Benjamin Vrbicek 12/30/14 Benjamin Vrbicek 12/30/14

Reading List 2014

I’m not sure if readers love them, but I read enough blogs to know that bloggers love to create them: End-of-the-Year Lists. This is my contribution—the list of books I read in 2014 and a few comments about them.

Below is the list of books that I read in 2014. My goal for the last two years was to read 52 books during the year, or about one book a week. As you can see, I didn’t quite make it. I only hit 50 books. (For the nerds out there, the numbers come in at 13,075 total pages, or about 261 pages per week.) But I’m not too bummed; by God’s grace, I got closer than last year (34). Maybe in 2015 it will happen.

Some Disclaimers

As you glance at the list, you might notice a few things (some of them a little goofy), so I might as well point them out. First, I removed the “dates of completion,” but the books are listed in the order that I completed them.

Second, I didn’t count partial books, except for one. I only made it through one-third of The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard B. Hays. The book is huge. I took it on vacation in August, and, well, you know how it goes. Maybe someday I’ll come back to it.

Third, you’ll see books from several different categories (some about writing, blogging and publishing; others on preaching, theology, and Christian living; and one biography, and a few novels). I do this for a number of reasons, but one of them is cross training; it’s a healthy thing. Another reason is for continuing education. Oh – and don’t forget – for enjoyment. That’s important too.

A few of my favorites were as follows: In the writing cluster, I enjoyed How to Write Short by Peter Roy Clark (everything he writes is helpful), and Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik (the title is a rift on the famous book by Strunk and White).

As for preaching, I re-read Christ-Centered Preaching by Bryan Chappell and The Supremacy of God in Preaching by John Piper (for like the fourth time). Both are excellent in different ways (Christ-Centered Preaching deals with the theology of preaching but also the mechanics of preaching and the anatomy of a sermon, whereas The Supremacy of God in Preaching focuses on the goals and traits of good preaching with a case study on Jonathan Edwards).

As for theology and Christian living, everything Robert Gagnon has written on homosexuality is helpful, but beware: his treatments tend to be exhaustive, which means they also tend to be quite long. Additionally, the essays in Themelios (written by several authors) were full of riveting scholarship.

In the category of biography and novels, I really enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath and The Pearl, both by John Steinbeck, and Justified Conduct by Linda Vargo (she is working on the sequel; I know because she is letting me help edit it). I also greatly enjoyed Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (you can see my book review here).

Fourth, #42 on the list is The Bible. Yep, I count that one too. Actually, I hope it makes this list every year. This leads to the next comment.

Fifth, where page counts are not obvious, I took my best guess based on an average “words per page” of the typical book. I did this for books like The Bible and Robert Gagnon’s 60,000+ words of email correspondence about the topic of “homosexuality and the Bible,” which I printed and read with great interest. Fascinating stuff – firm at times, but always very pastoral. And these types of “books” lead to the last disclaimer.

Sixth, I’m aware that calling everything on the list a “book” is a stretch. For example, Gagnon’s “published” emails; Themelios is a theological journal published three times a year; and Ramona and Her Father is a children’s book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading out loud with my oldest daughter (we alternated reading pages). But if a man is trying to hit 52 books in one year, he tends to want to count it all.

I Hope to Encourage

More could be said, but I’ll end with this. I’m not sure if this list will encourage or discourage – or maybe some of both.

My strong hope is that it will encourage you to read and learn and grow. And if it does happen to discourage, keep two things in mind: First, I used to hate to read and rarely did it. Second, for two years in a row, I have not hit my target, but I try not to worry about that. The reality is this: whether I read the “right” number of books or not, I made progress. And that was always the goal behind the goal. Maybe your goal in 2015 is only to read one book a month. I say go for it; even if you come up a little short, you’ll make some progress, and learn, and grow, and hopefully enjoy it too.