My friend Tanner Greer posted a list of books he read in 2017, with the best books highlighted. I am stealing his idea because this was a great year for my reading: I finished the Bible, which allows me to at least recognize (if not understand) passages brought up in other Christian writings. In the lists below the best (most intellectual engaging, most interesting, most informative, etc.) book in each category is bolded. I also want to give special attention to “Christoph Luxenberg“‘s The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, which was so mind-bending and so challenging it increased the seriousness with which I took philology and comparative religion.

Without meaning to, it seems I selected many books on dimensional projection and the philosophy called “Realism. “The Book of Ezekiel, St. Thomas Aquinas, Death’s End, The Secret of Ventriloquism, and The Weight of Glory all share this theme.

At the moment, I am reading two additional books. Wrestling the Angel is an intellectual history of the Mormon church. My God is the LORD is very similar to The End of the Beginning.

The Holy Bible

• The Book of Ezekiel
• The Book of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah
• The Minor Prophets
• The Book of Tobit and the Tales of the Deuterocanon
• The Books of the Maccabees
• The Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach

The Apocrypha

• The Prayer of Manasseh
• The Second Book of Esdras

Philology

• Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King, by Matthew W. Bates
• The Crucified Rabbi: Judaism and the Origins of Catholic Christianity, by Taylor Marshall
• The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, by John Walton
• The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites, by John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton
• The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, by Christoph Luxenberg
• The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, by Michael Heiser

Comparative Religion

• Medieval Christianity: A New History, by Kevin Madigan
• Stories from Ancient Canaan: Second Edition, Edited and Translated by Michael Coogan and Mark Smith
• The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City, by Jeffrey F. Meyer

Doctors of the Church

• Confessions, by Saint Augustine
• Eight Homilies Against the Jews, by Saint John Chrysostom

The Friars

• Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History, by Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke
• St Francis of Assisi, by G.K. Chesterton
• St Thomas Aquinas, by G.K. Chesterton

Anti-Catholic Writings

• Judaism and Christianity: A Contrast, by Rabbi Stuart Federow
• The End of the Beginning: Revelation 21-22 and the Old Testament, by William Dumbrell

Intellectual Biography

• Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi
• The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklinkgs, by Philip and Carol Zaleski
• The Lost Book of Moses: The Quest for the World’s Oldest Bible… and the man who wrote it, by Chanan Tigay

Science Fiction

• The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
• The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu
• Death’s End, by Cixin Liu

Horror

• The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson
• The Secret of Ventriloquism, by Jon Padgett

Christian Apolgetics

• Heretics, by G.K. Chesterton
• Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis
• Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
• The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton
• The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
• The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, by C.S. Lewis

Business Strategy

• Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation, by Blake Harris
• Super Mario: How Nintento Conquered America, by Jeff Ryan
• The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, by Scott Galloway

Politics and Political History

• Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green
• Hacks by Donna Brazile
• Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Travel

• Exploring New Europe: A Bicycle Journey, by Barry Wood