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2025: A Reading Retrospective

2025 was great reading year. I decided early to swap out watching the news in the morning with reading a chapter from an academic journal or book. Solid decision! I ended up 10 books above last year’s total at 77 books read. That puts the total number of book reviews on my website at over 1,000. More people are noticing, too, with 32,000 views last year. You’re one of them, so thank you.

You might notice some trends in my reading list. I (finally) finished Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen 10-book series. What an epic finale! I spent more time commuting this year so Stephen King’s Holly Gibney detective books kept me company. For Bible and theology, I started reading pentecostal eco-theology. Swoboda’s Tongues and Trees is not to be missed!

As for my own work, the article I prepared on prophetic discernment for the 2025 Society of Pentecostal Studies meeting will be coming out as an article in Pneuma this year. I also wrote a book review on Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination for Practical Theology journal. I’m currently working on something book-length for Ezekiel (I just can’t get away from that prophet). If you’d like to keep in touch with my latest writing projects, please fill out the short form in the footer.

Bible & Theology

There are quite a few excellent books in this list, including a couple by fellow McMaster DPT grads (McGuire’s Biblical Hermeneutics in the Metamodern Mood and Sanger’s When Ministry Hurts). My favourite read of the year, however, was Swoboda’s Tongues and Trees. His pneumatological ecotheological vision is profound. A very close runner-up here is Idestrom’s Show Me Your Glory. Read this one for a comprehensive understanding of God’s glory as revealed in the Old Testament.

Fiction

Are you interested in a literary yet plot-driven novel with richly developed characters you get to follow episodically through decades? Oh yeah, and a supernatural cabal wreaking havoc? Then Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is the novel for you. It gripped me from the first page through the last. As the more mysterious elements of the plot were revealed, I found myself thumbing back hundreds of pages to make sense of something I had read earlier. Brilliant.

Spiritual Formation

Celebrating Abundance by Walter Brueggemann
Telling the Truth by Frederick Buechner
Hallelujah Anyway by Anne Lamott
Crafting a Rule of Life by Stephen A. Macchia
John and Charles Wesley by Frank Whaling, ed.

Hallelujah Anyway earns the win here, despite some of the weak biblical research. Anne Lamott’s irreverent honesty cuts through the pseudo-spirituality we like to wrap ourselves in. The vignettes in this book read like the Psalms have taken narrative form.

All the Rest

Normally it would be difficult to choose one stand-out from such a miscellany, but not this year. No book comes close to the literary artistry or spiritual depth of Dillard’s For the Time Being. Seriously. Buy it and read it right away.

Phew—what a good year! If you’re curious, here are my Reading Retrospectives from former years: