Like a number of other people I know, I keep a list of the books that I read over the course of a year and then share that list online at the start of the next year. I started keeping the list for myself more than a decade back and started posting it several years ago in response to requests for me to share it.
This year I read almost exactly the same number of books that I did in 2021. I suspect that this was largely because I devoted much of my sabbatical to archival research and read thousands of pages of primary sources rather books.
As is usually the case, the majority of my reading was work related. So there are a number of texts about Unitarian Universalist theology, populism, and parish life. I did, however, manage a few works of fiction and some graphic novels for pleasure. I read a collection of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories at the start of the war in Ukraine and finally started in on the works of Sally Rooney. I read Beautiful World, Where Are You in just a couple of days. I enjoyed it so much that I plan to polish off her two other novels this year.
The best book I read all year was without question The Dawn of Everything. It is a work that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life. I have mentioned it a few times already in blog posts and suspect that I will do so again. It presents a profound intellectual challenge to the way that the political order is structured and offers an invitation to imagine a different one, not of the basis of hypothetical utopias but rather based on a review of the many ways in which people have historically organized themselves.
Here’s the complete list of books, in the order that I read them:
Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century, Ignatius Donnelly
Dune: House Atreides, Vol. 1, Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson
The Knights of Heliopolis, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Luke
In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900, Omar Ali
Nemo: The Roses of Berlin, Alan Moore
Fashion Beast, Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren
A Village Life, Louise Gluck
An Introduction to the Unitarian and Universalist Traditions, Andrea Greenwood and Mark Harris
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable
I Tried to Change So You Don’t Have To: True Life Lessons, Loni Love
Tamara Drew, Posy Simmonds
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Nikolai Gogol
interplay of things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together, Anthony Pinn
After the Protests are Heard: Enacting Civic Engagement and Social Transformation, Sharon Welch
The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor
City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination, Jacob Olupona
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Matsuo Basho
Search, Michelle Huneven
Living with Integrity: Unitarian Values and Beliefs in Practice, ed. Kate Whyman
Hungarian Unitarians in Transylvania; sermons by Maria Pap, a record of her visit to the Western Union in July/August 2014, Maria Pap
The Meaning of Doctrine; Unitarian Belief, trans. Vilma S. Harrington, Bela Varga
A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents, Earl Morse Wilbur
Francis Dávid: What Has Endured of His and Work?, trans. Vilma S. Harrington, Bela Varga
Growth and Development of Unitarianism in the Khasi and Jainta Hills, Renewlet Nongbri
The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. Iain McCalman, Robert Wedderburn
A Short History of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, John Campbell
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760-1860, Ruth Watts
Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three-Afro British Authors of the Georgian Era: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn, Paul Edwards
Wildcat Keeps Going, Donald Rooum
The Sovereignty of the Good, Iris Murdoch
A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America, Earl Morse Wilbur
Cordury Mansions, Alexander McCall Smith
To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachussets and the Making of the Antislavery Movement, Christopher Cameron
Unitarians and India: a study in encounter and response, Spencer Lavan
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World, Peter Wohlleben
Jamesland, Michelle Huneven
How to Spot a Fascist, Umberto Eco
The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self, Thandeka
Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O’Neal Story, Paul J. Magnarella and Pete O’Neal
Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Richard Rorty
The Way of Gratitude: A New Spirituality for Today, Galen Guengerich
Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics, Sofía Betancourt
Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney
John
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorfor
Small Preaching: 25 Little Things You Can Do Now to Become a Better Preacher, Jonathan Pennington
After the Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism, Nancy McDonald Ladd
Manual Destructivista/Destructivist Manual, Tina Escaja
Only the End of the World Again, Neil Gaiman