Oh what I would do for a snowplow to run me over…

But as a devoted Batman fan, I have learned one thing about making a difference in this world: you don’t need super powers if you have buckets and buckets of money.

I have some buckets of money, fewer than I would like, and most of it is in a bank and not in a bucket—but because of this money, I can just pay people to write a book review. They actually read the book, and they send an honest review to you. If your book sucks—and it probably does—you get to read the shitty review ahead of time and choose whether or not to make it public. There are two main services that do this: Kirkus and BookLife.

BookLife is the same as Publisher’s Weekly, except it’s…well…I don’t actually know the difference. And then there is a BookLife Prize, which is a different review, and you might when a prize. But neither are technically Publisher’s Weekly reviews, but the reviews are written by the same people who write the Publisher’s Weekly reviews, and you can pay to have them printed in Publisher’s Weekly, but you can’t call them Publisher’s Weekly reviews, but they are.

So rather than trying to make sense of all this, I just emptied one of my money buckets and ordered a review from both of these services. And then apparently I also bought one from IndieReader. Which I don’t remember doing.

And the reviews are good! How about that!

•••

Here they are:

Kirkus:1

•••

BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly:2

•••

The BookLife Prize:3

•••

IndieReader:4

•••

So that’s fun.

If you happened to read Loser* and also liked the book, please add your own review to Amazon, Good Reads, or any other places where you can click a number of stars on things. This stuff actually make a big difference when you’re an unknown. Maybe. I don’t really know. But it makes me feel nice.

If you hated the book, don’t worry about leaving a review. Just buy a bunch of copies to give out as white elephant presents next Christmas. Or you can lie. I’m ok with lying.

You should also look at my website for more book info including: author appearances, photos of me with celebrities that didn’t want to take a picture with my book, bad senior photo shoot images, other things people said about my book, pictures of my hockey puck collection, and a link to my book’s Spotify playlist.

www.csbeaty.com

Thank you everyone who has supported my writing thus far! Those little bits of encouragement go a long way.

-Chris (not C.S.)

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1. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

2. Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff

3. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

4. Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

5. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

6. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

7. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham

8. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

9. Boomtown by Sam Anderson

10. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

While my wife was recovering from invasive receding gum surgery—where they sliced a strip of flesh from the roof of her mouth and stitched it onto her lower jaw—she read a couple of Holocaust books. Her rationale was that it would be harder for her to feel sorry for herself while reading a memoir about surviving a Nazi concentration camp. I think it worked, though her mouth still looked like it really fucking hurt.

It wasn’t my plan, but perhaps there’s a reason why I read so many books about terrible things while “sheltering in place” and “social distancing” during my first-ever global pandemic. There was something about reading these firsthand accounts of awful events that made me feel less angry about the state of the world. I guess eating take-out ramen and watching Tiger King isn’t as bad as: 9/11, the London bombing, dying on Mount Everest, the rise of Hitler, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the impact of institutional racism, being held as a political prisoner during apartheid, and living in Oklahoma to cover Russell Westbrook.

I also started journaling way more. It’s not like I had met much else to do, but I was acutely aware of just how weird this moment in history was. I thought I should keep a record of it. The University of Nebraska-Omaha library even encouraged the practice, and made an open invitation for journals during COVID to be donated to their collection to go alongside their diaries from the Spanish influenza outbreak. So I ramped up the practice to a new level of discipline and spent every morning of 2020 recounting the previous day’s events alongside the reported cases of COVID and COVID related deaths in whatever city I was in at the time. Once the shutdowns began, I did not miss a day.

But here’s the thing about writing during a pandemic. It’s pretty boring. So your journals are also pretty boring. Nothing was really happening, but also with where I was in life, I was waiting for things to happen. Kids. Work. Church. Life’s purpose. I felt myself inching toward resolution in each of these areas until someone in China ate a bat on a stick and the world told me, “NOPE. YOU’RE NOT DOING SHIT.”

And yet, at the end of the year, much of my life was indistinguishable from the 2019 version of myself. It was an inflection point. And inflection points don’t look any different from what immediately preceded it, until suddenly everything goes a different direction.

•••

1. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

First off, let me say I have no idea how anyone could write a book with their spouse. I guess it helps if you’re both authors and religion professors. Maybe that spousal dynamic helped with the book. People get sick of one another. The Inklings have this reverence as “the greatest friend group ever,” but the two key figures, Lewis and Tolkien, weren’t even on speaking terms at the end of their lives. There’s no doubt that those meetings at The Eagle and Child were pure magic. But magic isn’t real. It wears off when somebody figures out what the gag was. And then people get mad when you make Santa Claus a character in your young adult novel and they stop being your friend.

And yet each year I read a biography of C.S. Lewis because I am still enchanted by his life. I long for the camaraderie and joy that he describes. Even though when he describes it, it feels like he’s longing for something other than what he has at the time of his writing.

Before I left a church, I was ushered into a waiting room before the important pastor was scheduled to see me. I was holding a copy of this book and this pastor—a friend, a person I loved—asked about it when he walked in and found me reading. I lit up while describing it. I was giddy, really. And then we did that awkward hard transition where the tone gets real serious, someone says “well..”, there are a few deep breaths, and then we talk about the thing that we knew we came to talk about. I told him I hated his church. I hated the way the church treated me. I hated the way the church treated my wife. I hated the way that he himself had never stuck up for me when things got hard. I told him I was never coming back. And I told him that I hoped he took what I said to heart so others may not feel this same hate that I still do.

We left on O.K. terms. He even read this book after I enthusiastically described it to him.

He told me later he couldn’t get into it.

•••

2. Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff

I read this book in a sweaty tent that was filled with fireworks. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the most patriotic moment of my life, and it felt fitting (in a weird way) to read a book about the people who experienced these attacks while selling explosives for the 4th of July. There was this moment of unity back then. Of single mindedness and shared purpose coming out of those attacks. Kind of like the early months of COVID when we all felt like we were in this thing together.

And then post-9/11, like post-COVID, people decided we weren’t in it together after all. We became defined by divisions and bickering as sides were drawn about the proper responses for this and for that. We politicized the events. We lost friends over things we saw differently. Things became stupid. Then people became stupid. People thought we were stupid. We thought they were stupid.

A lot of them were stupid.

But it’s helpful to go back. To remember what we saw and agreed about. To be reminded of shared tragedy. To try to get along.

Because every once in a while, something completely unexpected happens and we wonder why we were so preoccupied with petty fights and finger-pointing when there are things in life that really matter.

•••

3. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

This is how Larson opened his narrative history of Winston Churchill and London during World War II. In his Kansas City book talk I attended on March 10th, 2020—the last formal gathering I went to before COVID restrictions ended gathering of any kind—Larson described the bombing of London as “essentially fifty-seven straight 9/11’s. On any given night you knew hundreds would die.” The response of the English during this time was noble, their resolve only eclipsed by the reality that so many had it even worse during this bleak period of our history. Just as how Spanish influenza was forgotten in favor of World War I, the Blitz became a footnote because of the horrors of everything else those dickhead Nazis were up to. Maybe that’s their most remarkable feat, that they managed to relegate fifty-seven straight nights of bombing one of the world’s greatest cities to a secondary atrocity.

Larson tells gripping stories of how the Brits coped, one of these practices became the basis of his book research. The English encouraged people to keep a journal.

•••

4. Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones

Meanwhile, back in the United States, Theodor Geisel enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps to create propaganda and cartoons that “instructed U.S. soldiers on military practices and procedures, usually by showing the comedic and sometimes horrifying consequences of not following protocol or instructions.”2 The main character was named Private Snafu.

This guy also wrote about some cat and a green guy.

•••

5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Dude this book is insane. Krakauer climbs to the top of Mount Everest, a bunch of people die, then everybody is like, “well fuck. I guess that’s what happens on Everest. Let’s keep going.”

I’ve read all Krakauer’s books, but this one I saved for last. I’m glad I did. It’s easily my favorite.

•••

6. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson

I generally try not to include multiple books by the same author on these lists, but this one was just too good to leave off. It’s kind of like the prequel to The Splendid and the Vile. Sort of. It follows the account of the United States Ambassador to Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. You can imagine he was pretty busy during that time.

Larson and Krakauer both went on my all-time favorite author list after 2020. It was a beautiful year for discovering authors, even if it wasn’t beautiful in many other ways.

•••

7. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham

These book descriptions are feeling a little repetitive at this point.

This book was also the shit.

And the Soviets were also terrible.

And bad at building nuclear power plants.

And if you want to know what nuclear radiation actually is other than something that’s “bad,” Higginbotham’s description in Chapter 2: Alpha, Beta, Gamma is the best explanation of a scientific topic I have ever read in my life. And that’s coming from the guy who wrote the 2013 Architectural Engineering graduate project with the gripping title of: “The Effect of Sample Dimensions on the Corresponding Compressive Strength Between Concrete Cores and Standard-cured Molded Cylinders.”

•••

8. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore

Instead of just picking one period of American history, Jill Lepore decided to write a book about THE WHOLE THING.

It’s stunningly ambitious, thorough, and readable.

Spoiler alert: there are a bunch of racists.

•••

9. Boomtown: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, It’s Chaotic Foundation, It’s Apocalyptic Weather, It’s Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming A World-Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson

I guess Jill Lepore’s book was a little light on all the parts about Oklahoma City. Good thing we have Sam Anderson to fill the gaps.

I heard about this book from a delightful podcast episode titled “The Worst Way to Start a City.”3 Oklahoma picked the worst way of doing a lot of things. And thanks to Sam Anderson, I now love them for it.

•••

10. Long Walk to Freedom the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Oh yeah. Apartheid was also fucking terrible.

•••

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To write each book review essay, I've re-read my journals from that given year to try to place myself in the same frame of mind I was in back when I read those books. It is unavoidable for the way you feel and what you are going through to influence what you read—and perhaps more so—what you resonate with. Up until this point, my journals haven't looked much like journals. They were catalogs of thoughts, quotes, sermon notes, and lists. Some of those pages reflected what was going on in my mind and in my soul, but they mostly notated things I thought I should do. Should remember. Should be. It was the journal of a person trying to become a different kind of person, not the journal of a person who was. This year was different. When historians one day (don't) go through my library of unruled black notebooks, they'll notice a turning point in 2019. I said things out loud. I became less concerned with what I should be and began examining who I was.

Key word: began.

But a work started with a new approach, one that is still ongoing. It took me a lot longer to go through the journal pages for this year, there was much more to review.

But it was worth the effort.

December 9th, 2019

2019 was, and maybe still is, a bad year.

In listing seminal moments, it's easy to remember why:

January

• Met with lead pastor to discuss anger and hurt caused by him and his leadership, told I was “a thorny person to lead.”

• Started giving my wife infertility injections

February

• First round of infertility injections and IUI procedure unsuccessful

• Second round of infertility injections and IUI successful

• Miscarriage

March

• Vacation to Vancouver, paused infertility treatments

• Grandma died, deliberately chose not to go to funeral as an internal protest of how little she cared for me and my siblings

April

• Met again with lead pastor, ended in bitter frustration

• Started third round of infertility injections with drugs bought from Europe at a fraction of the cost of U.S. drugs

• My closest Uncle died of a heart attack, funeral held a week later at the exact same funeral home as my Grandma, drove to South Dakota to attend

May

• Third round of infertility treatments unsuccessful

• Started adoption process

June

• Began filling out adoption paperwork, chose agency

July

• I was removed from another ministry, lead pastor told me “sorry it happened again”

• Went to Hawaii for work

August

• First home visit with adoption social worker

• Went to Guam for work

September

• Met with two additional pastors to discuss treatment by church and lead pastor

• Began first adoption fundraiser

• Met with lead pastor for final time, told I would no longer be considered to be involved in certain ministries for at least several years, at the same time new church attendees asked to fill roles that my wife and I previously held

October

• Had a co-worker protest my involvement on a project in Guam because he lived closer to it (South Korea), executive leadership was called in to resolve the dispute

• October 21, 2019: Original due date for pregnancy that ended in miscarriage

November

• Coworker from Minnesota drove to my hometown to tell me he would be taking over my sales territory (unannounced no prior communication from any management), kicked off a conflict between management that went unresolved for several years

December

• Left church

Yeah, that was fucking brutal. But the crazy thing is, this was a really great list of books. Amid that shitbag of a year, I found a friends in the written word that I loved reading for no reason other than I loved reading them. There weren't any books that I felt obligated to like, and I remember finding solace in certain pages during the events listed above. They were my guides, companions, support system. I never really read books that way before.

•••

1. The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

The villain in my story also recommended this book. Not to me directly, but in a podcast. That's how he spoke to me when I wasn't being scolded in my living room for not being a subordinate enough Christian. He's really good in podcasts.

As the digital age separates physical beings further and further from a physical reality, our metaphysical souls long for something tactile. Tangible. Real. There's something beyond efficiency and convenience that doing things the old ways creates, something that fills a gap in our being we didn't realize was empty until we stopped filling it. David Sax considered the reincarnated popularity of several of these old ways of doing things. He investigated vinyl records, board games, and film, and wondered out loud why the digital age didn't kill those means like it promised to.

When I bought a typewriter, I wrote a stream of consciousness essay about my purchase. And emailed it to David Sax. And he emailed me back. And then Sax bought his own typewriter. And then started his own Substack about writing on a typewriter. I won't take all the credit, just most of it.

Thoughts on a Typewriter

Thoughts on a Typewriter

Why would anyone want a typewriter in 2023…

Read more

3 years ago · 11 likes · 9 comments · David Sax

This remains on the shortlist of books that changed the way I see the world, from yesterday to today. As time goes on, the lessons only feel more real.

Some items, ideas, messages are timeless.

•••

2. Armada by Ernest Cline

During a tough season, we got a reprieve. A wonderfully glorious reprieve. There was a bunch of construction set to go down on the island of Guam, and my company needed a sales guy. Since Guam is basically equally in the middle of nowhere from everywhere, they picked a guy in Omaha. I needed to talk to a potential customer. Who lived in Hawaii. So that's how my wife and I got an all-expense paid trip to paradise for just the price of her plane ticket.

In the airport, I saw a paperback copy of Armada on one of the Hudson News book racks. I had no idea Ernest Cline wrote another book after Ready Player One but decided against buying it. I already had The Revenge of Analog in tow, but unfortunately that book was too fucking good to last me the entire trip. In a desperate attempt to buy Armada, I scoured every subsequent bookstore we saw as soon as we landed on Oahu. I was coming up empty.

On the last leg of our trip, we found a used bookstore on the Big Island. With our rental of snorkeling gear, Snorkel Bob gave us a copy of his book about snorkeling. We weren't particularly interested in what Snorkel Bob had to say about snorkeling, so we decided to sell that copy and save space in our luggage for more seashells. While the Kona bookstore decided how much Snorkel Bob's life work was worth, I tracked down a perfect hard cover copy of Armada. And inside its pages was a fabric bookmark I have used in every book I've read since.

If you liked Ready Player One, just stop everything and get reading.

•••

3. Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families & Churches by Russell Moore

We told the small group we were leading at church about our plans for adopting, and one of our friends gifted us this book. Her parents had read it before deciding to adopt two children of their own. I was overwhelmed by it. It made such a clear case for adoption that this path not only felt right, but obvious. Inevitable. God’s will for our lives.

Last night, six years after reading this book, the mom of that friend called my wife to discuss challenges raising our adopted children. It had turned out differently than both of them thought it would.

•••

4. Jim Henson by Brian Jay Jones

I really enjoy biographies of people that got super famous for some random thing. Puppets are a pretty random thing to be famous for. Jim Henson's life had its up and downs, but mostly it was fun. Like this book. While my wife was in the back room of a fertility clinic at 7 AM for an intrauterine insemination while our future as parents and the efficacy of the tens of thousands of dollars we had spent on fertility drugs hung in the balance. I read about how Jim came up with the voice for Kermit the frog.

Like he has been for so many, Kermit was a friend when I was in desperate need of one.

•••

5. The Dark Tower and Other Stories by C.S. Lewis

As evidence by my entire brand concept, I like C.S. Lewis. I like him quite a bit. I can't get enough of his writing, well most of it. I’ve had my fill of his boring nerd stuff. Even though he was a boring nerd at times, Lewis comes alive when he tells stories. And, not surprisingly for a genius with so much going on in his mind, he didn't have time to finish all those stories. This book is a collection of all the stuff he played with but never got quite right, and instead of going to press, it was shoved in a box of papers that his literary curator dug out of the rubbish heap after Lewis went further up and further in.

Some of the best stories are left unfinished.

•••

6. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Anyone want to guess which musical came to Omaha in 2019?

•••

7. Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t like this one as much.

•••

8. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michel Sandel

I took an MBA ethics course and most of the curriculum was reading books and watching movies. And I loved it. I was exposed to so many different viewpoints and challenges, and then did what I do best— write rambling, incoherent essays about the topic to try to sort through it all. This book was my favorite. It gave an overview of the limitations of economic and market principles when applied to non-economic ideals. Ideals such as, isn't it kind of shitty that all our favorite professional sports teams intended to unite a city play in stadiums named after male grooming products? It was an amazing corollary to The Revenge of Analog. This one also goes on the shortlist of books that changed my mind about things. It’s a masterwork.

•••

9. John Adams by David McCullough

John Adams was a grumpy old fuck.

•••

10. 1421: The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies

We look back on history with ourselves at the center. It's inevitable. As much as we would love to avoid bias and narcissism, human consciousness can never fully allow it. How can you not be the center of the story when you are the center of your story?

So, when white-people write history, they write it the way white-people would. With white-people heroes. But the narrative changes when someone who doesn't have a voice is allowed to speak.

All that to say, Christopher Columbus was full of shit. The Chinese discovered America. They just didn't feel like bragging about it.

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1. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

2. Them by Ben Sasse

3. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

4. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

5. Three Cups of Tea* by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

6. The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

7. The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

8. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

9. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

10. The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

I've been writing about myself a lot—it's kind of all I write about. When you start doing this, after a while you realize how unobjective everything you think really is. Human beings are storytellers by nature, by default, hardwired into our being in the way we make meaning. Meaning about our world, about our mentors, about ourselves. We have no other choice. We tell stories that cast characters in certain lights, because that's the only way we can make sense of it.

And the world MUST make sense. It has to make sense. The only thing worse than a world without meaning is a world that we can't even understand.

I don't think this is a deficiency in human beings, in fact I think it may be the singular attribute that makes us human, but it would be foolish to not acknowledge how easily we corrupt this, how easily others manipulate this, how fickle and misleading needing to find sense and meaning in everything can be. When you write to a limited audience (like I do) each of your subscribers feels like someone that is personally invested in you. I recruited many of them individually, and I filled out my mailing list email by email. The fact there are some people left that have yet to hit “unsubscribe” feels like a responsibility. A vote of confidence that what I am doing provides just a small slice of meaning to the world they see around them. (Or maybe they're just unaware they can unsubscribe. My demographic swings older, that's what happens when half of your followers are there to hear stories from your 85-year-old podcast co-host.)

