’ve decided to go over my lists. This list begins in alphabetical order, because I only started keeping track midway through 1388, so I listed all the books I had read up to that point.

  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • A Child’s History of England—My first voluntary Dickens book. Charming; probably whiggish.
  • Diggers in the Earth—surprisingly fascinating.
  • Frankenstein—Great literature; so much more than a monster story.
  • Gulliver’s Travels
  • Ivanhoe—Very good.
  • Little Women—Sweet… treacly sweet.
  • Orthodoxy
  • Peter and Wendy
  • Phastastes—My first foray into George MacDonald. I reread it recently because I couldn’t remember the plot. But there is no plot, just George MacDonald’s fertile imagination.
  • The Pilgrim’s Progress—Heavy-handed moralizing, terrible fiction. My first intimation that C.S. Lewis and I have different taste.
  • Pride and Prejudice—Not as good as the 1996 BBC original. 😉
  • Robinson Crusoe—Great story; difficult prose.
  • The Sign of the Four—Holmes! So I was in my late 20s before I got into this.
  • Sketch of Handel and Beethoven
  • A Study in Scarlet
  • Thomas Wingfold, Curate—Really wonderful moral novel.
  • The Time Machine
  • On the Incarnation—I know I had read this before, so this was a (fully justified!) re-reading.
  • The Resurrection of the Son of God—Intellectually formative. I read about a hundred pages and ordered the earlier two books in the series.
  • Kingdom and Promise
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?—Great popular-level discussion of philosophical questions.
  • Language documentation
  • Henry VI, Part 2—This is when I decided to finish up Shakespeare’s histories. There’s a reason you don’t hear much about Henry VI.
  • Henry VI, Part 3
  • Life of Anthony
  • Tricks of the Trade—Provides wonderful intuition about qualitative research.
  • The Spirit of the Disciplines—Easily my favorite Willard book; far better than The Divine Conspiracy.
  • Cultures & Organizations—Principal component analysis of cultural variables; what’s not to love?
  • A Practical View—This book, written by William Wilberforce, sounds like one I’d like to read. I can’t remember a thing about it.
  • Descent into hell—My first Charles Williams book. Mind-bender! I’d like to re-read it.
  • Richard III—My reward for making it through the Henry VI’s.
  • Please Understand Me II—I don’t recall the merits of the book; I’m a big fan of Meyers-Briggs in general. (I’m a textbook INTJ.)
  • Now, Discover Your Strengths
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns—If his first wasn’t exploitative enough for you….
  • A Manual of Literacy for Preliterate Peoples
  • Descent into Chaos—Interesting subject matter, horrible analysis.
  • Emma
  • Silmarillion—Very difficult to care about.