Reading Review (2022)

Of the 24,000 pages of books I read this year, there's only four things worth sharing.

This year, I had four major reading projects:

• Os Guinness’ Corpus: In 2020, I picked up a couple of Guinness’ latest books for a modest Mere Orthodoxy review. After I realized that something much larger was necessary to do justice to the life and career of Guinness, this morphed into trying to get a better grasp on everything he had published. From mid 2020 through the beginning of 2022, I worked through twelve or so works of his (leaving plenty untouched). The resulting essay is much larger (nearly 4000 words) and focuses more on Guinness’ life and leadership in the public square than on any of his books, but hopefully it will give readers of Guinness’ books a deeper appreciation for their author. TLDR? We need more public intellectuals committed to institution building. The Guinness article will be published in the next print edition of Mere Orthodoxy. You can subscribe to receive it here.

• Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: TFQ is the longest epic in the English language, dwarfing other works better known these days like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. TFQ was a favorite of C. S. Lewis’ (J. R. R. Tolkien had little taste for it) but up until about 1914 it was an epic that almost everyone would have been quite familiar with. Today, our language has morphed sufficiently that even Lewis acknowledges “it is perhaps the most difficult poem in English,” and, as a result, of the few who have even read excerpts of it, few have made it beyond the first of the six completed books.
  
  I would not recommend that everyone read TFQ but it seemed impossible to fully understand Lewis without having done so. More fiction ought to be written as Spenser wrote his: in order “to fashion a gentlemen or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
  
  Lastly, on the point of reading to better understand Lewis, I could not more heartily recommend Planet Narnia by Michael Ward, which was one of my 2022 reads. Ward unlocked the depths of Lewis’ Space Trilogy for me and it was his constant references to TFQ that convinced me to finally make the plunge this year. If you need a reading plan, here’s the one I came up with. You likely won’t persevere to the end without one.

• Tolkien’s Legendarium: Inspired to read and re-read Tolkien this year by Kirsten Sanders’ write-through of the trilogy, I once again picked up The Hobbit and the trilogy before pressing on to new territories for me: The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin. In 2021, I had (finally) completed The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, so none of this was entirely new plot material, but it was a delight to read nevertheless. Children of Hurin is a graceless tragedy, brutal to endure, but alongside the trilogy, gives a more balanced—realistic even—account of the nature of the world.
  
  For those looking to read someone writing about Tolkien and what he’s up to in LOTR, there is no better book than Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle Earth. It is very rare, but wonderful, when secondary literature is not just informative but also delightful to read. I am very glad to have read it this year. Shippey’s academic training and professional career is uncannily close to Tolkien’s own in philology, making him the supreme guide to every jot and tittle in Tolkien.

• The Divine Comedy: In 2021, Baylor University’s Matthew Lee Anderson released the 100 Days of Dante resource and led the world’s largest Dante reading group. I foolishly decided not to join at the time, but fortunately the resources and reading plan are still available here. I’ve read The Divine Comedy before (Inferno in high school, and the whole shebang after divinity school) but I retained almost nothing from those readings. With the help of better translations (Pinsky for Inferno, Ciardi for the rest), more attentive note-reading, and the podcast episodes from 100 Days of Dante, the Divine Comedy has quickly become one of my favorite epics. Like The Faerie Queene, the Comedia offers instructions in the virtues and a life worth living (though, presently, I’m more convinced that Dante succeeded on this point). I’m almost exactly halfway through (finished Inferno and the beginning of Purgatorio), so I will have more substantial thoughts come Easter 2023 when I wrap this reading up.

All together I read 89 books. Other than these major projects, the most memorable and recommendable were:

• Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. With three kids under three, my wife and I have read a lot of books about parenting as we try to survive parenting our own children. The book has led to more productive conversations this year than anything else we read and earned it a spot in our parenting pantheon alongside Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family and Emily Oster’s Cribsheet.

• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. A great book on rest and the habits necessary to living a restful life. Comer does a great job of boiling down upper shelf theological ideas about the Sabbath and spiritual disciplines into something that you could give to a lay friend or family member as a gift. I’m looking forward to following Comer more closely in 2023.

• Good Charts by Scott Berinato. I read more than half a dozen publications from the Harvard Business Review. Each and every one of them other than this one was leadership-speak mumbo jumbo, no more informative than the fake Latin lorem ipsum text programs sometimes use to auto-fill documents. Good Charts, on the other hand, has been something that I’ve thought about most weeks in my job trying to boil down facts and figures into something comprehensible. If you work with numbers, or want to find a way to work more with numbers, this is a great manual for making your data legible and aesthetically pleasing.

In 2023, I plan to read a lot more theology and ethics. In grad school, I learned that it’s often more valuable to read deeply than broadly (I am eclectic to a fault), so I am hoping to continue to work through the writings of Paul Ramsey and Oliver O’Donovan. My read-throughs of Stanley Hauerwas and Os Guinness have led to some of my favorite own writings. A Russell Kirk intensive might also be in order as I try to think and write more on conservative politics and public policy.

Finally, one of the very last C. S. Lewis books I need to read is A Preface to Paradise Lost, so I might turn 2023 into a year for all things Milton (Stanley Fish’s book on Paradise Lost has also been on my to-read list for quite some time). You can never go wrong reading the canon, or about the canon.

Are there any other things that I should consider? If so, be sure to let me know.