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If you have not read while eating croissant and sipping ca phe den in a little cafe in Hanoi, you should.
My 2014 reading list is coming along nicely...
The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Aligheri
The Book of Enoch, translated by R.H. Charles. This is where almost all your angelology and more than a few screenplays come from.
The Other End of Time, by Frederick Pohl. Unreadable...
Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David Mindell
Saturn, by Ben Bova
Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
The Ware Tetrology, by Rudy Rucker
How Jesus Became God, by Bart Ehrman. His best to date.
Zero History, by William Gibson
The Philosophy of Spinoza, edited by Joseph Ratner
Paradise Lost, by John Milton. Whew!
Did Jesus Rise From The Dead, by William Lane Craig. This eBook is more of a monograph, but he calls it a book so I'm claiming it. Still, it's fideist fluff.
The Tank Killers, by Harry Yeide
Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, by Bart Ehrman
Escape From Hell, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, by Erik J. Wielenberg
The Gun, by C.J. Chivers
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I, by Richard Ned Lebow. This was a goodreads giveaway. Lebow's assessment of first order effects were pretty good but as with all such alternative histories the second order impacts of small changes are anyone's guess. It would benefit from a different style of presentation that made more clear when the author was moving from historical to alternative futures.
From Babylon to Bethlehem: The Jewish People from the Exile to the Messiah, by H.L. Ellison
3001: The Final Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, Tough slogging...
The Engines of God, by Jack McDevitt
The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood
Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville is mesmerizing, nauseating, and transgressive; a disjoint admixture of Terry Gilliam, William Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft. Steam-punk, science-fiction, mytho-poetic, horror-fantasy novels aren't my usual thing but China Mieville is so viciously skilled a writer he makes it work even for me.
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle, by Pamela Eisenbaum. Fun stuff. "Paul Was Not a Christian" should be on every Christian theology nerd's reading list.
The Quran. Must be much, much better in the original Arabic.
Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, by Stephen T. Davis. I'm not even a Christian, or even a theist, and still it gives me hope to see these philosophers of religion going at it all "hammer and tongs" about a concept so central to their respective theologies. Wondrous stuff!
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, by Karen Armstrong is a well-written analysis of the origins of many of the world's current religions (and a few, like Zoroastrianism, which we have not heard from in a while). The organizing idea, that there was an Axial Age when these traditions solidified at the same time in Greece, the Levant, India, and China, comes across as a little strained, mostly coincidentally, and largely unrelated.
Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, by Kathryn Tanner Have you ever noticed how much theology is mostly about harmonizing irreconcilable ideas you already believe? Neither especially systematic nor particularly brief.
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, by Terence McKenna
