My favorite books of 2023
Book recommendations in fiction, memoir, theology, and more
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Gentle reader,
Oh, how I love books, and I love getting and giving book recommendations. In today’s post, I’m sharing my favorite reads of 2023. I’ve divided the book recs into 4 categories: novels, (mostly spiritual) nonfiction, theology (with some mostly spiritual memoir), and my favorite book of the year.
I’d love to hear about your favorite reads this year; drop your recommendations in the comments!
Top picks in novels:
Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls is a beautifully written missing person story treating family, disability, happiness, and loss. It’s a book with heavy themes that never hits you over the head with those themes (succeeding in this even though the novel’s narrator likes footnotes!)
“Our brains are hardwired to want resolution, to want the answer. The bigger and broader the mystery, the deeper the satisfaction when it’s resolved,”
— from Happiness Falls
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is story of long term friendship and of the nature of good work. From the description at Amazon; “Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.”
“Sam's doctor said to him, ‘The good news is that the pain is in your head.’
But I am in my head, Sam thought.”
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus absolutely charmed me. It’s also a well-done television show at Apple TV, but, you know…the book was better. There’s love and friendship and science and cooking and misogyny and a fabulous dog. The characters in the book are no fans of Christianity, but their reasons are good ones, as they’ve been subjected to spiritual abuse.
“Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do,”
— from Lessons in Chemistry
Tess Gunty’s National Book Award winning The Rabbit Hutch is one of the richest things I’ve read in some time. Gunty does her own thing with language, and it’s magic. The book goes deeply into themes of faith; the main character, Blandine, is obsessed with medieval mystics. Content note: the book deals with sexual assault.
“You couldn’t go anywhere in this town without bumping into God,”
—from The Rabbit Hutch
Top picks in (spiritual leaning) nonfiction:
I’m sure many of you have read Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, but I finally got to it this year and was floored by it. In fact, I wrote a whole post here:
“Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fire burning self-contained for power’s sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang,”
— from Holy the Firm
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy by Mark Doty is some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. The book is about how stuff matters, so it’s good fare for thinking about the doctrine of creation and being human. It’s also about still life, a genre I’ve never liked or understood. Doty led me to see it and love it. Any book that can achieve a conversion is a remarkable book.
“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”
I loved Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals; while Burkeman has a secular understanding of the world, he’s exploring a deeply theological problem, and he is wise in the ways of finitude.
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
—from Four Thousand Weeks
Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats tamed us and Took Over the World is a niche recommendation based on my new status as a cat person, having been converted by Dwight, my #theologycat. I learned about the difference between cats and other domesticated animals and about how the British used cats as a tool for colonialism. Great fun!
“A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it is something rather more remarkable: a tiny conquistador with the whole planet at its feet. House cats would not exist without humans, but we didn’t really create them, nor do we control them now. Our relationship is less about ownership than aiding and abetting,”
— from The Lion in the Living Room
Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss is a trembling, beautiful blend of backyard nature writing and memoir. I don’t usually like this sort of thing, but Renkl’s writing is so wonderful, I know I’ll read this again and again.
“The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line,”
— from Late Migrations
Top picks in theology (with some spiritual leaning memoir):
Julia Foote’s spiritual autobiography, A Brand Plucked from the Fire is available in full as a free download here. Foote, a 19th century evangelist, tells her story of ministering the gospel and of the opposition to that ministry that she endured based on sex and race. I taught this book this year, and my students loved it as much as I did.
“in the early ages of Christianity many women were happy and glorious in martyrdom. How nobly, how heroically, too, in later ages, have women suffered persecution and death for the name of the Lord Jesus. In looking over these facts, I could see no miracle wrought for those women more than in myself. Though opposed, I went forth laboring for God, and he owned and blessed my labors, and has done so wherever I have been until this day. . .”
— from A Brand Plucked from the Fire
Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told absolutely floored me. I read it in a day. Key tells his own story in a way that people just don’t do. The whole thing is unsettling and honest and raw and real, and there is a comparison between two churches which no pastor or Christian should miss. It’s a humor memoir, but it’s an excellent work of ecclesiology. Content note: the book deals with adultery.
“Compatibility is an accomplishment of marriage, not a prerequisite,”
— from How to Stay Married
I’m still thinking about Phillip Cary’s The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ, which is inviting me to reimagine old friends, like Luther and Augustine, who I already know well.
“Making the Gospel central decenters the doctrine of justification by faith alone, precisely by locating its center in Christ, not in our faith or our justification.”
Another book I taught this year: Diane Langberg’s Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church is exemplary is turning to theology to guide us through crises in the church. Content note: the book deals with abuses of power, including spiritual and sexual abuse and genocide.
“We forget that anything done in the name of God that does not bear his character through and through is not of him at all. In our forgetting, we are more loyal to the words of humans than to the commandments of God,”
— from Redeeming Power
Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir is so vulnerable and so clear that it’s all about Jesus.
“The funny thing about having what you think might have been an encounter with God is how you just go on doing all the earthy things, like getting acid indigestion. I brushed my teeth. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s why I’d come to the sink in the first place.”
— from All My Knotted-Up Life
My favorite book of 2023:
My top book of 2023 is Tiffany Kriner’s In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm. I’ve never read anything like it. There is so much here for people interested in literature, in faith, in farming, in flourishing.
I interviewed Tiffany about her book here:
“But we had just set out the new pasture—no more chemicals. That morning, in bathrobe and boots, I walked through thirty acres of woods full of gooseberry bushes and birdsong. The sun was coming up over the lip of the east's cup as I crossed the field. And yes, finally, there they were, the tiniest bits of new sprouted green pasture grass, each leaf lit like a stained-glass window. So many forces hidden there, from root to sky; and I prayed for the healing of the field,”
Here’s to another year of happy reading!
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Some favorite books for the year:
Of Green Stuff Woven, by Cathleen Bascom, Bishop of Kansas. A fascinating novel about people saving the prairie.
La grazia como participación en la naturaleza divina según Tomas Aquino, by Marcel Sorondo Sanchez (I vetted the English translation, coming in 2024). A stunningly insightful investigation of Aquinas' understanding of grace.
Run, Rose, Run, by James Patterson & Dolly Parton. A fun mystery set in the heart of the country western music world.
Le frérisme et ses réseaux, by Florence Bergeaud-Blackler. How the Muslim Brotherhood is subverting democracy in Europe.
The Triune God (2 volumes) Bernard Lonergan, bilingual in Latin-English. His least-known masterpiece that completely recenters trinitarian theology. "Brilliant metaphysical fireworks" — Kate Sonderregger.
I want to read Beth Moore's book. I think there's more to her than I might have thought (uncharitably).
I can't resist tooting my own horn, since we are talking favorite books in 2023... For what it's worth, I published two books this year as well.
"Attentive, Intelligent, Rational, Responsible": Transforming Economics to Save the World, with John Raymaker (Marquette University Press).
Choose the Narrow Path: The Way for Churches to Walk Together, (Peter Lang). Volume 14 in the series, Studies in Episcopal and Anglican Theology.
and finally,
Le Livre de la Prière Commune (Church Publishing), a new translation of the 1979 BCP (I chaired the translation committee.)
Advent blessings!