But this responsibility is easily corrupted. I worry about what to say now. Complete honesty and transparency begets disappointment when it doesn't reinforce what someone already believes, and abject terror and failure when it reaches a different conclusion to the core questions of the universe that your reader holds most dear. You become an apostate. A false teacher. A wolf. A failure. A person that needs saving, but if that proves fruitless, then a person that needs silencing.

It's amazing how the smallest of writing platforms still unearths the largest of stakes. And when you don't want to confront those stakes, there are two options. You can choose to entertain (this is easier when you're kind of funny) or you can lie. You pretend like you actually feel what you're supposed to be feeling rather than actually feeling what you are actually feeling. In 2018, I had a hard time actually feeling what I was supposed to be feeling. But I did a good job of faking it. There's a way of faking that gives you more credibility with the people you're faking in front of. You “open up” — you know you did it right when after you're done people don't have any advice (because they can't admit to feeling the same way) but instead say “wow thanks for sharing all that.” And then they ask to pray for you, mumbling all the words through masks of their own while you make sure to tie yours tighter.

A pastor once used a sermon metaphor about how when you read biographies of impressive people, you can't help but be amazed by them yet disappointed in yourself. You begin to measure yourself against them, which tends to detract from any inspiration and morph it into despair. I remember that metaphor because that was the exact metaphor I used when I had lunch with him earlier in the week. A lunch we were having to discuss all the ways I was a failure at his church. The ways he didn't want me to “serve.” The ways I needed to “be humble” and “follow his leadership.” And then he used my exact metaphor as a sermon illustration.

Now he would deny that. Of course he would. He would say he came up with it on his own, or it had been given to him by the Holy Spirit, or from who knew where really. But certainly, it wasn't ripped off from me. Because I was not someone worth quoting. He would deny it because he truly wouldn’t have thought there would have been something of value in me that was worth plagiarizing. He would have had no recollection of that conversation whatsoever.

And that’s the danger with biographies, memoirs, writing and thinking about yourself—you might start believing all the things you write. And you don't even notice how much the normal, the average, the unimpressive really have to offer. The people that don't get books written about themselves, because frankly, they don't need them. They don't need to turn their story into something that makes sense.

•••

1. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

According to the “Immorality Act of 1927,” in South Africa it was unlawful for a white and black person to be in a romantic relationship. Since Trevor Noah's parents violated this law, he was “born a crime.” I don't think Trevor Noah is all that funny, but man this book is good. It's a fascinating memoir that gives a first-hand glimpse of a racist totalitarian government that existed in my lifetime. I was always taught we got rid of all those before my birth. I read the book in preparation for a trip with Paige to South Africa, and despite the dismantling of apartheid, its impact as could still be felt. We took a tour of Robben Island, the island prison where Nelson Mandela and other political activists were held. Our tour guide was a man that was held captive there for engaging in a non-violent bombing of a government building. He still lives on the island, but by choice, to help the world remember how far we have or haven't come.

We took a safari in the northern part of South Africa, staying as the only guests of a wealthy white couple that owned a safari lodge. The safari guides were white. The cooks, the maids, and the staff were all black. The two groups treated one another with respect, but also deference. Our middle-aged host insisted we say a prayer before every meal and then shared stories with fondness about his childhood growing up in South Africa.

“The I970s— I think that was the best decade.”

A few days later, we visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. At one display a plaque read that “the 1970s were the best years to be white in South Africa but the worst years to be black or colored.”

•••

2. Them: Why We Hate Each Other— and How to Heal by Ben Sasse

I've always had this fantasy that I would be reading a book on a plane, take a break, look at the seat next to me, and realize I had been sitting by the book’s author the whole time. We would then engage in a first-hand dialogue about the content and have the greatest flight ever. On October 23rd, 2018, my dream came true—sort of.

I was scheduled to fly to Chicago for an afternoon meeting and fly back later that night. The client cancelled on me the day before. Since the plane ticket was nonrefundable and I wasn't expensing a hotel, I decided to take a day trip to Chicago anyways. It was one of those butt crack of dawn flights, the kind business travelers frequent for meetings like mine. I found a window seat in the midsection of Southwest Airlines’ open seating so I could lay my head against the wall of the plane and try to sleep. I was jostled awake when we landed in Chicago, collected my sparse belongings, and noticed that Ben Sasse was seated in the row in front of me. Had I not skipped the vacant middle seat in his row in favor of a window, I could have had an early morning conversation with the author of the book I was reading. And since he was an active US Senator, he would have felt obligated to discuss things with a constituent.

We were stuck in the purgatory of plane deboarding, so I fished out my copy of Them and got Ben's attention. I had already paid extra for an autographed copy when I pre-ordered (I was and am still holding out hope that Ben Sasse is a US President one day), but I asked if he would sign it again. And he did. He was pretty excited about it. This was the second time I had gotten an autograph from Sasse in person, and both times he struck me as the coolest dude ever. I loved the guy, so I was surprised at the non-stop vitriol received from a former high school classmate when I posted a photo of the autograph on Facebook along with this story. His barrage of Facebook attacks was unlike anything I had experienced on social media, and all attempts to constructively engage him proved fruitless. He wouldn't respond to any of my private messages attempting a dialogue, rather he posted attack after attack for the digital public to witness.

I had not spoken to the guy since high school graduation, but I always thought we were cool with one another. I got private messages from other former classmates that were shocked by the venomous reaction.

Fitting—since the entire book is about how much we hate people we disagree with.

“In simple terms: we're biased. Our mind's order-seeking need is responsible for motivated reasoning, which describes our tendency to accept what we want to be true much more easily than we accept apparent new ‘facts’ that we don't want to be true. If you happen to be someone who generally agrees with my politics or my worldview, you are probably inclined to read the pages of this book sympathetically. But if you are on the other side of the political aisle (and let me pause to thank you for giving this book a shot), you might be scanning the pages, looking for a sentence or paragraph that you can use as a justification to dismiss the rest of the book. I get it. I do it, too.”1

•••

3. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

Did you know Ashlee was a boy's name?

I was recommended this book after expressing fondness for the Steve Jobs biography during a church leader meeting. I was told “if you liked the Jobs biography you’ll love this one.” The guy was right, but Steve Jobs had the advantage of being dead. It's a lot easier to write the story of someone's legacy when they're dead. Vance added an updated afterword to my paperback copy of this book to catch the world up on what Musk had been up to after the initial release, but it had already become outdated. And then about 5 years later I read Walter Isaacson’s own treatment of Musk— not so subtly modeled after his Jobs biography right down to the cover design.

After each installment I thought, “Musk is batshit crazy, but I kind of like him. It's good to have people like that.”

And that brings us to today. I do not currently feel that way. The next Musk biography will have a different ending than the last two.

•••

4. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

On April 13, 2024, I sent Phil Knight a letter asking him to autograph a hockey puck. One year 8 days later, he sent me what's known in the autograph community as a “form letter” apologizing for not being able to sign my item because he has become overloaded with similar requests. It was addressed to me personally on an official Philip H. Knight letterhead underneath an embossed Nike swish— but it was certainly filled out by a secretary at Nike using a template approved by Nike public relations. There was a signature at the bottom, in real ink, but this was likely made using a device known as an “autopen,” where you can preload a signature and the mechanism draws an exact replica.

To the naked eye, everything appears to be a personal letter from Phil Knight signed by the man himself, but looks can be deceiving.

Still cool though. He could have sent nothing at all.

•••

5. Three Cups of Tea* by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

When I read Three Cups of Tea, I was touched by the story of a man that risked his life and sacrificed material wealth to build schools for the less fortunate. He even got kidnapped by some shady fucking Taliban dudes at one point, but he was let go because even they were grateful for all the good he was doing in the Middle East.

The only problem was the whole story was bullshit.

I was awkwardly informed of this when I originally posted this Top 10 list on my Facebook page in 2018. In response, an author person I went to college with passive aggressively posted an article discrediting the book. I wrote a “whoops” post and removed Three Cups of Tea from my original Top 10.

Super awesome mountain climber writer outdoorsy adventurer author man Jon Krakauer was similarly duped by Greg Mortenson, but he caught wind of the story in time to write his own book about it. Krakauer donated all the proceeds from that book to a real charity.

•••

6. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher

“The idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We would have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we would doom our children and our children's children to assimilation.”2

There's this tension Christians feel after decades of trying to be “in the world but not of world.” It’s an utter exhaustion from constantly failing to convert, challenge, and critique the world around them for not doing things the way it should be. After a while, you realize what you’re doing is not really working. The culture is moving in a different direction, and your Facebook posts and awkward “spiritual conversations” and “gospel presentations” provide little resistance to the flood of cultural momentum. So Rod Dreher suggests we say fuck it and make a Christian culture completely separate from the cesspool of secular influence. We should take our Jesus ball and go home, kind of like some monk named Benedict did.

My favorite part of the book was his historical analysis of western religious thought that served as an introduction to the problem statement. His suggested solutions, however, never made much sense to me.

I really like the book cover design though. I think the blue on white looks nice.

•••

7. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

As an Omahan, I have a deep fondness for Warren Buffett even though I’m not that into investing. I think he's a good ambassador for our city, and I love driving out-of-town visitors by his modest for-a-billionaire Omaha home.

This book is thick, but a good read. So thick in fact that I was deeply impressed when I spotted a copy on the shelf of a friend that I didn't expect to have interest in the subject matter. He told me to open it. The pages were glued together and hollowed out to house a bottle of whiskey. It was a gag gift from his brother-in-law.

It was funny, but I didn't really see the point. I don’t try to hide my whiskey.

•••

8. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Before reading this, I had only seen the live-action Disney movie of The Three Musketeers. The book is different.

•••

9. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Even after reading this book, I still don't get what’s so great about the Mona Lisa.

•••

10. The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

“For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience, they are no better for having heard the truth.” 3

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1. C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

2. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

3. The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

4. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

5. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

6. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

7. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

8. Confessions by Augustine

9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

10. A Long Way Home (Lion) by Saroo Brierly

“What is curious is how elusive Bitcoin is, as a thing to understand. Bitcoin often gets explained but somehow never stays explained. You nod along and think you are getting it but then wake up the next morning needing to hear the explanation all over again.”1

-Michael Lewis

Other than what could be called “miscellaneous,” there were two types of entries in my 2017 journal. The first were detailed notes from my church’s Sunday Night School of Theology, the second were detailed notes from my church’s book study on Rankin Wilbourne's Union with Christ. Lots and lots of notes. Long ones. Sketches. Quotes. Bible verses. References. Suggestions for further reading. I put so. Much. Work. And. Effort. in 2017 into understanding God and my proper relation to him. The theology lectures attacked the head. The book group attacked the heart. I worked it from both sides. And I worked it hard.

And looking through my journals, I found I woke up and needed to hear the explanations all over again.

Rankin Wilbourne quoted Leo Tolstoy to try to explain things.

“The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.”2

This was the introduction to chapter 3. Following that quote, I have another 15 pages of mental resolve in my journal pages capturing Wilbourne's instructions on how to go about this life changing.

I had written down another quote from one of the pastors that taught my theology lectures.

“Christianity becomes attractive in part as Christians become the most healthy, whole, people that others come in contact with.”3

I resonate with that statement. A few years later, I left that man's church when I realized he was the single most self-absorbed and narcissistic leader I have ever encountered. I left his church after being in his presence became unbearable, often resulting in tears and hiding in the church bathroom throughout the service. No one in the church seemed to notice. No one in the church seemed to think making a change was necessary. No one else seemed troubled in their conscience by this. Not after private meetings with five separate church elders, where they all shook their heads in an empathetic gesture but made no changes to their behavior. Not after the pastor I quoted sat in my living room and compared me to the quarterback Jalen Hurts and told me I probably needed to leave his church to do something meaningful, the way Jalen Hurts got forced out of Alabama and won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Oklahoma.

A couple years after that, that pastor fired one of my close friends from his full-time job in the church after my buddy brought up some concerns about this guy’s leadership.

I probably sound bitter. Because I am. But I am also troubled in my conscience by the ways I've seen actions repeated in the church with no changes taken. Troubled by when the words I write down in my journal don’t match the actions of the people who spoke them.

Then again, as I was told by my pastor as he sat in my living room, I'm a “thorny person to lead.” It’s probably all my fault I feel this way. And my deep-seated resentments and hurts are probably my fault too. He’s a pastor after all. He would know.

Let me go back and check my notes to figure out how I'm supposed to fix all that.

I seem to have forgotten.

I seem to have woken up.

●●●

1. C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath

I'm not sure why my wife and I were in Parable Christian Bookstore, but there was an entire aisle on C.S. Lewis. I liked this aisle. I had read nearly all the works written by Lewis himself, but it was hard for me to know which biography was worth reading. I had Alan Jacobs's The Narnian, but I wanted some kind of refresher.

This book caught my eye. The text for my Sunday Night School of Theology was Christian Theology by Alister McGrath and I had been doing weekly readings from it for months. It was a little heady, but a good book as far as textbooks go. I had no idea McGrath had also written a Lewis biography. I pointed it out to Paige, and for my birthday I unwrapped it. I’m glad I read it, if for any other reason it helped me make a list of places to visit that summer when Paige and I went to England. It's so much better visiting The Kilns, The Eagle and Child, The Lamb and Flag, and Holy Trinity Church after reading about The Kilns, The Eagle and Child, The Lamb and Flag, and Holy Trinity Church.

It's amazing to see the real thing after reading about it.

“Theories of the atonement are not the heart of Christianity: rather they are attempts to explain how it works. We see here Lewis's characteristic resistance to the primacy of theory over theological or literary actuality. It is perfectly possible to accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works. Theories are always, Lewis holds, secondary to what they represent.”4

-McGrath

●●●

2. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

With thanks to our friend Lin Manuel Miranda, in 2017 the American Revolution was cool again. I jumped into the fad and my reading lists became inundated with biographies of founding fathers and recollections of Revolutionary battles. It's interesting to understand the historical “how it happened,” but history tends to be silent on “why it happened to this particular people at this particular place at this particular time.” History records facts and events, but not everything that explains the way things are neatly fits into the category of facts and events.

Jared Diamond tries to fill some of those gaps.

Said another way, why is it that white people conquered the world and not black people? Or any other race? According to Diamond, it had nothing to do with any sort of intellectual brilliance and more to do with environmental factors as simple as white people tended to live in countries that stretched from west to east instead of north to south.

It's speculative, sure, but man is it interesting. It helped a lot of things make sense to me— including the acid trip art installation of Denver's Meow Wolf where I stumbled on Diamond’s book crammed into an art sculpture. Apparently, the stoners that made this creative homage to industrialization wiping out indigenous cultures didn't just randomly choose which paperbacks should go in the book fort.5

I love it when people pay attention to detail.

“The New Guineans whom I know include potential Edisons. But they directed their ingenuity toward technological problems appropriate to their situations: the problems of surviving without any imported items in the New Guinea jungle, rather than the problem of inventing Phonographs.”6

- Diamond

●●●

3. The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

I've never been very political. I didn't know who Ben Sasse was when he made his first Senate run. The first time his name piqued my interest was when I was at a church men's retreat and the pastor said, “aren't you glad you have a Senator like Ben Sasse who doesn't put up with the bullshit in Washington DC?” He apologized later for swearing, but I made a note to pay more attention to Mr. Sasse to see what type of bullshit he didn’t put up with.

I bought his book. And loved his book. Sure enough, he seemed like the kind of guy that didn't put up with the bullshit of Washington DC— but I also found him thoughtful, funny, and measured. He's the only active politician I’ve considered volunteering for, but Sasse’s Senate re-election campaign didn’t need my help after the cupcake-store-owner running against him had his own party withdraw their support when his staffers accused him of sexual harassment.7 Sasse won by the biggest margin of victory in Nebraska history.8

I met Sasse briefly while in Beatrice, Nebraska to see a solar eclipse where Bill Nye the Science Guy was scheduled to make an appearance. As an autograph hunter, I brought a hockey puck for Nye to sign, but was let down when the guy turned out to be a total dick. Throngs of children and nostalgic adults followed Bill around while he ignored them. He grabbed a couple of books and signed them, but when a kid handed him a birthday card intended for a family member, the Science Guy threw both palms up in the air as if the autograph seeker was handing him a bag of dog shit.

“I'M ONLY SIGNING BOOKS I WROTE! ONLY BOOKS ONLY BOOKS ONLY BOOKS!”

Since a hockey puck isn't a book, I walked away without a signature but with the knowledge that this happy-go-lucky kid’s personality was a complete tool.

Then I saw Ben Sasse. He had his own pack of followers, but they looked more like political staffers rather than pre-teens who liked to watch explosions. Whereas Bill Nye stood in a field alone, staring up at the sky not wanting to be bothered— Sasse was walking with purpose. He briefly stalled outside a side doorway in the visitor's center, where I slid next to him, presented the puck, and sheepishly asked, “I know you're really busy and have places to be, but would you be willing to sign this?”

He gave me a smile, replied “absolutely,” and chatted with me while pretending that asking a U.S. Senator to autograph a hockey puck is a totally normal thing to do. Maybe he was just a politician wanting my vote, but I didn't get that vibe. I just felt like he was a really, really good dude.

And he got my vote.

●●●

4. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

Last night my daughter and I were trying to decide how to survive the remainder of her 5-day weekend. She suggested watching a movie, and since this option allowed me to outsource my fathering for an hour and 35 minutes to a television set, I embraced the idea. She went through our DVD collection and narrowed her choice of potential movies down to five selections. Three of them were made by Pixar. Her and I had an excruciating time landing on the final choice.

Back in my youth, Pixar was the King Midas of children's movies. Every single feature film—and three quarters of the shorts—was inventive, heartwarming, funny, and profound. Centuries later when textbooks are written on western societies, Toy Story and Up will be named alongside Shakespeare and Beowulf as literary masterpieces that defined a culture. Those movies are that. Damn. Good.

Even though Turning Red and Elemental are harder to watch than my children’s music recitals, Pixar's ability to churn out brilliant masterpiece after brilliant masterpiece in the early years is nothing short of remarkable. It turns out, they didn’t just get lucky a whole bunch— they had a culture and a process that created an environment ripe for all of this success and beauty. And they practiced what they preached.

Catmull's description of this time is spellbinding.

They were really good at casting spells.

“Why ‘Pixar’? The name emerged from a back and forth between Alvy and another of our colleagues, Loren Carpenter. Alvy, who spent much of his childhood in Texas and New Mexico, had a fondness for the Spanish language, and he was intrigued by how certain nouns in English looked like Spanish verbs— words like ‘laser,’ for example. So Alvy lobbied for ‘Pixer,’ which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning ‘to make pictures,’ Loren countered with ‘Radar,’ which he thought sounded more high-tech. That’s when it hit them: Pixer plus Radar equals Pixar. It stuck.”9

- Catmull

●●●

5. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.”10

-Daniel H. Burnham, Director of Works, World's Columbian Exposition, 1893

Whether it’s creating a world's fair or a secret hotel to murder people, you got to love when a plan comes together. When all the things you've plotted and pondered over the years jump from the page to reality.

