Favorite Books 2023—The Best and Brightest from My Reading Year

As an English professor and lifelong reader, Jennifer Holberg spoke my love language in Nourishing Narratives. She dips into her story-shaped life to come alongside readers who want to become better interpreters of the stories we are reading and—more importantly—the stories we are living.

Holberg discerned early on that God went with her into “whatever bookish land” she traveled. On that basis, she urges readers to bring imagination and delight to our reading life, to receive the gift of narrative beauty as evidence of “God’s loving generosity and our own ‘enoughness.’”

As a woman of faith, Holberg offers biblical insight into friendship, the church, community, and vocation, all with humor, warmth, and candor. Her goal throughout is to consider how “narrative can make us more capacious in our approach to God and to ourselves.”

With the topic of forgiveness finding its way into the news in the wake of every new outrage, Tim Keller’s argument in favor of forgiveness is relevant–and in Keller-esque manner, it is also convincing. Forgive sets out to answer the two most basic questions around forgiveness: Why should I and how can I? Keller begins his argument in the same place Jesus did–with the parable of the unforgiving servant, a man who was forgiven much but then withheld forgiveness from his fellow servant.

Forgive by Tim Keller is a review of the gospel, a glorious acknowledgment that sin is deadly and guilt is real, and yet God’s mercy, forgiveness, and acceptance are so rich that we will spend the rest of our lives deepening our understanding of his love for us. The message is not, “Forgive and be forgiven,” but rather, “Be forgiven–and then forgive.”

I found everything about The Covenant of Water to be both intriguing and richly satisfying fiction. Abraham Verghese has woven a storyline that follows three generations of the Parambil family with deep roots in the “spice coast” of India and an even deeper secret–the peculiar affliction of an unreasonable fear of water and a tragic death by drowning in every generation.

Verghese’s main protagonist, the twelve-year-old bride who ripens into the family matriarch, is only one of the strong women whose passing lives propel the narrative forward. Their days are complicated by British colonialism, the caste system, and their fierce connection to family, and the reader is treated to a front-row seat to the women’s rich, interior lives. Their faith and loyalty are like the water surrounding their dwelling place, ever-present, informing their decisions, and binding them together in ways that do not become apparent until the last page of this deeply satisfying novel is turned.

We were all designed with a longing for home, and eleven-year-old Sierra feels the lack deep in her bones through bouts of instability and even homelessness. Finally, though, life seems to be headed in the right direction when she and her military mum find their way to Koinonia House. Sierra begins to hope that her mother will learn to cope with PTSD, that she’ll find friends at school, and that, one day, she and her mum will live peacefully in a real home together.

Linda MacKillop’s three-dimensional characters and well-written dialogue contribute to a heartwarming story of struggle. She addresses huge issues including poverty, mental illness, bullying, and family dysfunction in words appropriate for a middle-grade reader, but never resorts to trite answers or formulaic plot devices. Hotel Oscar Mike Echo is an invitation to the reader to walk bravely into our own challenges, to embrace the hope of a faithful God who Himself is the fulfillment of all our longings for home.

I tend to feel the need to read Crossing to Safety in the fall. It’s a story in which a friendship is so front-and-center that it seems to become one of the characters in the book. Luxuriating in Stegner’s gorgeous prose makes the rich storyline and well-developed characters all the more riveting. With his definition of friendship, I pray that you have people like this in your life:
“It is a relationship that has no formal shape,
there are no rules or obligations or bonds
as in marriage or the family,
it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood,
there is no glue in it but mutual liking.

It is therefore rare.”

I try to read at least one book by Elisabeth Elliot every year. This year I managed to reread Love Has a Price Tag as well as A Path Through Suffering. Elisabeth’s collection of essays expresses (with both humor and deep biblical roots) her commitment to faithfulness and obedience as a wife, mother, and believer.

Writing from the details of her everyday life makes a strong case for the fact that a critically acclaimed author and speaker is grace-dependent and subject to the vicissitudes of life just as we are.

And if you’ll pardon the trespass over genre lines, I read and was thoroughly challenged by both of the new Elisabeth Elliot biographies this year. You can read my reviews HERE and HERE.

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