I keep
lists: of ancestors, of sermons I’ve preached, of places I’ve been to, and of
books I’ve read. I am not sure why lists appeal to me, but when the time comes
to reminisce they are handy for jogging my memory. I track my books on
Goodreads.com. And so, without further ado, here are the books I read in 2016
that I don’t want to forget.
Where We Came From: My ongoing fascination with human evolution was enriched by Svante Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. Pääbo’s book is a memoir about how he fell in love with genomics, and how his team eventually became the first to sequence the Neanderthal and Denosivan genomes. While the book does get a bit technical from time to time, Pääbo is able, for the most part, to describe the science in terms understandable to lay people. The inside look at the politics of science is a reminder that Washington and Ottawa are not the only places to find politics. The book feels, in some ways, like a road trip where you know the destination and can’t wait to get there. Hands down, the best science book I’ve read in years—and I’ve read quite a few.
Science Fiction! Several of my favorite
books were science fiction. Two African American women writers were my hands
down favorites. The first was N. K. Jemisin, who wrote, The Fifth Season trilogy. The first book in the trilogy is The Broken Earth. Her books encouraged
me, as a reader, to reconsider systemic racism and personal prejudice by making
the point of contention not skin color, but unique but not widely-shared human
gifts and skills. The turns of plot are both surprising and believable, the Earth
Jemisin creates is detailed and exotic, and the key characters are
well-developed.
The other
author—perhaps the best I read all year—was Nnedi Okorafor. Her novella Binti reminded me, a bit, of Margaret
Atwood at her best as a stylist—as when Atwood’s poetic chops spill over into
her prose. Okorafor’s writing is also near-poetic and subtly engages all of the
reader’s senses with compelling descriptions of characters, their looks, their
smells, and their families. I’m looking forward to reading the Novella’s full-length follow up, which was
published in late January, 2017.
Modern Media Tech and Its Casualties.
My PHD was in Speech Communication, and during those studies I became fascinated
with how different speech, reading and writing arts and technologies demand
different kinds of intellectual equipment. People in oral societies with low
literacy develop fascinating ways of communicating via spoken word and other media
that are quite different from societies where books are front and centre. High
literate societies, on the other hand, are very different than those where
screens predominate. I explore this in my own book, Not Sure.
Adam
Gazzaley’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient
Brains in a High-Tech World is pure gold for parents, teachers, preachers,
and university students who want to understand what is going on in their
brains, and the brains of their wired audiences. I found the book’s structure—one
half given over to neuroscience, and the other half to explaining its
consequences—a bit off-putting. And the book is dense. But the effort it took
to read was richly rewarded with deepened understanding of a technological
change that is still sweeping over us. A good companion to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and a look under
the brain’s hood for those who want to understand why it is that we entertain ourselves to death.
Behind the Trump Phenomenon: Two
books that provided very helpful background for understanding Trump’s victory
and white Evangelical Christian support for him were Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of
Class in America and Robert Jones' The
End of White Christian America. Isenberg focusses on how America was built
on the backs of poor immigrants such as indentured servants, jail parolees, as
well as slaves. She traces out the generational poverty of this sort of
deep-family-history, and it isn’t pretty. Jones shows how the structures of
Christian religion, both mainline and conservative, have often worked against
racial justice, inclusiveness, and an honest appraisal of why things are the
way they are.
Memoirs: When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir of
the author’s long illness with cancer, up to just before his death. Paul
Kalanithi is a neurosurgeon struggling to finish his residency and keep his
marriage afloat. He’s a good man and his story, as sad as it ends, is also
inspiring. I was fascinated by the role religion played in his life, even
though he doesn’t dwell on it. With several doctors in my own extended family,
the description of the grind Paul had to go through as a resident was sobering
and sad. But I came to love this man, even if only from a great distance.
Stefan Hertmans
wrote an inventive memoir about his grandfather titled War and Turpentine. I was impressed and often moved by the way Hertman’s
described the social and familial traps his grandfather had to navigate. The
grandfather’s diary of his time as a soldier in Flanders Fields serves as the
non-fiction basis for this book. But Hertman then adds his own fictional gloss
to the story in order to make a truer portrait rise and shine. The aching pains
from long ago that marked his grandfather’s life is given great prominence
here, and encourages all readers to be sensitive to the hurts they or others
struggle with too. The book includes some very compelling descriptions of First
World War battles, as well.
Written in English: As an old
English major, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of English—and by
extension, the evolution of language. John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
focusses on the impact of Celtic and Norse grammars on English grammar, and the
reasons why this sort of influence is often missed in “history of languages.” I
know. It is hard to imagine that this might be scintillating. But it is!
Language is a window on so much more. His takedown of the Sapir Whorff
hypothesis is marvelous. His speculation that Phoenician traders may be the source
of up to a third of proto Germanic words that are not Indo-European is really
fascinating.
Fiction: I read many novels that were
not sci-fi, but my favorite was Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. This slim work is part mystery, part
gripping yarn, and part parable. The protagonist, Tony, reflects on what he has
made of his rather empty life. I resonated with his doubts and disappointments.
The ending, though, is a big surprise, one that Barnes has carefully laid the groundwork
for so that it is also totally believable.
Theology: As a minister and theologian,
I’ve read (a nearly) countless number of books about the meaning of life and
basic theological questions like, “Is there a god?” and “if so (or not) so
what?” The best of a dozen I read this past year—if not in style, then in terms
of offering a helpful overview of more liberal perspectives—was David Ray
Griffen’s God Exists but Gawd Does Not.
This is a book about Process Theology, deeply rooted in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Griffen describes the “Gawd,” of classical theism, as one who sits on a throne and interferes in the world on behalf of some but not others. He contrasts this concept of Gawd to Process Theology’s God. He nailed much of what eventually made me uncomfortable with the sort of God that I was raised with. His explanation of the Process alternative, however, was less compelling.
New Amsterdam Dutch: I couldn’t put Russell
Shorto’s The Island at the Centre of the
World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped
America down. A great deal of American political and social culture is
partly rooted in how the Dutch set the table at Manhattan. From the Declaration
of Independence, to the Bill of Rights; from pluralism to religious freedom,
the Dutch experiment in New York informed the nascent American psyche, and
sometimes for the better. I read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton a few months later, and I couldn’t help but note
how often Shorto’s book shed light on Chernow’s.