Well, unless you're the person getting murdered at the murder hotel, at which point it kind of sucks. The Chicago World’s Fair sounded cool though.

●●●

6. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Turns out this movie was a book, it’s fun seeing what getting eaten by dinosaurs looks like in literary form.

The Lost World wasn’t as good. And the red ink on the cover of my Barnes and Noble hardbound edition rubbed off all over my sweaty hands while reading.

●●●

7. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

When C.S. Lewis's wife died, everything stopped making sense. The man who made a career of crafting elegant explanations for the world's most difficult questions was now out of answers. So, he did what a writer does, and he wrote. He wrote what he felt. He wrote what confused him. He wrote what used to make sense, but now in the face of agony, ceased to be understood.

A lot of people were surprised when the pseudonym the book was published under was later revealed as Lewis. Here was a man that cured the doubts of so many, admitting to doubts of his own. Doubts that were so prevalent that the Anthony Hopkins movie about Lewis and Joy Davidman's love ends on a note of doubt.

And yet, Lewis’s friends thought doubt could be comforting—so much so that one friend told a mourning Lewis that he should read this book. The friend had no idea Lewis himself had written it. He thought it might help. He thought hearing someone admit those pains out loud would clear a trailhead toward healing.

●●●

8. Confessions by Augustine

Here’s my confession: I have few journal notes from this book and even fewer memories about what was in it. But I was proud of myself for having read it, so much so that that I felt people needed to see it on my list and go “wow isn’t he smart…”

●●●

9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Before he was murdered by the Russian government— twice— political activist Alexei Navalny wrote a memoir depicting life in the former Soviet Union and current Russia. He spent a lot of time talking about the propaganda and lies used by his country's leaders to indoctrinate them to some ideal of Russian virtue. But it was hard for the Russians to keep the message straight all of the time.

"If capitalism is so terrible that we should have wept with delight at our luck in being born Soviet children why was my most cherished treasure two multicolored cans of imported beer, so beautiful and alien that everyone, not only children who came to visit, but adults too, picked them up and admired them? And the foreign films so infrequently shown in the Officers’ Club, which told of the hard struggle of the working class against its oppressors, baffled the audience because all the oppressed were wearing jeans, sitting around in bars, and driving automobiles. It says so much that the American film classic The Grapes of Wrath, which relates the dramatic fate of ruined American farmers during the Great Depression and was ideologically perfect for Soviet propaganda, was, soon after being purchased for distribution in the USSR, withdrawn from general release and shown only to a restricted circle of the elite. It was just too difficult to come up with a convincing explanation for the broad masses of the Soviet people of how an American family, deep in poverty, could own a car and appear so much happier about its lot than the average Soviet collective farmer."11

-Alexei Navalny

●●●

10. A Long Way Home (Lion) by Saroo Brierly

Each year my wife and I watch all the Oscar nominations for Best Picture. After seeing the movie Lion about an adopted man finding his biological family, Paige (who is also adopted) sat through the entire end credits in silence, fighting back tears. The movie hit something within her, unlocking an emotion that had been buried over the years of doing everything else in life. But the emotions were there all along. They just needed to be given a reason to come to the surface.

The book is good too.

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1. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

2. The Bassoon King by Rainn Wilson

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

4. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

5. One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak

6. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

7. You Are What You Love by James K.A. Smith

8. Eiffel's Tower by Jill Jonnes

9. Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

10. Like Father Like Son by Pete Alwinson

I found a recommended reading list on my pastor’s website. It was the kind of list that only people like him would read, and it took me about a decade to realize I wasn’t a person like him. But in 2016 I thought I should be.

I scrolled through the options and selected the book that I thought might impress him if I ever had the opportunity to casually mention it. This guy was allergic to small talk, and I had struck out with each prior attempt. I needed a conversation starter, or conversation starters, so I picked out The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World by R.C. Sproul. The book was organized as an exhaustive overview of the most influential philosophical thoughts that set the groundwork for the way our culture processes and interprets the information they collect.

It was an ambitious work and an ambitious read. I would do my best to summarize Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx in my journal. But despite my best efforts, the only thing I was left with was a slightly better understanding of Communism and feeling really stupid. I mentioned the reading list and the book to a friend and his reply was, "oh yeah, I loved that book."

I didn't believe him.

There's a reason this book didn't make the list— I didn’t like it— but it easily takes up more pages of notes than any other subject in my two volumes of 2016 journals. The consequence of the book wasn't the influence of postmodern thought on how I view God— but rather that I don't want to pretend to enjoy (or to even understand) topics that don't spark my curiosity or imagination. Particularly if the only reason I'm doing it is to score pastor brownie points. He probably doesn't even like brownies.

But those weren't the only ideas I found. Up to this point, the re-reading of my 2013-2015 journals has felt like looking through childhood photo albums. I recognize the snapshots as myself, and even remember living through some of those moments, but that person is no longer the person I am today. I’ve grown up. Matured. Learned something. Changed.

But fittingly, I saw evidence of new ideas that have since blossomed.

There was:

• a bucket list that I can now cross four items off of— the most recent occurring a month ago

• a 5-year Plan charting my anticipated career path that contained some tangible goals I’ve successfully achieved

• “Get to write," listed as one of my “Ideal Job Traits"

• a rough sketch of my basement finishing project—the space which has since become my favorite place not only in my house, but in my life

• lists of wedding presents, most of which are still in working order

I created a mind map for "Chris's Worldview." I took inventory of the seminal moments of my life and how they shaped the way I act, think, and feel as a 26-year-old.  The timing of the before-and-after entries suggest that I filled this out while crammed in a center seat on the way home from my Greece Honeymoon with my new bride.

I can't say that the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard or Jean-Paul Sartre made a big impact on me— or if they did what the impact was— but there was still plenty of evidence of thoughts with direct consequence to the man I am today. The man that has since overshot the 2016 version of his 5-year Plan.

Also I can’t speak Latin, so cut me some slack if I googled the wrong translation for my subtitle.1

●●●

1. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

I've read the majority of Lewis's works. Even a lot of the boring stuff.  I don't get a lot out of those, other than a greater appreciation that such a dense academic could so easily pivot and write some of the clearest explanations of horrifically difficult topics that any writer has tried to explain for the common man. As a common man, I am so thankful to him for that.

A lot of my favorite work of Lewis's was written last. He had an odd love story that was sprung on him unexpectedly when he met the American admirer Joy Davidman through a fan letter. His life would be sent down a path that altered everything for him. It wasn't the path he had planned, but you can clearly see from the beauty in his late writing, it was the path he was destined for.

He dedicated Till We Have Faces to Davidman. In many ways it's an unexpected love story in its own right. It's a retelling of the myth of Cupid, but there are no fat babies—which was the only version of Cupid I was aware of. So for me, this is the version that counts.

I can't really say why I love it, but I do. Not knowing why you love something is also kind of the point of the story. I’m not sure how Lewis did that, but according to the biographies I’ve read, Joy helped a lot. Joy pulled out a version of Lewis that was buried and he needed help finding. The two of them would play Scrabble by combining multiple bags of tiles and any word in any language was fair game. They knew a lot of languages.

I read this book in a couple of days, mostly while laying on my fiancée’s living room couch. Later that year we got married. She's a lot better at Scrabble than me.

"I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you, I might—"2

●●●

2. The Bassoon King by Rainn Wilson

Celebrity memoirs are a crap shoot. Are they going to be ego-inflating manifestos spouting off all their expert opinions on things they're not experts in? Or are they going to be extended joke books attempting to demonstrate to a studio executive how funny they would be in their own starring sitcom role?

Rainn Wilson nails the correct balance.

Wilson shows that it's possible to be thoughtful, funny, and famous. His bohemian origin story has enough weirdness in it to keep things interesting, and he speaks as someone of substance that doesn’t take himself too seriously.

The Office is my favorite show and I have a Dwight Schrute bobblehead, action figure, stress ball, Lego mini-figure, and Pez dispenser in my office. I'm really glad he didn't ruin that for me.

Also, Rainn gives a fascinating explanation of the Baha'i faith as an appendix. You should read that too.

●●●

3.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

I know. I was supposed to have read this sooner, and part of me thinks I did, but holy shit is this a good book when you're an adult.

About a year ago, Paige and I went on our first real date without kids to see Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation— starring the creepy Grandpa from Ozark3 as Atticus Finch. It was also remarkable. I liked it so much that I watched Aaron Sorkin's Masterclass on the most expensive app I've ever purchased. I also watched Malcolm Gladwell’s Masterclass, where as a non-sequitur he mentions that he absolutely hates To Kill a Mockingbird and people that like it are just too dumb to understand how racist it really is. Or something like that. Well, I think you're dumb Mr. Gladwell.

I also read the money grab Go Set a Watchmen, published posthumously after someone decided they could compile the original drafts of To Kill a Mockingbird and market it as a different book. It wasn't a different book, just a worse version of Mockingbird with a racist Atticus Finch.

Maybe Malcolm Gladwell had a point.

"You are too young to understand," she said, "but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey in the hand of, oh, your father…" "What I meant was, if Atticus Finch drank until he was drunk he wouldn't be as hard as some men are at their best. There are just some kind of men who— who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."4

●●●

4. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

In 2016, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was a couple years into a sales job I didn't like, but was meeting interesting people that seemed to have a lot of big ideas. I didn’t have any big ideas. The biography of Steve Jobs was still ringing in my ears, so I went through a several year phase of reading the start-up stories of sexy businesses. I liked these books, but I can't say I learned a lot— other than I probably wasn't going to create a search engine.

"Smart creatives… place culture at the top of the list (when looking for a job). To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider."5

"People's B.S. detectors are finely tuned when it comes to corporate speak; they can tell when you don't mean it."6

●●●

5. One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak

Remember how I like The Office?

