2023 Top Ten Books of the Year
For many years, I've strived to read roughly one book per week, recording what I read and selecting a Top Ten from my list, although it often exceeds 10! Like previous years, here's my 2023 list which includes 13 books, roughly in order of preference, with a few notable mentions that almost made the cut. I've included brief synopses of the aspects I found intriguing in my top-ranked books. My responses to these books are deeply personal, reflecting my own interests.
Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, 2023, 317 pp.
At age 15, Fei-Fei arrived in the US from China, not knowing the language. Through the commitment of her high school math teacher, she found her stride as a student. Today she is a computer science professor at Stanford University and directs the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She had a sabbatical time at Google as chief scientist, has testified before congress, and has been recognized by Academies of Engineering, Medicine, and the Arts and Sciences. Her memoir, wonderfully told, intertwines her personal and family challenges with her insights on artificial intelligence: beyond theory to application in various fields. She carefully faces the ethical challenges of her field, avoiding both simplistic solutions and seeking solutions for the real difficulties. Though there is no indication that Prof. Li is religious in any way, she raises questions that are important for Christians to seek to understand.
David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, 2023, 275 pp.
David Brooks is a columnist for the NY Times, a commentator on PBS, and an author. Our world has never been as connected as it is today, and yet loneliness is up, suicide is up, and too many people report not having a single friend. How do you really get to know another person? Brooks draws on research in psychology, neuroscience, interviews he has done across the country, and lots of self-reflection in this thoughtful and insightful book. Is this fundamental issue at the heart of the increasing anger and divide we all feel in this country? This book finds David Brooks at the vulnerable center of his own growth, and as such offers additional insight. The glimmers of his growing faith are evident in this account.
Mario Livio, Is God a Mathematician? 2009, 252 pp.
Mario Livio had a career as an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the Hubble Space Telescope. Today he is an author of multiple books that popularize science and mathematics. In this book he confronts the question: Is mathematics invented or discovered? If mathematics was a human invention, as many contend, then why is it that even the most esoteric ideas of mathematics turn out to be fundamental in explaining the relationships of our natural world through science? If mathematics were purely utilitarian, what would explain its beauty and grandeur? Livio is a wonderful writer who explores these questions in a way that brings joy and insight for many. This is a journey into our natural world that truly “raises the question of God.”
John Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game, 2013, 242 pp.
John Sexton is emeritus dean of the law school at New York University and served as its fifteenth president from 2002—2015. He is also a baseball fan who came to love the Yankees after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, for the sake of his son. He uses baseball as a metaphor to provide insight into issues of faith (defined very broadly, beyond his personal Catholic faith), doubt, conversion (where he tells to story of being converted to become a Yankee fan), miracles, and so much more. He writes passionately, weaving stories of baseball with stories of faith in a way I have not seen before. If you like baseball, you will enjoy this, and if you don’t, you might give baseball another look.
Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South, 2023, 208 pp.
Esau McCaulley is a New Testament professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, and is a writer for the New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, Washington Post, and Christianity Today. His earlier book, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope helps us understand the cultural interpretation we bring to Scripture. In this memoir, he describes his life growing up as an African American in Alabama. It is the story of the challenges he faced because of race, poverty, and challenging circumstances in the family and in his personal life. Yet there is rarely even a hint of whining in the account, but rather the hopeful call to face the challenges, draw on his faith, and make a difference in the world. This inspiring account was both uplifting and insightful.
Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God, 2000, 288 pp.
Philip Yancey is a journalist (for many years writing for Christianity Today and the author of more than 20 books published since 1977. Nothing is simple for Yancey, who explores doubts and questions as openly and honestly as any Christian writer I have read. In this book in particular, he wrestles with the question of getting to know and trust an invisible God when what we know of him seems fraught with contradiction. I found this an unforgettable experience of honesty, humility, and insight. There are no simplistic answers here. His memoir which came out last year, Where the Light Fell, was one of my top books last year and provides a credible foundation for all of his writing.
R. Paul Stevens, The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes, 2022, 170 pp.
Paul Stevens is the retired marketplace theology professor at Regent College, Vancouver, and continues to be a prolific author and speaker. This book is a deeply theological view of what it means for God’s people to live today with purpose and commitment to represent the Kingdom of God in a challenging world. He draws on his experience as a theologian, pastor, and carpenter to offer insight for a life of faith in our world. He has written 50 books and continues to write (he has another coming out in 2024), and I have read many of them, but this one stands as my favorite.
