The Best Books I Read in 2017

I am a fan of the Goodreads reading challenge. For two years now it has done a good job of helping me to keep reading a priority without (as I was afraid it would at first) making reading into a chore for me. One of the side benefits has been that at the end of the year I have a nice list of books I read that year. So I thought it would be fun to go ahead an throw together a list of recommendations from my 2017 reading list. According to my 2017 challenge, I read 62 books in 2017, which I feel is pretty good. However I should note that I did include audio books and that just under half of the books I read were science fiction or fantasy novels. I am not apologizing for that—I am an unabashed fan for genre fiction—but mentioning it probably important in painting any sort of accurate picture of my reading habits.
One last note before I get into my top book recommendations for each of four categories (plus a "best overall") is that I try to do at least a short one or two sentence review of each of these on Goodreads when I read them as I know how helpful book reviews (particularly Goodreads and Amazon book reviews) are for new and indie authors hint hint. You can find the piece I wrote up about that HERE.

Science Fiction - Fantasy

So just under half of the book I read in 2017 were either Science Fiction or Fantasy. And I was only able to keep that under 50% by including Young Adult books as a separate category so if I include the YA sci-fi novels I read I think I end up at exactly 50%. Of those, my favorite read was The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk. I had actually never heard of the book before I started discussing resistance dystopias with some friends online and one of them recommended it. The Fifth Sacred Thing is unabashedly pagan to the extent that the author would probably be at least a little upset that I filed her book under sci-fi and fantasy. That said it is excellently written; the characters are well developed, fully fleshed out, and entirely compelling. Additionally the book has the benefit of actually managing an pacifist apologetic and still being suspenseful and full of action.

Note: If I had read more I would have separated these sci-fi and fantasy as categories so let be add that my favorite sci-fi book (actually series) I read was Craig Alanson's Expeditionary Force series which starts with Columbus Day. It is not "great lit" by any stretch of the imagination but it is an unremittingly fun series and the AI character in it is one of my favorite AIs I have ever read. I did these on audiobook and I have to say that R.C. Bray does an amazing job narrating the books.

YA (Young Adult)

As a high school teacher (and let's be honest, just because I enjoy them) I try to read a number of YA novels each year. I read some really good ones this year including the Nemesis series by April Daniels and John Green's return to publication Turtles All the Way Down. However, the best YA book of the year for me has to go to Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. I know this thing has won awards all over the place and it frankly deserves them. This book is really engaging, entirely immersive, and constituted one of those moments where a message finds its perfect genre. The book dives straight into a narrative of police violence, racial divides, code switching, cultural whiplash, as well as structural and individual racism and builds all of it in a complex and powerful protagonist's social bildungsroman. The book will break you and heal you and make you fall downs and jump for joy. I can't recommend it enough.

Theology/Philosophy

2017 was a good year for me in these genres as well. I started the year with the specific goal of improving my Inklings studies by taking a dive into the works of Inkling, poet, and philosopher Owen Barfield. In the end my "dive" turned out to consist only of reading his Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances as well as starting his fairy tale The Silver Trumpet which I finished yesterday so it didn't end up making the 2017 list. Of the two I was more excited to read Saving the Appearances but ended up appreciating Poetic Diction far more. In fact Poetic Diction ended up being my runner-up in this category and I have every intention of re-reading it in 2018. Beyond my Barfield reads, I spent time in 2017 boning up on my Anabaptist, Anabaptist-adjacent, and "progressive Christain" theology. I  started Greg Boyd's The Crucifixion of the Warrior God which I am still working on, and did finish his popular treatment of the subject Crossvision. I read some Wes Howard Brook and started a series on Blue Ocean Faith.

So I really appreciated my theological reading this last year and want to add a little more direct philosophy back into the mix in 2018. With all that in place, the book which, I think, has had the greatest impact on my this year is Matthew Croasmun's The Emergence of Sin. To give fair warning the book is a pretty darned scholarly piece of work and takes some serious wrestling and work to get through (at least it did for me). But the work is 100% worth it. Corasmun brings to Christian theology a model which has the potential to unlock a whole lot of our (or at least my) understanding of both philosophy and the spiritual. In the book he takes emergence theory as it has been developed variously by philsophers, sociologists, and "hard" scientists and uses it as a lens for approaching the concept of S/sin in Romans. While I think his applications in Romans are pretty much on the mark, the far more exciting aspect of this book for me, is the potential this lens has for thinking about further spiritual reality. This book will certainly have me pondering and reflecting for the next several years.