This was not a celebrity memoir. This was something else entirely. B.J. was hired on The Office to be a writer, but creator Greg Daniels thought it ­ would serve the show well to make some of the writers also act in order to help them embody the tone of the show. After a while you forget that Ryan, Kelly, and Toby in the annex were really paid to write jokes.

Novak's book of short stories shows how good he is at that. This collection of fiction ranges from the way the hare's life was ruined after the legendary upset at the feet of the tortoise, to the Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela. Brilliance.

Yet simple. I felt inspired after reading it. I had the constant thought of “I could come up with something like this” after each essay. There was a he-makes-it-look-easy quality to the writing, but more so it was just so much fun to read that I thought it would be just as much fun to write.

I felt like I could write something funny.

I felt like I wanted to write something funny.

In a fun aside, both B.J. and Rainn acknowledged Mindy Kaling in their work:

"Mindy Kaling gets her own line in the acknowledgments, as previously negotiated by her representatives. Thanks, Mindy. I love you and you're the best."- Novak7

"I also want to thank Mindy Kaling for being so yucky."- Wilson8

"B.J. Novak was an incredibly young stand-up comic out of Harvard when Greg Daniels discovered him. I've never met anyone with a sharper, darker wit. He's got lasers in his brain… Mindy Kaling is a horrible person. She doesn't deserve a paragraph in this iconic pantheon of writers. (B.J. writes most of her stuff anyway.) She's an insufferable flibbertigibbet who is obsessed with fashion, shopping, Beyonce, and cutting off the penises of the men she's slept with and putting them under her mattress. She also owes me two hundred fifty bucks, a soy latte, and a guest-star role on her new dumb show. She makes me sick, I need to stop writing about her now."- Wilson9

Mindy's take:

"B.J. Novak was a terrific friend and editor, giving me sound notes like, ‘Hey, Mindy, I think you sound kind of racist here. I would be really careful about not sounding racist in your book.’”-Kaling10

"I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn and I'll immediately launch into 'Oh my god, Rainn's so horrible.’”-Kaling11

●●●

6. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

Those of you following along, you knew Walt would get a mention.

I had to take a lot of math classes in college. I never really liked math. I could do it, but it was always work. The fact that it was so cumbersome is probably part of the reason I went to engineering school. I figured work should feel like work. Certainly that's how everyone feels about math, right? Someone’s got to do the math.

I dropped out of my University's Honors program after going to a theoretical math lecture that I needed for Honors credit. The lecturer was trying to explain how there is no such thing as a number, only empty sets of numbers, and numbers are just a certain number of empty sets that aren't really numbers. He drew something on the board that was supposed to clear this up, complete with parentheses and squiggles. I had no idea what the fuck he was saying.

I labored on. I finished engineering school. Working at it. But I had a chance encounter with a Math Major that changed how I viewed math forever.

Math Major: (fumbling with his words after misspeaking) “Ugh, sorry. English isn't my first language.”

Other girl in the room: “Haha, what is then?”

Math Major: “Math.”

This dude loved math. It was the language he spoke.

Whoa. There are people like that?

Einstein was like that. He LOVED math. LOVED physics. LOVED the things that I found burdensome when I was assigned them as homework.

Not only did I realize that someone could love math, I realized I didn't. And I eventually realized that this was ok.

"For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the cosmos is comprehensible, that it follows laws, is worthy of awe. This is the defining quality of a 'God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.’”12

“Also by his bed were twelve pages of tightly written equations, littered with cross-outs and corrections. To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the final thing he wrote, before he went to sleep for the last time, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe."13

●●●

7. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith

• Key words:  liturgy, telos

My pastor booked James K.A. Smith for an Omaha appearance and was so excited he announced it a full year ahead of time. I had never heard of the guy, but I picked up his most recent book— more specifically my wife was given a copy at an event and I claimed it as my own— and did my homework for the guest speaker 11 months in advance.

It was a great read. Smith's thesis is basically: our habits shape what we love, and we cannot claim to have something like God as our ultimate love, our ultimate aim, our (fancy word) telos, if what we do on a daily basis doesn't reinforce that aim.

It seems like a fairly straightforward concept, but the way Smith breaks it down is pretty profound. I found myself asking questions like, "is it really appropriate for someone in the military to wear their dress uniform at their wedding? What is he communicating with that fashion choice?" When you start looking at what your daily habits consist of, you may get a different answer to the question of 'what do you love' than you would give at an awkward Bible study.

I eventually joined one of those awkward studies to discuss the book. I had read the book months ago, so I was completely lost in most of the conversation because I didn't want to re-read it so close to having just finished it.

When I finally met Jamie Smith— as they call him when he's not a fancy author— I listened to him twice. He had a lecture available to the public and one for our church the next morning. I got a lot out of it.

When I went up to him afterward to have my book signed, I asked him the question that had been gnawing me the entire 48 hours of his speaking engagements. Something that the master of how liturgies and activities shape who we are and what we admire would certainly have a profound answer for. Something he said in passing, but I latched onto and couldn’t stop wrestling with.

"How does a Canadian like NASCAR?

"I’m not sure."

I was a bit disappointed.

He signed my wife's book:

"Chris-

Blessings & Hope,

James K.A. Smith"

It's my book now.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, succinctly encapsulates the motive power of such allure: ‘If you want to build a ship,’ he counsels, ‘don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.’” 14

●●●

8. Eiffel's Tower by Jill Jonnes

When we got married, one of the most exciting moments was combining our book collections. Paige and I have different tastes, but she had a really good history professor in college and went through a period of buying a bunch of the exact type of non-fiction that I devour.

When the Omaha Borders bookstore was having their out of business liquidation, she impulsively grabbed this little treat off the discount rack.

If I had a time machine, I think it would be pretty incredible to visit some of the famous World's Fairs. But even with a time machine, the effect would be largely lost since I routinely take my kids to the $1 Ferris Wheel inside Scheel's. Even if I was transported to Chicago in 1893, it would be impossible to recreate the feeling of marvel that would come with the unveiling of that invention. Awe comes with experiencing something that you can’t comprehend.

This book is a pretty good substitute for that time machine. Jonnes spends a lot of time explaining just how crazy Eiffel was. Since we live in an age when the Eiffel Tower has become ubiquitous, it's profound to hear just how controversial and difficult the structure truly was to create. The City of Paris was even going to tear it down until Eiffel was able to convince them that it could double as an antenna.

It took a while for everyone to get it. But Eiffel always got it. Vision is funny like that. It takes a while for people to get it.

●●●

9. Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

My church small group gave me this book as a gift after I got married.

"Chris, Hope you enjoy the book... look forward to your review of the pages that follow.

Love,

The Seadores"

Alright Nate, here it is eight years later.

This super smart guy Michael Ward thought he figured out a mysterious connection between all of The Chronicles of Narnia books and the pre-Copernican model of the universe. Each book was loosely— or not so loosely— based off of a planet and the allegorical attributes assigned to it.

The theory was a little out there: claiming Lewis tied all the Narnia books together with some secret message he never told anyone.

But the crazier thing was I believed him.

I'm totally on board with the conspiracy.

Tin foil hat: ON.  

However, I had no idea what Ward was talking about when I first read this book. I had to wait for the dumb guy version called The Narnia Code to come out several years later. It turns out I'm not as smart as I'd like to be. Even the fact that I put this book on my Top Reads list was mostly meant to signal, "Hey I'm smart and read smart things!"

It’s also interesting to compare Lewis with Einstein on the topic of planets. Both are geniuses, both found God in the mystery of the universe, but each went at it from a completely different end of the spectrum. Yet thumbing through each book, the phrase “music of the spheres" comes up repeatedly in both Isaacson's and Ward's work. Even someone as dense as me can see that, even though I can't understand it.

Neither did they.

●●●

10. Like Father Like Son: How Knowing God As Father Changes Men by Pete Alwinson

I was given this book at a church men's retreat. This wasn't a put-a-boot-up­-your-ass-and-start-being-a-man type of church men's retreat, but it was one where they tried to make you cry by bringing up how much we all feel like we've failed as men because of our issues with our dads. I don't know, men's retreats are kind of weird to me, but it was mostly good.

This was probably the first time I started thinking through how my own relationship with my dad shaped me for better or worse. I'm glad I'm writing this review now. In 2016, I thought about a lot of the bad things. But now that I’m a father and have kids of my own, I better appreciate how impossible a job fatherhood is. It doesn't mean we're not screwing up our kids. It doesn't mean they shouldn’t still sort through those issues as adults. And it doesn't mean some of their problems aren't your fault. But it does mean we're all just trying to figure it out together.  

As I'm typing, I'm playing a greatest hits compilation of The Doors. My brother introduced me to the band on a family vacation, and my parents angrily turned off the CD during "The End" when Jim Morrison went on a rambling rant that contained the lyrics:

"Father?

Yes, son?

I want to kill you."

Jim did a LOT of drugs, so I don't think the poetic depth of these lyrics should be taken too seriously. My parents were completely justified in turning the song off. I would have turned the song off if I heard my own kids playing it. And I've never once felt that way toward my own dad.

But I know there are people that do feel that way. That do want to say that out loud. That are too scared to say that out loud. That have buried that in a deep place that only drugs and The Doors could bring it out.

Maybe we should say it out loud.

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Share By C.S. Beaty

I love writing. I love thinking. But sometimes thinking too much gets in the way of writing. A few years ago I used a big bonus check to buy the cheapest typewriter readily available on Amazon and got to work. It was a bizarre feeling to write without the ability to edit. And it completely changed the way I relate to composing stories.

