I keep this page fairly current; it was last updated on March 11, 2024.

• The section for each year includes all the books I read that year (including the current year), in the order I finished the books.
• Books are marked “(new)” if this was the first time I read them, or “(reread)” otherwise.
• I separate out fiction and non-fiction not because I value them differently, but because they just are very different.
• Links on the books themselves are affiliate to Bookshop.org!

Quick links:

• Planned
• Started
• Tabled
• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

Planned

These are books I am actively planning to read — not just volumes I’m vaguely interested in, but texts I am committed to reading for some reason.

Non-fiction

• A Time to Keep, Ephraim Radner (new)

• Created in God’s Image, Anthony Hoekema (new)

• The Epistle to the Romans, Karl Barth (new)

Fiction

(no specific plans right now!)

Started

These are books I have actually begun reading. (You will see items move from Planned down here if you watch this page!)

Non-fiction

• The Gospel and the Catholic Church, Michael Ramsey (reread)

• Open Music Theory, Mark Gotham, Kyle Gullings, Chelsey Hamm, Bryn Hughes, Brian Jarvis, Megan Lavengood, and John Peterson (new)

• Functional Programming in Lean, David Thrane Christiansen (new)

Fiction

• The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, J. R. R. Tolkien (new)

Tabled

These are books I have started at some point but have (at least for now!) put aside and do not currently plan to finish, but which I might come back to eventually.

• Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra: Vectors, Matrices, and Least Squares, Stephen Boyd (new)

• What Are Christians For?: Life Together at the End of the World, Jake Meador (new)

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk (new)

• Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach in Racket, Jeremy G. Siek (new)

• Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, David H. Kelsey (new)

  • posts on the book

  Tabled, ultimately, because I found I had gotten everything helpful I could from Kelsey’s opening few chapters, and decided it was not worth wading through his absolutely awful prose for the sake of his equally atrocious hermeneutical moves later in the book.

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (new)

  I suspect there are a few interesting things in this book, but Taleb is perhaps the most insufferable writer of nonfiction I have encountered in the last decade. The core idea of “things which get stronger via challenge” is a mildly interesting idea, but the egotistical delivery and “Isn’t it amazing how no one else ever saw this? Aren’t I so smart? And also isn’t it great how I am ripped? And let me call every other philosophy or approach ‘sissy’ or ‘wussy’…” got very old very quickly.

2024

Non-fiction

• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon (new)

• The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, Richard Rumelt (new)

• A Quiet Mind to Suffer with: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ, John Andrew Bryant (new)

• How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (new)

• Crafting Interpreters, Robert Nystrom (new)

• Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations, Norman Davies (new… ish: I read the first third of this half a decade ago and put it down, and now have picked it back up)

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, Andrew Wilson (new)

Fiction

• Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (new)

• Our Game, John le Carré (new)

2023

Nonfiction

• Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, Stuart Russell

• The Anglican Way: A Guidebook, Thomas McKenzie (new)

• Shifting the impossible to the inevitable: A Private ARPA user manual, Ben Reinhardt (new) — filing this here because… well, at 80,000 words, I think it’s appropriate? Even if it is a book that is densely hyperlinked and otherwise built for internet reading rather than codex reading, it is still a book in scope and ambition.

• The Doctrine of Scripture, Brad East (new)

• Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke (new)

• 80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower, Matt Fitzgerald (new)

• On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race at Your Real Limit, Matt Fitzgerald (new)

• How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle, Matt Fitzgerald (new)

• Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software Projects, Baldur Bjarnason (new)

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella Meadows (new)

• Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster (new)

• Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett (new)

• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais (new)

• Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters, Richard P. Rumelt (new)

• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael A Hiltzik (new)

• The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, Alan Jacobs (new)

• Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly, John Kay (new)

• What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World, Sara Hendren (new)

• Karl Barth, John Webster (new)

• The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.10 and 8.11

• Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (new)

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou (new)

• We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God, David T. Koyzis (new)

• Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Bruce A. Tate (new)

• Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, John Webster (new)

• Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, Shriram Krishnamurthi (new)

• The Staff Engineer’s Path, Tanya Reilly (new)

• Call for God: New Sermons from Basel Prison, Karl Barth, translated by A. T. Mackay (new)

• The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware (new)

• The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind, Daniel J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson (new)

• Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow (new)

Fiction

• Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky (new)

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin (new)

• Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky (new)

• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Tad Williams (new)

  • The Dragonbone Chair
  • The Stone of Farewell
  • To Green Angel Tower

• Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey (reread)

• Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (new)

  • A Wizard of Earthsea
  • The Tombs of Atuan
  • The Farthest Shore

• Sword & Citadel: The Second Half of the Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe (new)

• Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (new)

2022

Nonfiction

• Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination, William G. Witt (new)

• The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder (new)

• The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Richard Sennett (new)

• Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen (new)

• Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky (new)

• The Internet is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, a warning, Justin E. H. Smith (new)

• The Halo Effect… and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, Phil Rosenzweig (new)

• The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann, Ananyo Bhattacharya (new)

• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott (new)

• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, James Clear (new)

Fiction

• The Galactic Cold War, Dan Moren (new)

  • The Bayern Agenda: The Galactic Cold War, Book I
  • The Aleph Extraction: The Galactic Cold War, Book II
  • The Nova Incident: The Galactic Cold War, Book III

• The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan (reread)

  • The Great Hunt
  • The Dragon Reborn

• Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky (new)

• Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky (new)

• Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto More (new)

  No full review for this one, because I’m not going to dignify it with that. It wasn’t worth the time I spent on it. It could have been, because the ideas were good, but… it wasn’t. The main character was too much a Mary Sue, a stand-in for young millennials and older Gen Z types who want their video game obsessions to mean something. The very interesting high concept doesn’t get its due as a result, and there’s no interesting characterization to make up for it. Ugh.

• Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold (new)

• Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky (new)

• Age of Swords: Book Two of the Legends of the First Empire, Michael J. Sullivan (new)

• The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien (reread with my younger daughter)

2021

Nonfiction

• Holiness, John Webster (new)

  • posts on the book

• Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez (new)

• Dogmatics in Outline, Karl Barth (new)

  • posts on the book

• Word and Church, John Webster (new)

  • posts on the book

• Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim (new)

• God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology: Volume I: God and the Works of God, John Webster (new)

  • posts on the book

• Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, Eric Berger (new)

• God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology: Volume II: Virtue and Intellect, John Webster (new)

Fiction

• The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (reread… with older my daughter!)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien (reread… with my older daughter!)

• The Expanse, James S.A. Corey (new reread, continued from 2020, in prep for reading the excellent conclusion):

  • Cibola Burn (reread)
  • Nemesis Games (reread)
  • Babylon’s Ashes (reread)
  • Persepolis Rising (reread)
  • Tiamat’s Wrath (reread)
  • Leviathan Falls, James S. A. Corey (new)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien (reread… with my older daughter!)

• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir (new)

• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien (reread… with my older daughter!)

• The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan (reread)

• Shadow & Claw: The First Half of The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe (new)

2020

Non-fiction

• Phaedrus, Plato (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.02 and 8.03

• The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.04 and 8.05

• Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.12 and 8.13

• The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.14 and 8.15

• Evolution as Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly episodes 8.16 and 8.17
  • posts on the book

• The Culture of Theology, John Webster (new)

  • posts on the book

• Shape Up, Ryan Singer (new)

• Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship, Eric Gregory (new)

  • posts on the book
  • review

• Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much, Ashley Hales (new)

  • review

• Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tüfeçki (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly episoes 8.20 and 8.21

Fiction

• The Expanse (reread, continued from 2019), James S. A. Corey

  • Babylon’s Ashes
  • Persepolis Rising
  • Tiamat’s Wrath
  • Auberon (short fiction) (new)
  • Gods of Risk (short fiction)

• The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil (new)¹

  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.06 and 8.07

• Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (new)

  • review
  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.08 and 8.09

• The Lost World, Michael Crichton (new)

  • review

• Sourdough, Robin Sloan (new)

  • review

• The Orphans Trilogy,² Sean Williams and Shane Dix (new)

  • Echoes of Earth
  • Orphans of Earth
  • Heirs of Earth

• Delta-V, Daniel Suarez (new)

• Contact, Carl Sagan (new)

  • discussed on Winning Slowly episodes 8.18 and 8.19

• Age of Myth: Book One of the Legends of the First Empire, Michael J. Sullivan (new)

• The Expanse, James S.A. Corey (reread… again)):

  • Leviathan Wakes
  • Caliban’s War
  • Abaddon’s Gade

• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan (new)

  • review
  • discussed on Winning Slowly 8.22

• Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson (new)

• Mistborn: Secret History, Brandon Sanderson (reread)

2019

Non-Fiction

• All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment, Hannah Anderson (new)

  • review

• Retrieving Eternal Generation, edited by Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain (new)

  • review

• What is An Evangelical,^2:1 Thomas Kidd (new)

  • review

• In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World,^2:2 Jake Meador (new)

  • discussed in an interview with Jake on Winning Slowly

• The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs (new)

Fiction

• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (reread)

• Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (new)

  • review

• Beowulf (new)

  • review

• The Martian, Andy Weir (reread)

• The Themis Files, Sylvain Neuvel (new):

  • Sleeping Giants
  • Waking Gods
  • Only Human

  review

• [Red Mars]https://bookshop.org/a/21126/9780593358825), Kim Stanley Robinson (new)

  • review

• Recursion, Blake Crouch (new)

  • review

• Dark Matter, Blake Crouch (new)

  • review

• The Expanse, James S.A. Corey (reread):

  • Leviathan Wakes
  • Caliban’s War
  • Abaddon’s Gade
  • Cibola Burn
  • Nemesis Games

2018

Fiction

• Agent of Change, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (new)

  • review

• The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (new)

  • review

• The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal (new)

  • review

• Ringworld, Larry Niven (new)

  • review

• The Broken Earth trilogy, N. K. Jemisin (new)

  • The Fifth Season
  • The Obelisk Gate
  • The Stone Sky

  These are incredibly grim and fairly violent. I do not regret having read them, but I also cannot endorse reading them.

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Notes

1. This is where it is for a reason. Don’t @ me. ↩︎

2. These do not have links because they are entirely unavailable on Bookshop.org, and may be out of print. You may still be able to find them on Alibris… or by asking a local used bookstore! ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