When I look back on my year1 in terms of books, it was a great year of reading. I read more books this year than any other year in my adult life since seminary. There was no secret life hack; I just tried to use my phone less. Achievement unlocked.
All of that hard work was worth it to bring you these very coveted, prestigious awards that no one knew about until today. The titles listed below are books I finished reading in 2023, although not necessarily ones that were published that year. You’ll see my Top Ten Books of the Year, two honorable mentions, and then some random extra awards to other deserving works. And if books are not your thing, skip down to the end for some non-book awards.
I hope 2024 is an even better year of reading for you.
My Top 10 Books of 2023
Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story), by Daniel Nayeri
What an incredible book.2 It’s so human and yet so full of transcendent hope. I can’t remember the last time I felt so much gratitude after finishing a book. Maybe you think I’m being hyperbolic, but I felt like I had received a gift.
It’s an autobiographical novel based on Nayeri’s life, where he, his sister, and their mother had to flee from Iran as refugees after she converted to Christianity from Islam. Eventually, they all end up in Oklahoma, where they face new problems.
With this book, you’re in the hands of a master-storyteller who has complete control. One minute you’re laughing out loud about a crazy story involving feces, and the next, you’re weeping.
It’s a book about perseverance, faith, hope, and human dignity, but also about the nature of stories themselves and their ability to shape us and how we see the world.
“Stories are stories. Life is life. They kiss and they marry, but they die alone.” Then he thought about it some more and added, “And death is not the end. They kiss more in paradise.”
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
1,006 pages of pure fun and delight. It’s a novel that takes place around the Napoleonic Wars and focuses on the two titular men as they battle to become the preeminent magician in Britain. And when I say magician, I don’t mean, “Illusions, Michael.” I mean, magic. Hijinks ensue and it does not go how either of them think it’s going to go. The magical world is not something humans can fully understand, much less control.
Yes, the book is long, but when you get to the end you’re going to want more.
Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, by Christopher Watkin
Finished it on New Year’s Day 2023, so it just made the cut for this year.
There’s been a lot of really calm and even-handed debate about Critical Theory online the past few years.3 Christopher Watkin shows that the Bible can offer us an even better critical theory, being able to explain and critique every culture, including the secular modern West. Tim Keller explains the concept well in the preface:
The term critical theory has an older and more basic meaning. It means to not just accept what a culture says about itself but also to see what is really going on beneath the surface. Every culture deploys multiple patterns—narratives, pictures and images, vocabulary—to create a “world” (or “worldview” or “social imaginary”). But the Bible has its own narratives, images, and patterns that enable us to analyze any culture at the deepest level and to both critique and appreciate it, while at the same time preventing us from being captured and co-opted by it.
Watkin starts in Genesis and moves through the major story beats of the narrative of redemption and shows how they each have quite a lot to say about our world.
It’s another big book, but such an exhilarating read.
On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, by Alan Noble
Our society is in a mental health crisis. If you haven’t yourself already dealt with anxiety or depression, you are close to someone who has. To quote Alan Noble from his previous book, “A significant segment of the American population finds life unbearable.” Which is why this short book by Noble is so needed.
This isn’t a book that just tells you to “Rub some dirt on it and walk it off.” Noble writes with so much empathy because he battles with mental illness on a daily basis and at times finds it hard to get out of bed in the morning. When you’re dealing with mental health issues, it can completely block out any feeling of purpose or hope. He encourages all of us that we do indeed have a purpose for living, not because we have done anything to earn such a purpose but because we have been endowed with dignity and worth by our Creator.
Your existence is a testament, a living argument, an affirmation of creation itself. When you rise each day, that act is a faint but real echo of God’s, “It is good.” By living this life, you participate in God’s act of creation, asserting with your very existence that it is a good creation.
Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson
This is such a unique book—part history book, part cultural critique, part grand theory of everything. That sounds like it would be a boring read, but it was so fun, even thrilling at times, because Andrew Wilson is such a great writer.
The book is centered around two main thesis.4 The first is that our current post-Christian world has been formed by seven features, represented by the very fun acronym, WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. All of these things have combined to create a society that is completely unique in human history.
The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality, no matter how universal or self-evident we may think they are. We are the WEIRDER ones.
The second thesis of the book is that our WEIRDER secular world came into being because of events in 1776. Before you angrily toss this British author’s tea into the harbor, Wilson isn’t putting all the blame on the American founders. Actually, much of the book is not about America at all; there was a lot going on in that time period. 1776 is really just a lens to look at the big factors that were driving dramatic change in the West at that time that we still are feeling the affects of today.
Why does it all matter? We need to know where we came from to understand how we ought to live today, and also to understand where we could be headed.
The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
Speaking of old worlds passing away in exchange for new ones. This epic novel5 is a retelling of the classic legend of King Arthur and it has influenced many of the biggest fantasy authors of the present day. The first section, The Sword and the Stone (which got turned into a Disney movie), is whimsical and full of magic, much like childhood should be. But once Arthur becomes king, things get much more difficult.
