This mortal life: Favorite Books I Read in 2018

Once again, I get to think through and post my favorite books I read this year. This continues to be a highlight of the year for me because I get to remember these books again and think through why I liked each of them. I also get to do one of the things I love most, recommend books!

Here are my favorite books that I read in 2018:

1. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (1982 - 2012)

At the end of last year, I had never read a Stephen King book and had never heard of this series. However, after hearing multiple co-workers talk about how this series was one of their favorites, I took a chance and started reading. The series is made up of seven books, written between 1982 and 2004, and is a futuristic fantasy Western, centered on Roland Deschain of Gilead. King considers this his magnum opus and would say that most of his other works have bits of The Dark Tower in them. The Lord of the Rings and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly are two of his main inspirations for the characters and plot.

The first book, The Gunslinger, was the shortest and my least favorite. Once I got a quarter of the way through book two, The Drawing of the Three, I was hooked. Book four, Wizard and the Glass, was probably my favorite, and the conclusion in the final book, The Dark Tower, was very well done. By the way, I recommend reading them in order, but reading Wind Through the Keyhole, which King wrote last, between books four and five.

I really loved the story overall as it draws you in to a rag-tag group of people (known as "ka-tet") who, though hesitant at first, become united in their purpose and love for each other. Roland is a deeply flawed individual, but I love his strength and courage, his singular focus in life, and the ways he grows in his ability to love others. I'll miss the world that King created, but its characters and unique language will stay with me for a while. Long days and pleasant nights.

2. The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place by Andy Crouch (2017)

This is an indispensable book for all parents who want to lead their families well in the 21st century. While Tony Reinke’s book (below) has more of a focus on phones and social media, Crouch’s focus is on the home and how we should more purposefully consider interacting with many different types of technology. His guiding principles (Ten Tech-Wise Commitments) are excellent. In them, he lays out what a family should be about (developing wisdom and courage, more creating than consuming) and then practical commitments in light of those.

“Boredom -- for children and for adults -- is a perfectly modern condition. The technology that promises to release us from boredom is actually making it worse -- making us more prone to seek empty distractions than we have ever been...the more you entertain children, the more bored they will get...the videos we put on for our kids -- or the video games we pull up on our phones in our own moments of boredom -- are designed, unconsciously or consciously, to produce a bewitching effect. And this effect is achieved by filling a screen with a level of vividness and velocity that does not exist in the real world -- or only very rarely…So here is one result of our technology: we become people who desperately need entertainment and distraction because we have lost the world of meadows and meteors.”

3. 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You by Tony Reinke (2017)

This was a very engaging, convicting, and helpful read about how our smart phones are changing the way we exist in the world. Reinke interacts with media theorists, psychologists, and everyday examples to point out the ways our phones are shaping us (causing us to be addicted to distraction, to crave immediate approval, to perpetuate our own loneliness, to lose our ability to think deeply, to fear missing out) and that what our hearts are really longing for underneath the constant interaction with our phones (connection with God and others). This book is great because it helps you see the silliness (at best) and destructiveness (at worst) behind our habits, gives some practical tips for using your phone in a healthy way, and also provides great wisdom behind those tips so that there might be lasting change.

“...we must become mindful and slow our pace...'The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake’ (Brad Littlejohn)...By seeking trivial pleasure in our phones, we train ourselves to want more of those trivial pleasures. Most seriously of all, ‘either we, out of fear and guilt, lose our delight in God, the source of all good, and thus begin to lose our delight in all the goods he has given us.'"

4. Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity by Nabeel Qareshi (2016)

This was a very moving story and a very fascinating read. Qareshi spends a good bit of the book reflecting upon and describing how practices of Islam were meaningful and impactful to him, offering a perspective I had not learned much about before. He also shows how he wrestles with his faith with his good friend, David. Through many disagreements and openly talking about their worldviews, Qareshi begins to see how much of Islam’s belief system and the Quran itself is blindly accepted with little critique, while the Bible and the person of Jesus seem to stand up in the face of much scrutiny. Living in the United States, and especially the South, I don’t have to give up much to be a Christian. It’s humbling and challenging to read about how much Qareshi gives up to follow Jesus.

“While I was wallowing in self-pity, focused on myself, there was a whole world with literally billions of people who had no idea who God is, how amazing He is, and the wonders He has done for us. They are the ones who are really suffering. They don’t know His hope, His peace, and His love that transcends all understanding. They don’t know the message of the gospel. After loving us with the most humble life and the most horrific death, Jesus told us, 'As I have loved you, go and love one another.' How could I consider myself a follower of Jesus if I was not willing to live as He lived? To die as He died? To love the unloved and give hope to the hopeless?”

5. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nichols Carr (2010)

Having been written eight years ago, there are parts of this book that seem dated, but overall, this is still a very relevant read in our age of distractedness. The premise is that our brains are literally re-wired by the Internet and other related technologies to become distracted and shallow thinkers in all areas of our lives. I like that the author leans heavily on McLuhan's Understanding Media and uses history to show how our technology tools have developed over time and both what was lost and gained with each major advancement. Spending less time on the Internet and associated technologies and spending more time in nature are two of the implicit take-aways that will help to build a calm, attentive mind, which can lead to deep thinking and empathy.

