It is that time of year again, time to lay out the books I want to try to read this year. It is much better than reading Twitter. I know my posts auto-tweet and some of you come here from there, but man, is that place awful. I keep saying I’m not going to log on, and then I look briefly in the morning and see dear friends completely lost in conspiracy theory. Back to books, I have a goal of hitting 24 books this year, most of them you can see in the picture above. I beat my goal last year, so I’m starting to inch it back up and and hopefully in a few years when the Nuggets are older, I can get back to 48 books a year. 

I usually break down by large categories, but I don’t really have that this year. No devotional this year, as we are reading the Bible as a church. I only have one non-fiction, A Brief History of Time, then three fiction books, there CS-Lewis, and the rest Theology/Bible Studies.

I actually just finished Heart of Darkness last night, so I am ahead of the game. I read The Old Man and the Sea last year, and sitting next to it on my shelf was To Have and to Have Not, so I added that in. Also, I few years ago, someone gave me Bleachers, it is a short little book from John Grisham, who is one of the best story tellers alive. I wanted to keep it short, due to the big boys I have on the list this year. 

A top three of sort – The New Testament in Its World, Evangelical Theology and Basics of Biblical Greek. The first two are heavy weights in NT Studies and Systematic Theology, both over 800 pages. For Greek, I finally broke down, bought the textbook, workbook, and DVD’s (yeah, that’s right, DVD’s are still a thing and they are much cheaper then the digital downloads or the ‘streaming’ option which is only good for a year). I plan to read ET first, and hopefully relatively quickly, then on to NT before my church gets there in our reading plan. No idea when/how to do the Greek. Not sure if it is daily, weekly, or what watching the lectures may be like.

But first, I have to read Five Views on Inerrancy, this has been on my list for years. Others in the Christian studies vain include: Cry of the Soul (about Psalms), Volume 1 (of 4) of 2000 Years of Christ’s Power, Pastoral Theology in the Classical Tradition, Knowing Scripture, and Biblical Theology. 

I put the CS Lewis Signature Classics anthology in there, but I don’t intend to read all eight of the books. I’ve read three already, so this year, I will read three more – The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, and The Abolition of Man. These are all shorter, but the ratio of amount of Lewis I’ve read compared to what gets quoted is quite small.

That gives me 16 books. My community Group started (well the intro) The Meaning of Marriage last year, the week before the pandemic, so I might pick that up. I also dropped a devotional to switch to a Bible reading plan, so I may finish that when I finish the Bible. I have two books out from Crossway that I need to review, so that I can get some others. The problem with them, they don’t send books, just Kindle files and, well, I forget about them. As for other ARC books, I know Baker was looking at revising theirs. As of now, they have either stopped it completely or cut me out without notification, as I have not received any books to review in months. I may read Concise Theology with Mrs. MMT. The remainder of the books will be (hopefully) filled with either library books or ones I can bum off of friends. 

We will see how it goes, as always I will update at the end of the year.