There’s a pleasing variety of non-fiction here. It doesn’t seem to have been a great year for fiction, though there are some good ones.

  • [redacted] — “Oooh… I wonder why it’s redacted?” But this was a painful book to get through, so a little damnatio memoriae may not be inappropriate.
  • The Language of God—Francis Collins; good book.
  • Wuthering Heights—Bleak and depressing. I didn’t care about any of the characters.
  • The Return of Sherlock Holmes
  • Epitome of the Divine Institutes (Lactantius)—I was very glad I read the epitome instead of the full Institutes, because this guy gave no evidence of knowing anything about the Bible. A cautionary tale to future cultural apologists.
  • Indo-European Language and Culture—This was really excellent, the ‘missing manual’ for Indo-European studies.
  • Kidnapped—Stevenson! Wonderful adventure author.
  • Extraordinary, Ordinary People—Condoleeza Rice’s first autobiography. She likes Brahms’ piano sonatas; I’m ambivalent about him.
  • Pirate Latitudes—Published posthumously, so who knows what he would have done with it, but what a terrible book.
  • No Country for Old Men—My first Cormac McCarthy book; I’ve become a fan (and tried my hand at his style!).
  • The Critical Villager—Interesting development writing; good reflections on the aid process.
  • The Great Divorce—Lewis writes the perfect rebuttal to MacDonald’s universalism—strong, yet gentle. Moral formation is important. This is probably my favorite C.S. Lewis book.
  • Christian Behavior—Unfortunately I can’t remember this book; a google search suggests that the author was either Lewis or Bunyan; I think Lewis is more likely, but I can’t recall a thing about this.
  • The Little Book of Conflict Transformation
  • Jesus and the God of Israel—Bauckham. This was very good, and offers some interesting directions for understanding early christology.
  • Next
  • The Princess and the Goblin—George MacDonald at his best, profound and childlike. Probably also the most cohesive plot of any MacDonald book too.
  • The Art of Writing (Stevenson)—He sure knew how to write, but I don’t recall that he had any insights about how to write.
  • Operational Security Management in Violent Environments—Good, straightforward prose and hardheaded thinking. Bit of a depressing read, but good nonetheless.
  • Rob Roy—I remember waiting and waiting and waiting to meet Rob Roy. This was good, but the actual protagonist is someone entirely different.
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—The plot was thin and the sex and violence were voyeuristic. Its popularity is no mystery.
  • His Last Bow
  • Basics of Biblical Greek
  • The Psychopath Test—This was a great read.
  • The Pioneer Woman—Don’t judge me; my wife had gotten it from the library and I needed a book.
  • The Iliad—The Pope translation. It reflects poorly upon me that I’ve enjoyed having read this book far more than I enjoyed the actual reading.
  • Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy—This was pretty thin gruel. I’d previously enjoyed the same author’s history of Byzantium, but this was too cursory. (I want to say Julian Norwich, but of course that’s not right)
  • The Princess and Curdie—I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Princess and The Goblin; this was much more grown up.
  • Basic Music Theory
  • The Trivium—Slightly more interesting than reading the classifieds.
  • The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
  • The Man with Two Left Feet
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave—If America was produced any more mature reflection of freedom, individualism, and human dignity, I have not found it.
  • War in Heaven—This is my favorite Williams book; I love the image of the archdeacon who is saturated with the liturgy.
  • The Valley of Fear
  • Basics of Biblical Greek Workbook
  • Many Dimensions—Perhaps my second-favorite Williams book.
  • The Great Gatsby—I can’t understand the appeal of this book. Want to read a choppy story about people throwing their lives away over trivia?
  • Introduction to Epistemology—This was very nice; very good explanations.
  • 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know—This was my foray into making my programming more professional. I forget what I took away from this book specifically, but my code has become far better in the last several years.
  • Sense and Sensibility—I can’t recall a specific critique, but I didn’t enjoy this. I don’t seem to have read a Jane Austen book since this one.
  • Never let me go—A single clever idea, spread too thinly over a novel.
  • Ben-Hur—My goodness, what a terrible book. What a terrible portrait of Christ at the end, anemic and effeminate.
  • Watch for the Light—An uneven collection of Advent devotional material, but it stirs the pot.
  • The Climax of the Covenant
  • Relevance Theory: A Guide to Successful Communication in Translation—So much of linguistics is quibbling over details and paring down the data until we can account for it. Relevant Theory allows us to analyze satisfying chunks of reality.
  • Introduction to Translation Studies
  • The Persian Literature, Volume 1
  • Semiotics for Beginners—A fun book available online. I’m still only vaguely aware what semiotics itself is good for, but the data are interesting.
  • The Persian Literature, Volume 2 (Gulistan)
  • No Higher Honor
  • Thousand and One Nights, Volume 1—I don’t plan to read the subsequent volumes, since this was mostly the same story told over and over again. But perhaps the stories are sorted by plot, and other volumes have different plotlines.
  • The Tacit Dimension