Sho Baraka, He Saw that it Was Good, 2021, 179 pp.
Sho Baraka is a globally recognized recording artist, performer, culture curator, activist, and writer. He was an original member of hip-hop consortium 116 clique. He brings a marvelous perspective to the conversation on faith, art, and culture. Baraka introduced me to a world I knew little about. Yet he does this in such a way that he provided touch points of familiarity for me and caused me to listen carefully when we entered unfamiliar territory. It is hard to enter his world that often seemed so foreign, yet his foundations were there to bring stability to my journey. I loved this book.
Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue: A True Story, 2020, 356 pp.
Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran, lived for a time in a refugee camp, and then came to Oklahoma as an eight-year-old. Now in his late 30s, Nayeri wrote this from the perspective of the child that he was, sharing insights, questions, and challenges as he escaped from his old world and entered a very strange new world. In what by rights is a painful life of adjustment and disappointment, Nayeri does not dwell there. He shares the excitement of learning and growing, filled with humor and self-contradiction. Just listen to this young boy tell his story and learn from him in facing your own obstacles. Little signs of the role of faith in his life add to the beauty of this story for Christians. Brilliant!
Alexander (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963/2008, 148 pp.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and dissident , and a Nobel Prize winner, who was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in a Russian prison camp for criticizing Stalin. This book was his first novel, capturing some of his own prison experiences. The story captures one painful day in the prison camp that could readily destroy an average person. But Ivan Denisovich was no average person. He persevered in the face of horrible obstacles, he helped his fellow prisoners, and even brought purpose and meaning to what others might see as only drudgery. Near the end he says, “A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch.” Inspirational!
Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels, 2018, 326 pp.
Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an American mother and now is a writer and professor in Chicago. This boisterous, raucous novel focuses on two days in the lives of an extended Mexican-American family in the San Diego area. The first day is the funeral for the mother of Big Angel (so named because his father had two sons named Angel), and the second day is Big Angel’s birthday party. Big Angel was doing his best to live to see this birthday bash. Beneath the surface of all the bickering and challenges of life, the author helps us see real people who cared deeply, in their own way, for each other. Christians should not miss the way faith plays a part and offers hope in the otherwise deeply broken world. In the author’s notes at the end, we get a glimpse of the very personal connections between the novel and his own life.
Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s Crossing, 2011, 536 pp.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist a writer of historical fiction, and past winner of a Pulitzer Prize. This book takes us back to the 1600s in Puritan America and follows the life a young woman Bethia Mayfield. Growing up when the highest calling for a woman was to be a wife and a mother, Bethia gains her education through great curiosity and listening skills. She befriends and Native American, Caleb, and they learn together. He eventually “crosses over” and gets a degree from Harvard, though his mixed background stands in the way of full assimilation with either his past or with the colonists. Brooks bases her story on good research into colonial life and a small notation in the Harvard records of an early graduate of Harvard, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk. An insightful emersion into another time.
Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, 2018, xxiii, 218 pp.
Jerry Muller is a professor at the Catholic University of America, a writer for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and the author of books on economics and the market. Going back to my Boeing days, I have had a growing concern about the overuse of metrics and the way they can distort mission. Peter Drucker’s statement, “What gets measured, gets managed” is true, but it has the unhappy consequence that “What cannot be measured gets ignored.” In this book, the author puts to words this appropriate caution—he said what I have believed. This is an important book, especially for this day when data is too often seen as the final guide. For Christians, who tend to follow the latest trends even into the church, this provides some fodder for not allowing the church to become totally metric driven!
Honorable mention
Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Translation and Commentary, the Prophets
Robert Alter is a Jewish scholar and it is fascinating to get his insights from scholarship on the Scriptures we may miss because of familiarity with the passages.
Thomas Kidd, Thomas Jefferson: a Biography of Spirit and Flesh
This biography focuses on Jefferson’s moral and religious searching. He had a hard time getting out of the way of God’s revelation to him, trying instead to “tame” God into one of his own making. Painful to hear, but reflective of what we may also do.
Uli Chi, The Wise Leader
This book will be out in mid 2024, and is a personal and important account of a Christian leader, a software entrepreneur, and a teacher at Regent College
Jeff Haanen, Working from the Inside Out
Jeff argues that we too often teach and talk about faith and work, but challenges us to start with inner transformation. It is not about us but about God. Great insight.