“...after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper...when people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.”

6. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2012)

At the recommendation of a friend, I was able to read this before seeing the movie that came out in the spring (side note: while the movie got some things right and was entertaining in its own way, the book was better, as per the norm). It was very entertaining and hard to put down. The story is all about a futuristic dystopia where most people spend their days plugged into a virtual reality game (OASIS). The protagonist, Wade Watts, ends up learning everything about 80s TV, movies, and video games to help him succeed in the game, so it’s fun to be taken back into that world a bit. It’s also interesting to see how the story is a commentary on how our current lives are more and more bound up in online and virtual relationships and games. It shows what this does to a person, and how connecting with people in the physical, actual world, is the best kind of connection.

"I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real."

7. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs (2017)

In 2018, it seems that beliefs and ideas about the world are as divisive as ever. Most of us are very quick to mock those who disagree with us, instead of thoughtfully engaging in a dialogue that could possibly change our minds. In this book, Jacobs argues that most of us don’t really want to think, because thinking is hard, and it’s easier to say things that make you feel like part of the in-group. It’s easier to go into “Refutation Mode” and quickly dismiss what others say without considering that they could be right. Jacobs calls us to humility and courage as we do the hard work of considering those with different beliefs to be our neighbors and less as the "Repugnant Cultural Other."

“Everyone today seems to have an RCO [Repugnant Cultural Other], and everyone’s RCO is on social media somewhere...This is a profoundly unhealthy situation. It’s unhealthy because it prevents us from recognizing others as our neighbors -- even when they are quite literally our neighbors. If I’m consumed by this belief that that person over there is both Other and Repugnant, I may never discover that my favorite television program is also his favorite television program; that we like some of the same books...I may all to easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience. The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called ‘the war of every man against every man.’”

8. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973)

I first heard of this book in 2011, as it was assigned as reading for my seminary class Grief, Loss, Death and Dying. However, it took several more years, seeing it as influential to many and this great blog post interaction with it, to finally tip the scales for me to read it. While it was not a light read and one that was dense at times, I’m very glad I made it through. Becker’s argument in this book, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality and that death is man’s greatest anxiety. Because of this anxiety, we either focus on the small problems of our lives and “tranquilize ourselves with the trivial,” or we seek to transcend death by trying to live lives full of meaning, believing them to live on through eternity. As the Mockingbird article above points out, it’s good that Becker helps us be broken by the anxiety of death in light of our own small hero projects. Once there, we can see Christ who became mortal, faced and defeated death, and was raised for our immortality.

"This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.”

9. How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor by James K.A. Smith (2014)

This book is a commentary on A Secular Age, an award winning book about our postmodern, post Christian culture, written by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. It’s not likely that I would read Taylor’s massive work anytime soon, so I was glad to be able to read Smith’s summary. Taylor/Smith argue that we formerly lived in an enchanted, God-soaked world, but modernity brought a flatness to life as exclusive humanism started to take hold as a dominant view of life. We don’t live in an age of disbelief, but in an age that believes otherwise, in an Age of Authenticity where choice and tolerance are the highest virtues. As Smith says, "Your neighbors inhabit what Charles Taylor calls an ‘immanent frame’; they are no longer bothered by ‘the God question’ as a question because they are devotees of ‘exclusive humanism’ -- a way of being-in-the-world that offers significance without transcendence. They don’t feel like anything is missing.”

“Taylor presses the closed, immanentist ‘take’ not by pointing out logical inconsistencies or questioning the veracity of premises, but rather by suggesting that the closed take can’t seem to get rid of a certain haunting, a certain rumbling in our hearts...The upshot will be that Christianity (the ‘open’ take) can provide a better way to account for this -- not necessarily a way to quell it so we can all live happily ever after, but a way to name it and be honest about this dis-ease.”

10. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith (2001)

Emerson and Smith argue that many white evangelicals desire to end racial division and inequality in America, but because they don’t understand the structures that cause racial division, they end up perpetuating it. White evangelicals are firm believers in freewill individualism and blame the race problem on prejudiced individuals or a fabrication of the self-interested. However, this perspective, "misses that whites can move to most any neighborhood, eat at most any restaurant, walk down most any street, or shop at most any store without having to worry or find out that they are not wanted, whereas African Americans often cannot...misses that white Americans can be almost certain that when stopped by the police, it has nothing to do with race, whereas African Americans cannot.” Therefore, we need to recognize that there is more work to be done in this area and fruit will come as we repent of our individual, historical, and social sins and seek to eliminate the areas of systematic discrimination.

“Most Americans believe that opportunity for economic advancement is widely available, that economic outcomes are determined by individuals efforts and talents (or their lack) and that in general economic inequality is fair...By not seeing the structures that impact on individual initiative--such as unequal access to quality education, segregated neighborhoods that concentrate the already higher black poverty rate and lead to further social problems, and other forms of discrimination--the structures are allowed to continue unimpeded.”