1. Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (New York: Random House, 2007). This book has an excellent website. As the subtitle suggests, the work is part adventure book and part love affair. It follows the careers of several different people who are in love with the Redwood forests of Northern California and who are passionate about finding the world's largest trees - and in some cases, climbing them.
2. N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (Westmont, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006). N.T. Wright is an Oxford trained New Testament scholar and the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. This is a profound argument - personal and based strongly in reason - about how evil can be reconciled with belief in a just God. Wright was moved to write this book by the Southeast Asian tsunami of late 2004. One can get a solid precis of the argument by reading his sermon, "God, 9/11, the Tsunami, and the New Problem of Evil." You can read more of Wright's work here.
3. Umberto Eco, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006). Eco is a medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, novelist, communication professor at the University of Bologna, and owner of a 50,000+ volume library. This work is a collection of writings Eco published, mostly in European newspapers, about the role the media plays in politics, war-making, and other public controversies. Eco takes a rather long view about these things, choosing to see much of what goes on today in light of what went on a long time ago.
4. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). MacIntyre is a well known philosopher whose earlier book, After Virtue, was an invitation to return attention to Aristotle's ideas of civic virtue. In this later work, MacIntyre explores what it means that humans are animals, born helpless and entirely dependent, with the longest period from birth to maturity of any animal species. Beginning with man's weakness, dependence, and weak rationality, MacIntyre builds a case for why humanity needs virtue.
5. Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Modern Library, 2002). This novel, by France's and perhaps the world's greatest novelist, is a romantic story about the work required by humanity to master nature. A more accurate translation of the title might be "the workers of the sea," with all the socialist overtones possible of term "workers" in English. The work was originally entitled L'Abime, "The Abyss," and much of the book deals with the Channel islands and the vast Atlantic. When Hugo wrote the book he was living in exile on the Island of Guernsey where he was inspiring his countrymen to revolt against Louis-Napoleon (later, Napoleon III). As Graham Robb writes in the introduction, "Hugo's imagination had thrived on banishment and defeat." (By the bye, if you've not read Graham Robb's biography of Victor Hugo you're missing a great read.)
6. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2005). Stanley Lombardo has given the world a great gift. He has translated all three of the world's great epic poems - the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid - into American. Yes, that's right, not just the good old King's English, but a truly American translation that allows us in our own time to truly understand by analogy what on earth these great poems are really about. Exhibit A for this claim: go to amazon and check out the cover art on these great works and you'll see what I mean. For a snippet, consider this description of the angered Turnus, leaping down from his chariot, and careening madly through the enemy lines:
Think of a stone crashing down a mountain,
Either a storm has washed it free, or time
In its passing has loosened it, and now
The shameless mass of rock sweeps down
The steep slopes and bounds over the earth,
Rolling along with its trees, herds, and men.
7. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). This is a monumental work by one of the world's leading philosophers attempting to explain secularism to itself, historically and philosophically. No precis could do it justice. The work was very well written and taught me much that I didn't know about knowledge and belief and how they're inextricably related, among many other things about history, religion, secularism, &c.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). The argument of this book is that nations are imagined before they are realized, and that the first reason why a Minnesotan and an Arkansan, for example, think of themselves as part of the same community, but the Minnesotan and the Canadian just 100 miles away do not is because we've imagined the world to be a certain way. In other words, it is language and ideas that drive political realities, perhaps more than political or material realities drive political realities. This is a short work, but very much worth reading for those interested in political philosophy, &c.
9. Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). Reeves is a journalist; Mill was a journalist, philosopher, and, effectively, secretary of state for the British Empire. Reeves approach to Mill is one I like because it doesn't treat him as philosopher living in isolation, but an active participant in politics and public life.
10. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994). When I read this book I was overcome by Tyndale's single-minded purposefulness in translating the Bible into English. Not only did he literally give his life to this cause, but he had to sacrifice a great deal to bring about his great achievement before he died. He translated the New Testament first. When he decided to translate the Old Testament there was one problem. He couldn't read Hebrew. When he discovered that there was no other English speaking person alive at the time who could read Hebrew, he moved to Germany to learn it so he could continue his work. Now that's determination. I wish I had some single-minded purpose of such scope and noble meaning and the Christian courage to carry it out by giving my life to it. Inspiring.
Honorable mentions in 2008 should go to Kenneth Burke, Walter Bagehot, Jules Michelet, David Hume, and the ever-readable Cicero.
May you have more time to read this year than last . . .
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