40 for 40 (2020 Books)

Yesterday I published my 2019 book list. Check it out.

Today, let’s talk about 2020. Happy New Year!

I turn 40 this year. This milestone is obviously a time to pause and reflect, and one thing I’ve decided to do is to set a very different reading goal for the coming year. (My other big goal is to try to run a marathon).

This goal comes from two places. First, our church community is thinking a lot about spiritual formation and disciplines this year. One of my personality traits is to constantly seek and acquire new information. This is not a bad thing. But sometimes I can get caught up in needing to always be reading the “new” thing.

So part of my goal this year is to cut down the flow of new information, go a bit slower, and revisit some of the things that have formed me over the years.

Which leads to part 2: I’ve read a lot of things and been deeply formed by a lot of what I have read. There are a number of books that have been extremely important at different moments, but many of them I haven’t revisited. Some of those moments are now many years old. I’m interested to see: were these books I loved about that moment in time, or was there something timeless about what I was encountering?

Either way, it will be an interesting means through which to reflect on my 40 years. My hope is to then post something here about each book, what the original moment was like, and what it was like to read that book again at this stage of life.

A few ground rules: I could only pick one book from an author, even if I REALLY like that author (I did make one exception to this rule, but rules are made to be broken). I also sometimes picked a book that was more representative of the author, and not actually the book I enjoyed the most (this will make sense later on when I do the reviews). I also picked 39 because I want to leave room to remember something or change the list if needed. Finally, I tried to pick books from many different eras of my life.

Here’s the list:

1. The Holy Longing
2. A Community Called Atonement
3. Surprised By Hope
4. An Unstoppable Force
5. Reaching Out
6. The Divine Conspiracy
7. Jesus Wants to Save Christians
8. With Justice For All
9. The Gift of the Jews
10. Persons in Relation
11. The Drama of Doctrine
12. Tattoos on the Heart
13. Blue Like Jazz
14. Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places
15. Five Smooth Stones For Pastoral Work
16. The Shaping of Things To Come
17. Searching For Home
18. To Change the World
19. Church Next
20. You Are What You Love
21. Between Two Worlds
22. A Band of Misfits
23. What the Dog Saw
24. Traveling Mercies
25. For The Time Being
26. Everything is Illuminated
27. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
28. And The Mountains Echoed
29. Book of Lost Things
30. High Fidelity
31. The Fortress of Solitude
32. My Name Is Asher Lev
33. Franny and Zooey
34. The Fault in our Stars
35. Plainsong
36. The Kid From Tomkinsville
37. Angela’s Ashes
38. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
39. The Tender Bar
40. The Hate U Give