Note: A friend of mine wrote the other book which had a good shot at winning this category (According to Folly by Daniel Heck) and I certainly recommend it.

Other non-fiction

Yeah this is a terrible category but the fact of the matter is that it covers fourteen of the sixty two books I read last year. Without it I would have ended up with far too many one and two book categories. So poetry has to compete with memoir, politics, and theory books (or maybe it would be better to say that they have to compete with poetry). In fact, scanning through the books in this category gives a pretty good picture of my interests over 2018. There is some poetry and biography, then the list leans towards sociology, psychology, gender, and race theory with a definite background of political theory haunting many of the books in the list. A further reflection I had here was that I very much still appreciate all of the books I read in this category (which stands in contrast to—for instance—sci-fi and fantasy. That isn't' to say that I agreed with everything I read—I make an effort to read things that will challenge me and which represent views I don't necessarily agree with—but they all turned out to be helpful and substantive this year.

For all of that, the number one slot has to go to one of them and my favorite of all of these books was Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. I know, I am quite a few years late to the party on this one, but I am glad to have made it there eventually. Whipping Girl (I got the tenth anniversary edition) is, in addition to it's manifest intellectual virtues, an incredibly compelling and incisive account of the transgender experience from "the inside". The book was good enough that I read another of her more recent books a little later in the year (Outspoken—it was also terrific but is a little more "in the weeds" than Whipping Girl). Serano is, among other things, a spoken word poet and a professional biologist and the qualities associated with both of these vocations are evident in the book: passion and eloquence blended with careful and critical observation and reflection. Certainly this is a book which is more than worth the read for anyone who wants to engage publicly in the "conversation" around gender and sex. It certainly caused me to go back, re-read, and re-think some of what I have written.

The Best Book I read in 2017

Of course when we are talking about books 'best' is an inadequate descriptor. I think that what I mean by it here is that this book had a more profound effect on me than any other book I read this year. Put another way, if I had to choose to lose the experience of reading all but one of my 2017 books, this is the one I would save. Reading In the Shelter by Pádraig Ó Tuama is a book which breaks you apart only to put you together again far more whole than you were to begin with. I tried to get at this a bit in my Goodreads review of the book:

This is probably the most powerful book I have read all year. It is, to borrow C.S. Lewis' summation of "Lord of the Rings", good beyond hope. The author's blending of poetry, theology, biography,and story is an artifact too rich to be summarized—it must be experienced. Reading this book will wound, heal, and grow your heart. The author approaches the painful, glorious fact of being one's self in the world and the inscrutable love of god in a way that will have me coming back and back to this book.

The book itself is memoir so laden with philosophical and theological reflection that it could just as easily be classified as a piece of narrative theology or philosophy. Pádraig Ó Tuama has also included poems between chapters in a tacit acknowledgement of the final inability of prose to communicate all that needs to be said. If I were to find that he writes music as well I would pay much to hear him communicate through that medium as well. More than nearly any author I have read Pádraig Ó Tuama brings together a deep wisdom and the beauty of medium. This book is worth reading for so many reasons but here is one reason that would be enough all on it's own. In In the Shelter the three transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty dance together and are as one. After reading it, one does not, quite, feel that any discussion of the relation between those three will be adequately understood by those who have not read it. 

Reviews of Other Books I Read This Year

• Jesus Untangled by Keith Giles. This was good.
• Blue Ocean Faith by Dave Schmelzer. Everyone should read this one.
• The Second Edition of A Letter to My Congregation by Ken Wilson. I'm a big fan.
• Wells of Night a collection of poetry by Gabriel Blanchard. Several of these are piercingly beautiful
• Empire Baptized by Wes Howard Brook. It was well thought out and researched, some really strong points.
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk. This helped me understand trauma for the first time.
• Still Christian by David Gushee. Read it to understand the religious/political moment in America today.
• Sex, God & the Conservative Church by Tina Schimer Sellers. A tremendous resource for anyone who grew up in the purity movement or who wants to council people who were traumatized by that movement.
• Finding God in the Body by Benjamin Riggs. Really well written, full of insights and conclusions I utterly disagreed with.
• According to Folly by Daniel Heck