Everything I have written on this site has started in analog typewriter form. Some of these drafts were given to friends and family as a Christmas present, but many more live in solitude in my basement office.

I love the look and feel of these typewritten drafts and interacting with them gives a reading experience unlike what I’m used to. You learn to be more forgiving. You learn to take your time. You learn that the written word thrives in physical form.

I compiled many of my favorite essays about beauty in the ordinary. Physical objects. Physical people. Physical experiences. Available in physical form.

I would love for you to buy and read this. I won’t make money— blurb.com has a business to run— but I do want you to be able to hold this in your hands. Reading works best that way.

Click on this thing to buy:

I Bought a Typewriter: Volume 1

Here’s what people are saying about I Bought a Typewriter: Volume 1:

“Finished your book the other day and was impressed by your candor and honesty.”

-Chris’s Mom

“I enjoyed this and read it all… You are an outstanding writer.”

-Chris’s Sister

“…but I guess what I’m trying to say is you misquoted Lucius Fox.”

-Chris’s Brother

2. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

3. The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller

4. Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson

5. A Date with Destiny by John Martin Fey with Don Leahy

6. Cash by Johnny Cash

7. Sherlock Holmes: Vol. II by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

8. Dynamics of Spiritual Life by Richard Lovelace

9. An Idiot Abroad by Karl Pilkington

10. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

●●●

"Christian audiences, producers, and financial backers are going to have to learn to appreciate realism in Christian art or they will bind it in moralistic straitjackets which prevent its contact with the actual world, with non-Christian audiences, and with young people of every sort, who will soon desert a gelded art to seek poetry and music which is free and real... Evangelicals generally do not understand that what determines the edifying or corrosive power of a work of art is not the materials it uses and the actions it describes, but rather its moral outlook toward those materials and actions.”

- Richard Lovelace, from ‘Dynamics of Spiritual Life,’ pgs.346/347

My favorite movies are ones with the word fuck in them.

In college I had one of those obnoxiously unfruitful arguments with some church people about swearing. We were getting nowhere when my debate partner delivered the knock-out blow:

"I don't want to watch a mobster saying, 'freaking’.”

You may not want to watch a mafia movie. You may be better off by avoiding them. But a sanitized version depicting a mob boss you would feel comfortable introducing to your grandparents is not only inaccurate; it distorts reality into something that's tame.  Watered-down.

False.

You should watch Scarface and think the man is off the rails.

You should watch The Godfather and think that organized crime is appalling.

You should tell the truth.

In reading through my 2015 journals, I could feel myself inching in this direction. The transition wasn't complete, but I made an abrupt shift from composing heart-felt, polished prayers to just writing down stuff I wanted to write down.

But there wasn't any lament. This was an era that didn't need any.

I had gotten engaged.

There were sketches of wedding logos, lists of honeymoon destinations, mind maps for groomsmen presents, and even the rarest of the rare— something written in Paige's handwriting after I gave her permission to write down ideas for suggested activities for wedding guests.

This was an exciting time. And my journals reflected that.

Which I think gave me permission down the line to be honest when the times weren't so blissful.

Telling the truth is a habit that needs practice.

●●●

1. S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams

But not really by J.J. Abrams.

“S., conceived by filmmaker J.J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don't understand. It is also Abrams and Dorst's love letter to the written word."

-S., back cover

I've never read a book as innovative and clever as S. There's no way to get the full experience on audio book. An e-book won’t work. You really can’t check it out from the library. And I would be scared to loan it out to anyone because components of the book may get lost. The only way to really read S. is to buy a copy and immerse yourself in it. You need to hold it in your hands.

And it is worth it.

There are about four levels of storytelling. There’s the story of a classic novel. The story of that novel's translator. The story between two individuals attempting to decipher a code through handwritten notes in the margins. There is further communication in different colors of ink representing the passage of time. And there are paper artifacts shoved in between the pages for you to interact with.

It's an ambitious undertaking to read, yet an experience as captivating as anything I’ve experienced. It’s art and beauty in a form that seldom appears in something you can purchase off a shelf.

It also gave me an idea for how to propose to my wife.

It worked.

●●●

2. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is my favorite biographer, but biographies are misleading. A story of a remarkable person implies that that person is the story. When a story is told through the lens of a singular character, it’s easy to relegate all the others involved to a supporting cast.

Isaacson seeks to correct this false impression with The Innovators. Fresh off declaring the genius of Steve Jobs and giving the cult of Apple its most sacred text, he followed up the Jobs biography by illustrating just how small Steve’s role was in the totality of the digital revolution. Isaacson tells a history of innovation, from the computer to the internet, and how no single person can claim to be its author. And how no single person could have achieved it on their own.

Because that's not how innovation works.

"Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire." -pg. 210

"Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus dealmaking moxie) to turn it into a successful product.” -pg. 215

●●●

3. The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God by Tim Keller with Kathy Keller

The best part of this book is that it makes marriage sound terrible.

"Marriage doesn’t so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself. Marriage shows you a realistic, unflattering picture of who you are and then takes you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to pay attention to it.” - pg. 154

Being engaged is easy, getting married is easy, being married is hard. Thanks to this book and the counsel of some good people, when marriage started to suck it wasn't a surprise. It was just part of the deal.

Deals tend to go better when you understand what you're agreeing to on the front-end.

●●●

4. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

Here's my boy Walt again.

I remember my future father-in-law walking into my fiancée’s house and saying, “who's reading about Benjamin Franklin?"

"Oh, that's Chris's."

I felt like that scored me some points. I never really redeemed those.

Franklin is a fascinating person. There's a cliché when discussing history that asks, “does the moment make the man or does the man make the moment?" The answer is inevitably both, and no one illustrates this as well as Ben.

But despite his myriad achievements, Franklin’s tombstone read simply: “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin."

It had been shortened from a longer version he had penned at the age of 22:

“The body of

B. Franklin, Printer;

(Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents worn out,

and stripped of its lettering and gilding)

Lies here, food for worms.

But the work shall not be lost:

For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,

In a new and more elegant edition,

Revised and corrected

By the Author."

-pg.470

●●●

5. A Date with Destiny by Jon Martin Fey with Don Leahy

The University of Nebraska-Omaha lacks a lot of your traditional campus experiences, especially once they cancelled the football program, but the excitement of the college hockey team made up for a lot of that. I've already written about this topic ad nauseum, but in 2015 a new on-campus arena completely changed the fabric of the University. This book was an incredibly biased, yet fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the history of UNO Hockey and the events that led up to the opening of Baxter Arena.

They gave me a free copy when I went to pick up my office's season tickets that I convinced my boss to buy. I kept it and never told anyone.

●●●

6. Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr

I don't really remember anything from this book other than Johnny Cash had a sweet mansion in Jamaica that got broken into. But I remember liking the book.

Johnny Cash is someone I respect and the only country music I tolerate. And even then, I only like about a quarter of what I've heard.

But Cash is a badass.

●●●

7. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume II by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I finished off volume II, watched Sherlock die, come back to life, and solve some crimes. This edition contained the famed, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ and ‘His Last Bow.’

“One of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage."

- from ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,’ pg. 381

●●●

8. Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal by Richard Lovelace

I felt obligated to read this because I heard it referenced on a podcast and more obligated to say I liked it to sound smart.  It was a thick read, and my journals are full of notes. It's one of those books where your brain has to be switched to the 'ON' position, or you'll find yourself moving your eyes three-quarters of the way down a page with no recollection of the words that were allegedly formed in your sub-conscious.

I wasn't struck by most of my notes, but I really like the quote I put at the beginning of this essay. I like this one too:

"The instruments through which God works in the church are human beings.” -pg. 16

I've been pretty disappointed with the human beings in the church lately, which probably gives some explanation for my spiritual discontent. You can read that sentence and have it throw you into a panic for the state of my soul, but I think it's more of a reflection of the state of Christianity overall. We are all horribly and terribly lonely, and I think more people need to wonder out loud what role our current expression of ecclesiology plays in that. If Lovelace's statement is true, I probably shouldn’t have so many hard feelings toward human beings in the church. Go ahead and tell me that's my fault, then go have an honest conversation with so many others and hear similar sentiments. (Though it may be hard, Christians aren’t great at telling the truth).

●●●

9. An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington by Karl Pilkington

This was a fun season of life. There was this show about a British guy that travelled to the most amazing places on Earth and spent the entire time bitching about it. It had become one of Paige and my favorite Netflix binges. It was hilarious. He went to all 7 Wonders of the World and hated all of it.

I didn't know they turned it into a book until I found a copy placed on my desk. The inscription inside read:

"To Chris­

You have quickly become my favorite travel companion. Can't wait for all the adventures ahead! Maybe Karl can inspire us.

Love you,

Paige"

Karl traveled to Machu Picchu and then called someone back in Britain for permission to skip going inside.

"We got to a point called the Sun Gate that looked down onto Machu Picchu. It looked like more of the same that I'd seen earlier. Bungalows made from rocks with the roofs missing. I wonder if these were ever finished. I don't think they corroded away, I just think they couldn’t get people to live in them so they didn't bother completing the project. I was really tired and concerned that by the time we got to the Wonder it would be totally dark. I told Richard I thought it was pointless going any further. He said I had to go for the programme. I think he was worried the Sky bosses would be angry if we went back home with no footage. I called Steve to try to get him on my side." -pg.213

Paige went to Machu Picchu that year. She definitely felt it was worth going inside one of the 7 Wonders of the World.

In a couple of weeks Paige and I are going to Machu Picchu together along with our ten-year-old daughter. I guess I'll decide for myself.

●●●

10. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I didn't really like this book, but I hadn't read much else and needed a #10.