There’s a lot of King Arthur’s story that reminds me of King David’s—the promising start, the legendary reign, but also, reaping disaster from past mistakes that reverberate for generations.
Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, by Tara Isabella Burton
Tara Isabella Burton writes that the decline in organized religion in the West hasn’t led to an irreligious society. Humans naturally are meaning-making creatures and so something is alway bound to fill the vacuum. It could be argued that we are actually as a society as religious as ever; we just use phrases like “spiritual but not religious.” Burton examined this change in her other phenomenal book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, and now in Self-Made she examines where our worship and adoration has shifted. Instead of looking for God outward, we now look for transcendence inward. We are the gods now.
I believe we have not so much done away with a belief in the divine as we have relocated it. We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us—more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires. Our obsession with self-creation is also an obsession with the idea that we have the power that we once believed God did: to remake ourselves and our realities, not in the image of God but in that of our own desires.
And this is a feature of our entire society in western culture. You cannot escape it anymore than a fish can escape water. It’s baked into every feature of our world.
But this new way of seeing ourselves is not all just sunshine and Disney songs. A lack of transcendent meaning may in fact be contributing to our current mental health crisis.
We have inherited, too, this idea’s dark underbelly: if we do not manage to determine our own destiny, it means that we have failed in one of the most fundamental ways possible. We have failed at what it means to be human in the first place.
It’s a fascinating read that will help you see our culture through a new lens. This book is a great pairing with Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
I majored in English and somehow never read this American classic. I love East of Eden, so I’ve had this book on my list for a while.
The story follows a family named the Joads during the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s and their journey to flee Oklahoma and make a new home in California. It’s a story of struggle, hardship, and perseverance. But it’s also a story of how some humans press forward in the name of progress and prosperity, even if it harms and dehumanizes others.
It’s a dark look at America’s past but it also should cause us to consider how our fellow humans are still exploited today in the name of progress, not just within our borders but around the world.
Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis
This was a re-read. It’s been a while since I’ve read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and I wanted to see if new things would stand out to me.
I know Out of the Silent Planet is most people’s least favorite of the three books, but my revisit to Malacandra was so enjoyable. Lewis is still unparalleled in his ability to put into words something that you’ve known or felt instinctively but never knew how to articulate. There were at least a dozen statements about our world or humanity (uttered by the aliens in the story, no less) that stopped me in my tracks.
Our materialist modern age says that when we look up at the night sky, we are looking up at a silent universe. But instead, this story shows us a bustling cosmos that is full of spirits and powers that look down at us and what they see is a silent planet.
Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age, by Samuel D. James
One of the most important points Samuel James makes in this excellent book is that we are shaped not just by the content we consume but by the form it takes. Usually, Christians are content to just police content, but such a view betrays that we don’t really know how we are formed as persons. Our habits shape us just as much or even more than the content itself.
This means that a piece of technology can never be dismissed as neutral. All technology flows from someone’s view of the world and humanity.
The question is not whether a certain technology is tainted by an inventor’s ideology; the question is whether we can see evidence of that ideology in the way the invention works.
James writes that the form of the internet is “pornified,” not that it is sexually explicit (although, of course, it is that too), but that like pornography, it keeps you coming back for more by constantly pushing for more and more novelty. The creators of our devices have figured out how to hijack our brains and it has turned us into a society of isolated consumers.
After about 50 pages into this book I downloaded the Freedom app (more on that below) and haven’t looked back.
Honorable Mentions
Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction, by Cory C. Brock and N. Gray Sutanto
One of the densest reads of the year, but so rich.
Interior Chinatown: A Novel, by Charles Yu
So fun and inventive and so devastating all at the same time.
The 2023 Totally Random Book Awards
The Adjust-Your-Nerd-Glasses Award - How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning, and Thinking, by Dr. Sönke Ahrens6
The Book That Took Me the Longest Time to Finish - (7 years), The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God, Dallas Willard7
The Book That Took Me the Shortest Time to Finish - (23 hours) The Great De-Churching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?, by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P. Burge8
The Best Audiobook(s): The Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien, narrated by Andy Serkis9
The Best Children’s Book: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling10
The Book with the Best Ending: Personality and Worldview, by J.H. Bavinck11
Things of Beauty
And now onto the non-book-related awards.
The best show: The Bear (Hulu)
The Christmas episode12 deserves to be on the Mount Rushmore of all-time best single episodes of television. I was so tense afterword I couldn’t sleep. Yes, Chef, that’s a compliment.
The best podcast: The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God
It’s a documentary format podcast hosted by Justin Brierly that looks back at how New Atheism (of the 2000’s and early 2010’s) declared religion dead, but also how belief in God has stubbornly persisted despite their best efforts. Some of those atheists (like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was close friends with Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) have even begun to reconsider their prior objections to Christianity.
