One of my 99 goals for 2011 was to read one new book every month and review it. Turns out, I’ve ready way more than that this year. Here are twelve of the most significant books. All the links are affiliate links.

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The Pastor. Before he wrote The Message, Eugene Peterson was a pastor of a church in Maryland. And before that, he wasn’t planning to be a pastor. He was going to be a professor. That’s a lot like me.

Peterson’s writing has shaped my thinking and Bible study and writing for years. Which means that you have been shaped by it. This book is the story of how Peterson was shaped.

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The Jesus Way by Eugene Peterson. Subtitled “Conversations on the ways that Jesus is the way,” this is Peterson’s exploration of the ways that people tell us to follow Jesus, and the ways that Jesus invites us to follow. The two are often different. This is an abrasive book, not because Peterson is abrasive, but because we have built up such misguided notions. He looks at Moses, David, and other people from the Bible.

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King’s Cross is Tim Keller’s commentary on the book of Mark. I never make notes about books. Except for this one. Example: “…every culture says identity is performance-based, achievement-based. And Jesus says that will never work. If you gain the whole world, he says, it won’t be big enough or bright enough to cover up the stain of inconsequentiality. No  matter how many of these things you gain, it’s never enough to make you sure of who you are.”

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Mudhouse Sabbath. Lauren Winner looks at several spiritual practices, like prayer, grieving, and fasting. She tells of her conversions, first to being an Orthodox Jew and then to being a Christian. She talks about how her Jewish life taught her well in these disciplines. It was a quick read. She writes with honesty and vulnerability. (I also read Girl Meets God
which was a memoir of the process.)

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A couple years ago, Ed Dobson decided to spend a year living like Jesus (The Year of Living Like Jesus). He had heard A.J. Jacobs talking about his book, The Year of Living Biblically. Jacobs, who was agnostic and Jewish, needed a new book idea after having read through the Encyclopedia Britannica, and decided to live for a year doing what the Bible said to do. Dobson, who had been a pastor and now was retired and living with ALS, decided that someone should try the same thing as Jacobs, but this time living like Jesus lived and taught.

What both of them realized was that living according to the Bible was a consuming project. It demanded reflection about how literal and how figurative to be. A.J. Jacobs wrestled with how to obey the teaching about stoning people. Ed Dobson struggled with living in a very conservative culture and following Jesus’ example of hanging around with sinners. Both of them found that they had to arrive at some accommodations. Each of them thought about quitting. But both of them completed their year of living with the constraints. Both of them were changed by the process.

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The Checklist Manifesto isn’t about todo lists, at least not the kind we write daily. Atul Gawande writes about the kind that pilots and doctors use so they don’t forget steps in actions they do every day. Or only in emergencies. If you ever say, “I can’t believe I forgot that” or if you keep finding tpyos in pieces you write daily, Gawande will help.

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One day in November, I decided to read Isaiah. And I did. That day. It was amazing.

Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture by Daniel Treier provides an overview to a comparatively recent approach to biblical interpretation. In contrast to historical methods that focus on the text and separate the spiritual element, this body of thought looks at the text as words from God. Hence, the word theological in the title. The forerunner of this scholarly activity is Karl Barth. It started in the mainstream, with several writers coming out of Yale (somewhat independently it seems). Evangelicals and Catholics are starting to show interest (Treier is on Wheaton’s faculty). For reasons I may tell you someday, this book reshaped my scholarly view of myself.

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Regular readers here know that I talk often about reading the Bible. But one of the projects I’ve wanted to do and haven’t yet is to trace some threads all the way through the Bible. Randy Frazee has done that with The Heart of the Story. Some of us know two or three Bible stories, sort of. Some of us have worked hard to tell some of the stories well, shining a flashlight on them. Frazee is a tour guide, walking us all the way through the Bible, pointing out a story path.

At the beginning of the book, Frazee talks about the Upper Story and the Lower Story, the one big story that God is telling and the many little stories of individuals and daily life. As he walks his way through the story of the Bible, he ties the individual stories into the big story. (The rest of my review post about this book is at The Heart of the Story).

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Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas. Review Book Kindle