Top 10 in ’10
This year, for the first time, I decided to keep a log of all the books I read. I spend a lot of my free time reading, but I never really tracked what I was reading, so I thought this would make an interesting experiment. I tracked each book, how many pages, and what general category the book fell into. Here are my results in 2010:
- 12,807 pages
- 51 books
- 5 books in Philosophy
- 3 books in Classic Literature
- 9 books about Saints
- 5 books in Christology
- 4 books on Eastern Christianity
- 5 books by Doctors of the Church
- 4 books in General Theology
- 4 books in Spirituality
- 6 books about Baseball
- 1 book about writing
- 5 books in “Other”
Below are ten of my favorite books from this year (note: these are not books necessarily published in 2010 but books I read this year). I tried to make an effort to include books from all the different categories from which I read.
10) Beyond Belief, Josh Hamilton
9) Adventures in Daily Prayer, Bert Ghezzi
8) Hymns on Paradise, St. Ephrem
7) Jesus as God: The New Testament Use of Theos in Reference to Jesus, Murray Harris
6) Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
5) On Hope, Josef Pieper
4) How to Profit from Your Faults, Joseph Tissot
3) The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright
2) The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, A. Edward Siecienski
1) Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, Eric Metaxas
Thanks for your list, Eric. The Bonhoeffer book has been getting rave reviews around the internet. Was it really that good?
Brandon,
I admit, I’m a big Bonhoeffer fan, so I’m biased. He was the only non-Catholic I quoted in my book (and I quoted him twice!), so you can see where my sympathies lie.
But the book itself is fantastic – it really makes you realize what a terrible situation German Christians were in: just living under Nazi rule made them complicit in so many sins. I have often found the struggles of the Confessing Church in Germany to have many parallels to today’s struggles to not be complicit in the sin of abortion.
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45,700 pages, though not all books had page counts
25 of those books were in the area of Religion, Theology, Spirituality, Apologetics
I am not much for making lists of best books even though I read a lot of great books this year. But Light of the World was pretty awesome and the best piece of fiction from a Catholic was “A Postcards from the Volcano” with strong Catholic themes.
Jeff,
I bow to my bibliophile master!
I haven’t gotten Light of the World yet, but it’s on my list. I never heard of “Postcards”; I’ll have to check it out now.