Our disenchanted society is searching for meaning, and the naturalistic story our secular world tells has proven to not satisfy.
The best app: Notion and Freedom
It’s a tie. These two apps have massively overhauled my workflow. Freedom takes over my phone (and computer) and turns it into a dumb phone for most of the day. You can select what apps and websites you want to block and set schedules for the block sessions to automatically take place.
Notion keeps everything organized. It’s the all-in-one app of my dreams that allows me to create databases of all my projects, tasks, and meeting notes.
The best movie: Across the Spider-Verse
Yes, it’s a cartoon. No, you’re not too old to enjoy it. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in a long time.
The best analog tool: Traveler’s Notebook and rOtring 600 pen
I’ve written about this pairing before. Carrying around a notebook and pen is another great way to break free of your phone. I have since changed to using this pen refill in my rOtring because it can write on almost any surface.
Links - The Best Articles of the Year
There’s a lot of junk out there on the internet. If you want to see more good things and less junk, you should consider supporting one or more of these outlets through donations or purchasing a subscription.
Oiling the Chicken Machine, by Garth Brown - The New Atlantis
Man, this article. It starts off looking at the scientific breakthroughs in lab-grown meat (where they grow a chicken breast or steak in a lab instead of…you know…in an animal), and asking why it makes many people squeamish. It then looks at our current system for mass harvesting of chicken and shows how similar it is to the petri dish.
But this article is more than a screed against factory farming or wobbly lab meat. It shows that there’s something about the physicality of the world—the thingness of things, the creatureliness of animals and even ourselves—that we lose when we focus purely on efficiency and productivity. We were made for more.
“The difficulty of defining the wrongness of lab-grown meat has much in common with the difficulty of articulating why human relationships over social media are unsatisfying, or why living inside a phone probably isn’t the highest form of human flourishing. But because farming is so obviously, irreducibly material, it allows a distinctly grounded examination of what it means to live in a particular time and place.”
Living with Religious Scrupulosity or Moral OCD, by Alan Noble - Plough
A vulnerable and honest account of what it’s like to live with obsessive compulsive disorder, specifically moral scrupulosity. In many ways, this essay is related to Alan’s book, On Getting Out of Bed. We all struggle in different ways, but in the end, we still can have hope.
This life demands more of us than we can imagine, but not more than we can bear. Because we don’t bear it alone.
Once More, Church and Culture, by Brad East - Mere Orthodoxy
There have been many books, articles, and podcasts proposing that they have the correct way for Christians to engage culture. Many of them have some good things to say. The problem, though, is that no single method can possibly account for all the different factors and contexts that life throws at us. If there was supposedly a correct way, then it would have to be applicable if you’re a Christian in North Korea, Burkina Faso, or Cleveland.
Brad East instead proposes a fourfold model that allows for flexibility depending upon a person’s specific context: Resistance, Repentance, Reception, and Reform.
In the midst of so many factions within evangelicalism arguing that their way is the only way, it’s refreshing to find a take that is careful and allows for the complexity of life.
It’s been almost twelves months and my brain still has not accepted the fact that we are in the year of our Lord 2023. The concept of 2024 feels so foreign to me that it sounds like a made up year in a science fiction movie.
I hope you caught the Lord of the Rings reference in the title.
Oh wait. I’m just getting word that not everyone has been calm or even-handed in this debate.
Thesises? Thesi?
It’s really a combination of T.H. White’s Arthurian novels into one book.
It’s a whole book about a note-taking system, and I’m not joking that it may have completely changed my life. Go figure.
I know it’s considered a classic book. Please forgive me. I had other things to read.
The book is no light-weight at 272 pages. I just couldn’t put it down. Every Christian with any amount of influence or leadership in a church or ministry should read this book with a highlighter. It will overturn a lot of preconceived notions.
I’ve read LOTR more times than I can remember, but this is my first time doing it through audiobook. Andy Serkis (who plays Gollum in the movies) is incredible as the narrator. He also narrated The Silmarillion and I can’t wait to listen to it.
I first read the books as a twenty-something and now we are slowly reading through them with our kids. This time around I’ve noticed that the stories take on a whole new dimension as a parent. I now relate more to the adults in the story (I recently found out the distressing fact that I’m older than Snape was in this book). But because of this, I could not get through the cemetery scene without full on breaking down. The kids were so confused about why I was blubbering, but from a parent’s perspective, the moment when Harry saw his mom and dad was so moving—and gut-wrenchingly sad. In the midst of so much evil, love can cut through the darkness. The edition we used is this really amazing illustrated version that weighs like 5 pounds.
It was a dense read, but the last 8 pages were worth the whole price of the book.
The show is TV-MA for language. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing (or depictions of hostile work/family environments) this show may not be for you.