Getting married meant I read a lot fewer books this year than usual. According to my Goodreads account, I read 195 books this past year (that comprised a total of about fifty-eight thousand pages). And eleven and a half of those were books I specifically set out to read in last year’s Books on Deck post.
(Ok, the half is because I’m still reading Meditation and Contemplation: An Ignatian Guide to Praying with Scripture by Fr. Timothy Gallagher—I started doing it as a weekly reading, but too late in the year to finish in 2016).
I only missed three of the books on last year’s list, and I’m only planning to carry over one of those guys into next year: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
The point of my list isn’t to move heaven and earth to finish all the books, but to have a little added motivation to read books that have been sitting on my shelf for a while without ever getting into my queue. But, if I haven’t gotten to one of the books by the end of the year, I mostly figure I don’t really intend to read it, and make my peace with that for the present.
So, with that caveat, here are the books that I already own that I intend to read in 2017:
- (√) The Art and Craft of Feature Writing – William E. Blundell
- (√) Spiritual Letters – John Chapman
- (√) The Little Oratory – David Clayton
- (√) Distilled Knowledge: The Science Behind Drinking’s Greatest Myths, Legends, and Unanswered Questions – Brian Hoefling
- (√) Impro – Keith Johnstone
- (√) The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains – Thomas W. Laqueur
- (√) Ecclesial Movements and Communities: Origins, Significance and Issues – Brendan Leahy
- (√) On Friendship – Alexander Nehamas
- (√) Great Lent: Journey to Pascha – Alexander Schmemann
- The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
- (√) War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (this is a reread, we’re seeing Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812)
- (√) The Oxford Movement in America – Clarence A. Walworth
- (√) The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language – Rowan Williams
This list gets shorter every year as I (a) get more realistic about what I actually intend to read and (b) buy fewer books thanks to my chrome plugin (Library Extension) that shows me if any book I’m looking at on Amazon is in my public library system.
What are you putting on your nightstand for 2017?
[…] read Rowan Williams’s The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language as part of my 2017 reading list. I meant it to be spiritual reading, but the book was a bit abstruse and technical for me overall. […]
[…] year, I read all but one of the books on my Books to Read in 2017 list. Spiritual Letters by Dom John Chapman is in progress (so it doesn’t have its checkmark […]