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(Comments were part of the 2012 best book series) I definitely have a trend in my favorite fiction books of the year of reading multiple books by the same author fairly close together.  I read Poisonwood Bible in November, Flight Behavior in December and I am almost finished with Prodigal Summer.

I read a good interview with Kingsolver a couple days ago. She summarizes her advice to younger authors that I think is why I love her writing. “I think that when people read fiction, they’re really reading for wisdom. I am. That’s what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it’s because there’s something in it that we didn’t know already. Not just information but really wisdom””sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience, so”¦” (She gets around to saying quit smoking so you will live longer and become wise.)

Summary: An incredible novel of an Appalachian woman that comes to see the world as it is instead of the world that she thought she knew.

Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. I was admittedly reluctant. Kingsolver writes Literary Fiction.  Her books are serious, often heavy works of fiction that, while really beautiful prose and rich lyrical stories, also have a point. It is like being told to eat your vegetables because they are good for you.

So while I really did look forward to reading this, it took me a little while to actually get started.  Recently I have looked forward to happy, funny books that make me feel good. Maybe it is the fact that I am getting older or more resistant to easy fix world that too many embrace.

Kingsolver does not embrace the quick fix. She embraces a full look at the hard world that is around us.  But as amazing as it is to me, her writing does not feel like propaganda. It feels like a beautiful piece of art. Yes there is meaning there, but the meaning is not crude, it does not hit you over the head like a club. Instead you can see the beauty of the art and somehow that beauty is made greater because it is has a serious subject.

Flight Behavior is narrated by a young woman from the eastern Tennessee Appalachian mountains. She is the definition of poor. Both her parents died when she was in high school, she got pregnant and quickly married and moved into her in-laws home. Her husband is a good, but uninspiring man. Her children 5 and 18 months (the first pregnancy ended in a late term still birth) are the joy of her life. She still lives on the edge of her in-laws property. They have almost no income, very little opportunity and an absence of hope.

One day, Dellarobia Turnbow (the protagonist) decides to throw away her marriage and meet a man to have an affair, she comes upon an amazing sight. It appears that the entire mountain valley above her house is on fire, but not consumed (she connects it to Moses’ burning bush). She comes to her senses and goes home before meeting the man and without understanding what she has seen.

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Summary: It is important to remember that it was normal every day people, not just civil rights heroes that participated in the Civil Rights movement.

A few weeks ago, my pastor, while talking about the historicity of the gospel accounts of Jesus, mentioned that in seminary in the 1980s one of his professors suggested that within 20 to 30 years, once the survivors of the Holocaust started to die off, people would increasingly question whether the Holocaust actually happened.  And now about 30 years after that professor’s aside we can see that Holocaust deniers are increasing around the world.  My fear is that we will start having a similar denial of Civil Rights horrors.

It is one reason that I think that While the World Watched is an important book.  Carolyn Maull McKinstry was a good friend to and the same age as the four girls that died in the Birmingham 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963.  She had left the bathroom where the girls died only a minute or so before the bomb went off.

Over the first several chapters, McKinstry slowly tells the story of that morning in short snippits while giving background to her life and community before that day.  I think the method isn’t a bad one, because the reader is picking up the book because of that day.  But in order to really understand the day, we need to have context to understand what was really happening.  So the first four chapters are a little slow in unfolding the overall story.

But once that central story of the book is told, if anything the book becomes even more important.  Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just an average 14 year old.  She was born into an educated family (both of her parents and both of her mother’s parents had college degrees). Both of her parents worked with good jobs. But this is a story of an average girl. She did not have a special seat at the Civil Rights movement’s table.

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Takeaway: It is fine (and biblical) to admit we do not understand God.

I have recently discovered the blog Black, White and Gray. Bradley Wright (links to reviews of his books below) and a couple of other Christian Sociologists talk about statistics and sociology of Christianity. When I started The God I Don’t Understand I had just read the third of a four part series about research into Deconversion. Each of the posts were interesting and I would really recommend reading them to get past a lot of myths about why people leave Christianity.

