A 2024 Reading Retrospective

I logged 36 completed books in 2024, my highest tally in six years of Reading Retrospectives. Sixteen of them were audiobooks—also a record—and I counted Sandra Boynton’s hilarious introduction to chocolate, which is perhaps cheating. Why so many audiobooks? A few (overlapping) reasons:

1. I wasn’t putting as much listening time into Greek and Hebrew;
2. I managed to be more active for part of the year;
3. I seldom sit down just to read books anymore. In fact, I now look for an audio version even for books in my field because I am more likely to get through them that way. When I sit (or stand) at my desk, I am typically preparing for class, grading assignments, trying (when school is not in session) to write something more substantial, or wasting time on blog posts like this. Or I am on a device reading blogs, scanning the news, doom scrolling on the site formerly known as Twitter, window shopping for a new fountain pen—God knows there are enough needless distractions in my life. Maybe that will change this year.

Reading Highlight: Because it is not available as an audiobook, I asked for and received Peter Brown’s massive intellectual autobiography, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton University Press, 2023) for Christmas in 2023. The book’s 99 short chapters were my bedtime reading for the first six months of the year. Perhaps because I do not aspire to be Peter Brown, I found his account of his life in Sudan, Ireland, Oxford, Berkeley and Princeton, his travels in Iran and Afghanistan, and his language learning completely fascinating. One of several ways it expanded my intellectual horizons was to help shift my mental map of the ancient world: Instead of locating Judaea on the periphery of the Roman empire, I now place it in the center, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Parthian empire beyond the Euphrates on the other. That, I find, changes everything. It also resulted in a new map of the Middle East—another present—that now adorns my office wall.

As usual, here is my lightly annotated list, organized this time by broad category (Biblical Studies, Biographies / Memoirs, Other Non-Fiction, and Fiction):

Biblical Studies

Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal. AYBRL. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 

[Good evidence, but the argument didn’t quite live up to its billing, imo]

Avioz, Michael. Legal Exegesis of Scripture in the Works of Josephus. LSTS 97. London: T&T Clark, 2021. [Book review here]

Bauckham, Richard. Jesus: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Brock, Brian, and Bernd Wannenwetsch. The Malady of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 1. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016.

________. The Therapy of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 2. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. 

[A genuinely fresh take on 1 Corinthians. Like its exemplar, Barth’s Römerbrief, this stimulating two-volume theological commentary is by turns insightful and unpersuasive.]

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014. [Textbook; re-read multiple times, still worth reading]

Finger, Reta Halteman, and George D. McClain. Creating a Scene in Corinth: A Simulation. Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press, 2013. [A nice concept; but I won’t be using it again]

Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. Interpretation. Louisville: John Knox, 1997. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Henze, Matthias, and Rodney A. Werline, eds. Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters. SBL Press, 2020. [A worthy successor to its 1986 predecessor]

Jipp, Joshua W. Reading Acts. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. [Textbook; re-read multiple times]

Levine, Amy-Jill. Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians. HarperOne, 2024. 

[Audiobook; Scot McKnight’s book of the year; effectively punctures multiple Christian misconceptions of Jesus’ Jewish context]

Oliver, Isaac W. Luke’s Jewish Eschatology: The National Restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Memoirs and Biographies

Boucher, David, and Teresa Smith, eds. R. G. Collingwood: An Autobiography and Other Writings: With Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

[Cheating a little: I re-read the autobiography in 2023, and finished the essays, which are long enough for a volume of their own, in 2024.]

Brown, Peter. Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

________. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 

[As my bedtime reading for the second half of the year, I turned from Brown’s autobiography to the biography of Augustine that launched Brown’s academic career; completed on December 30.]

Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne. Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith. Pittsburgh, Pa: Crown & Covenant, 2012. [Audiobook]

McCaulley, Esau. How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. New York: Convergent Books, 2023. [Audiobook]

Smith, James. On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019. [Audiobook]

Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018. 

[Audiobook; I first heard about Tara Westover’s story while living in Cambridge; I met one of the characters in her story – a professor at Brigham Young University – in Washington, D.C. this spring.]

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel. 2d ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. [Audiobook; 1st published in English in 1960]

Other Non-Fiction

Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. 3d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016. 

[Audiobook; see this post for the reasons why I think everyone college age and up should read it]

Boynton, Sandra. Chocolate: The Consuming Passion. Random House, 1992.

Cline, Eric H., and Glynnis Fawkes. 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

[A mark of my intellectual seriousness: I read the ‘graphic novel’ version not the monograph.]

Horn, Dara. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021. [Audiobook]

Lawler, Andrew. Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. New York: Anchor, 2021. [Audiobook]

Payne, Leah. God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. [Audiobook]

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. [Audiobook]

Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Crossway, 2020. [Audiobook]

Watkin, Christopher. Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2022. [Audiobook]

Fiction

Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. 40th anniversary ed. Toronto: McClelland & Steward, 2004.

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1954.

Smith, Alexander McCall. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. New York: Vintage, 1998. [Audiobook; the first three books in the series became this fall’s comfort reading]

________. Tears of the Giraffe. Anchor, 2000.

________. Morality for Beautiful Girls. Anchor, 2001. [Audiobook]

Wiesel, Elie. Dawn. Translated by Frances Frenaye. Hill and Wang, 1961. [Audiobook]

________. Day. Translated by Anne Borchardt. Hill and Wang, 1962. [Audiobook]