The third post was about Christians responding badly to doubt. Of the 50 deconverts that wrote testimonies of their deconversion that were analyzed, 42 mentioned frustrations with Christians they knew. The problem was not primarily misbehavior or hypocritical attitudes as I would have assumed, but frustration with how Christians respond to doubt.

Having finished The God I Don’t Understand, I would highly recommend it as a book that properly responds to doubt. Christopher Wright is an Anglican Priest and professor and the head of the foundation that John Stott started to encourage pastoral education in the developing world. This is the second book I have read by him recently and I will be reading more. Christopher Wright (no relation to NT Wright) is wonderfully pastoral in his approach, but even more important he is incredibly biblical. Christopher Wright specializes in teaching Old Testament theology and more naturally than any other scholar I have read, talks about the bible as a single grand narrative of which the Old Testament cannot be removed.

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Summary: A wandering, but very encouraging story of how obedience can be used by God.

I know that some dismiss books that are written “˜with”¦’.  These are books where a person has a story to tell but does not have the time (and usually skill) to tell it well in book form.  Whenever I have hear automatic dismissal I think of the work that John and Elizabeth Sherrill did in bring the stories of Brother Andrew, Corrie Ten Boom, David Wilkerson and many others where their names did not clearly appear in the “˜with”¦’ section.

I do want to say clearly, that while I am supportive of people like the Sherrills and Dave Roberts in this book, I think these cowriters need to always be acknowledged and Christian publishers in particular need to stop the practice of hidden ghost writers.

In the Grace Outpouring, Roy Godwin tells the story of how God has used him and the Ffald-y-Brenin retreat center in Wales to bless others and bring God’s power to the people that visit the retreat center, the community around the retreat center, and even people that have never been there.

Testimony stories like this are an important part of Christian literature.  Sometimes I can forget how important a part they are.  These types of books are usually not great literary works, but instead are simple narratives of Gods work in normal people’s lives.

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Takeaway: Justice requires working systems. Part of working systems is adequate defense and reasonable sentencing.

No one that I know that has read this has rated it less than 5 stars.

Bryan Stevenson is the head of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery Alabama. Somewhat similar to the International Justice Mission that focuses on bringing justice and legal assistance to people around the world, EJI works to bring legal assistance to death row and other prisoners.

Stevenson deftly weaves the broader story of his life and work around one main story of an innocent death row inmate that was knowingly condemned to death and EJI’s work to prove his innocence and win him clemency.

Primarily this is a story of how our justice system is not equal. Poverty and race (and small town justice) often come together to produce not justice, but scapegoats.

This book came out before the Black Lives Matter movement started, but it is a good primer for the broader justice issues in the US.

Stevenson also does not spend much time on his own faith, but it is clear that his own Christian faith is a driving factor in giving him motivation and hope for his work. And I think that it is an interesting book to compare with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.

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Summary: An extended reflection on what it means to truly change through Christ’s power.

Dallas Willard is one of the originators of the modern spiritual formation movement.  Willard, and his protege, Richard Foster, have done much to refocus the Evangelical world on spiritual disciplines and intentional focus on spiritual growth.

Renovation of the Heart is the most comprehensive book I have read by Willard on the why and how of truly changing (and he means heart, mind, and actions).  As I read the book, I kept thinking of Paul’s thoughts in Romans 7:15 about doing what he does not want to do and not doing what he wants to do.

Willard responds to this common frustration not by creating a five step program or some other silver bullet, but a fairly detailed discussion of what it means to really change.  This is a fairly dense book.  I spent more than three weeks working on it and really I am not sure how to review it.

On the positive side, there is real spiritual wisdom here.  On the negative side, there are a lot of rabbit trails, and it could have been organized better.  I also listened to the book as an audiobook read by Willard himself.  He is not the best reader, and I think even if he had been a good reader, this content should be read in print, not listened to on audio.

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