Malcom Gladwell does this thing where he finds interesting stories and tries to pass off some thin connection between anecdotes as a code for understanding the universe. It's not research. It's not journalism. It's just storytelling that preys on our self-help tendencies to grasp at secrets of life.

As someone who reads actual social science and actual journalism, I mostly find this bastardized approach appalling.

He sells a lot of books though.

●●●

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2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

3. Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis

4. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

5. Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller

6. Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis

7. Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkien

8. The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

9. Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

10. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

●●●

A friend told me that dating is like falling down the stairs. In 2014, I tripped down the first step and kept tumbling until I eventually reached the bottom of the stairwell. It was painful. Most of my journal entries were un-readable. Someone recommended that I should write down a prayer each week and I took the suggestion fairly seriously.

Most of the written prayers followed the same pattern:

1. Some overly formal intro

2. Hemming and hawing about how I didn’t want to write down the things I was really thinking out of embarrassment

3. Delaying the writing by listing off the same collection of names of people that I felt like I was failing for not having converted yet  

4. Finally getting around to writing a page and a half about how much I wanted the most recent girl on my mind to fall in love with me

When I read those entries again, I couldn't get through most of them. I felt that awkward pit of embarrassment welling up in my stomach as the insecurity bled through the pages and back into my repressed memories of being single and lonely.

Fuck me, what a miserable time.

When I wrote things down in the form of a prayer, I had this formal tone where I addressed God as though I was a ‘Game of Thrones’ character—using words that I would never bust out in casual conversation like “steadfast,” “fellowship,” or “burdened.” People don’t really speak like that unless they’re cosplaying or trying to impress a Pastor (or a girl) while praying in public. I tell my sales students all the time: "talk like you normally talk."

Back when I was 24 I had yet to apply that lesson to myself.

And yet, I didn't feel ashamed as I read. Just pity. I knew that kid. I cared about that kid. And I remember how miserable he was. I had this refrain in a lot of the entries where I wrote, "I bet one day I'll look back on this and laugh or smile because of how little faith I had."

I wasn't laughing.

I wasn't smiling.

I couldn't stomach reading it any more than I could stomach writing it a decade ago. I felt nothing but empathy for him. What a difficult season of life to be in.

Alternatively, I also lamented feeling useless at work. I worried about not giving my company enough of myself. Well, that concern does makes me laugh now. That overambitious kid needs to chill out, the heartsick one needs a beer and a hug.

I wasn't miserable the entire time though. I had a lot of good first dates. The kind of extended lunches where time stands still but your bladder keeps moving. Where you hate to admit that the cups of water you drank out of nervousness are now assaulting the walls of your pelvis as you try to hang onto every word that the woman across from you delivers—not wanting to excuse yourself to pee for fear of stopping the momentum of conversation and possibly never getting it back. Those times were exciting. The text messages declining your invitation to a second date were not.

I did like one entry. A lot. It was the last one made in 2014 and it was the first one where I didn't directly address some rigid deity. I dropped most of the pompous Christian tone and jargon, though not all of it, and spoke to myself. The audience that I knew. Knew better than anyone else. And wanted the best for.

Thursday, December 18th, 2014

“So I'm writing this on December 20th, but the 18th is the important date. I've realized that the frequency of these entries is down a bit, and I think that is largely because I often write to try to organize my thoughts in an effort to obtain some clarity and peace with everything else going on in my mind. But I can say that my head has been remarkably clear as of late. On October 19th I met Paige Clouse for the first time on a blind date arranged by Kelley Greening and Katie Strock. The date went well, but I knew that I hadn't interacted with Paige enough to adequately assess the compatibility of a relationship. We continued to text, talk, and go on dates, and my infatuation with her increased exponentially as we spent more time interacting with one another. And, as mentioned before, my head became more and more clear. It became apparent to me that Paige and I were meant to be in a relationship. Now, that statement comes with some caveats.

I've made entries before that had a similar flavor to them about other women. I've long desired to know who that special person is, the way you hear the Best Man reciting the story about how "I remember when you told me that she was the one..." The reality is that a part of me hoped that with every girl I was interested in that I could convince myself that she was the one. That it was fate. That this story would finally have a happy ending if I could just pre-emptively write one. I had this vision of someone reading an entry years after being happily married and saying, "See! He knew all along!" The truth is that I don't. I don't know if I'll marry Paige. I don't look at her today with an absolute certainty that she'll be the same person I will look at veiled in white and entering into a covenant with. I think it's unrealistic to truly expect to know that. But what I do know with absolute clarity is that today, December 20th, 2014, Paige and I should be together. So, on Thursday, December 18th, I asked if she felt the same way. And she did. If true faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you cannot see, then having faith that you'll be married has nothing to do with clarity. There are no guarantees that you’ll make a definitive declaration of love the first time you meet someone. Confusion, doubt, and frustration are likely far more realistic. But the beautiful thing about the Gospel's application to all situations is that emotions that could cause despair can also cause hope, joy, and direction. Sometimes we think lack of direction is a bad thing, but when it informs faith, those same circumstances become beautiful. Our doubts turn to hope, our confusion to peace, and our frustration to patient expectation. And that is where I am today. No, I will not say that Paige will be the woman I will marry. I will not write the ending of that story today. But what I will say is that I serve a God that cares deeply for His glory and my sanctification. He will have His way inevitably in all areas of my life and will orchestrate what once seemed like a symphony of chaos into a beautiful melody. And He's doing the same thing in Paige’s life. So today, those two pieces of music are being played together, but that may not  always be the case. But perhaps more importantly, I would not be surprised in the least if it carried on in that way. That if when our songs finally end one day that we are holding hands, taking that bow together."

I did end up marrying her. We’re still falling down the stairs, but it’s nice doing it alongside someone. Even if we’re often pulling the other person down the stairwell with us.

●●●

1.      Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

What a book.

I've never taken the blood oath to join the cult of Apple. I learned how to type on a see-through green Macintosh with a hockey puck for a mouse, bitching the whole time about how confusing everything was on the school's computers compared to the simple Windows XP interface I had at home. But when the iPod came out, I have perhaps never loved a physical object more. I still have my 2008 iPod Video that I bought to replace my 2006 iPod Color that crapped out on me while I was working on my high school term paper. As I type, that same iPod is currently playing "Red Sky" by Thrice off of their 2005 Vhiessu album.

I love it still.

There’s something about Jobs' relationship to physical devices that inspires me, even though I don't regard his creations with the reverence many do, at least not all of them. I read this book with a friend in an attempt to start a short-lived book club. I think I read it too soon. I was 24 years old, trying to make my mark on the corporate world while lacking any real vision. Meanwhile, Jobs was founding an empire on a parallel path. I would read the milestones  and compare my progress against his:

"Well ok, he's 26 now in the book, so I guess I have another two years to become a multi-national CEO."

These aren't helpful thoughts. It took years for me not to feel like an utter failure for simply collecting a salary and paying a mortgage. I attribute a lot of that angst to reading this book when I did, but not to the book itself. I still love it.

Walter Isaacson has become my favorite biographer. He has a knack for crafting a narrative from disjointed episodes without losing the authenticity of non-fiction. Compare this style to someone like Erik Larson (who I love) or Ben Mezrich (who I think is ok). When you read from those two, you're not sure at any given point if what you're hearing is truth or embellishment since the writing feels like it was made-up, even when it wasn’t. Isaacson is formal and authoritative, yet uses plain language and reads as if you were talking to your favorite Uncle who just happens to have a super cool job and likes talking about it.

Also, it's good to see the human side of some of the world's idols like Jobs, even if it does make you insane. At least I didn't do what Elizabeth Holmes did after reading the book and actually try to become Jobs and end up in prison for fraud.1  

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything— all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

-Steve Jobs at a Stanford Commencement Ceremony (and probably quoted in that book somewhere)

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2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

Some books are profound. Some are haunting. Some are beautiful.

Maus is all three.

If you've seen this title, it was likely at a banned book display at some local bookstore or library. There are some places (like all of Russia) that keep Maus off the shelves, which is a tragedy, because it tells the story of another tragedy in the most captivating form I have ever seen. I've also seen "Schindler's List." That movie is great. Maus is better.

Maus is the tale of a son collecting his dad’s story as a holocaust survivor— his real story. Spiegelman used the form he knew, comics, and captured the atrocities of inhumane treatment by making all the characters in-human. Is that a word?  

Every Jew was a mouse. Every German a cat. Americans, French, Italians, and even Gypsies all got their own animal treatment. Because this was how the world behaved during this period— like a bunch of animals.

There are a lot of books I think people would like reading. There are only a few that I think everyone SHOULD read. Everyone should read Maus.

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3. Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis

I’m not sure exactly when I made the declaration that C.S. Lewis is my favorite author, but it may have been after reading this book. If you really study Lewis' catalog, it's impossible not to be impressed by its breadth. Children's books, adult science fiction, theology, academic criticism, poetry, and —with 'Surprised by Joy' —memoir.  Most people can't write one genre well, let alone every genre. I've read some of Lewis' scholarly work and am humbled by what a total moron I am since typically pages go by without me understanding a single thing he said. And then I read 'Mere Christianity' and feel like he just penetrated straight to my soul. ‘Surprised by Joy’ makes you feel like Lewis was your closest companion. You realize why he was beloved by so many of his students. He writes as if you're one of those pupils sitting in his study, swapping stories about shared passions.

I've become so captivated by his life that I make a point to read a different Lewis biography every year. This one may still be the best, despite some obvious omissions (like his weird relationship with the mother of his dead friend that he lived with the majority of his adult life), and the fact that the memoir predates his marriage to the conveniently named Joy Davidman who inspired him to write some of his finest work.

 "...it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again."  

"Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself."

"I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. 'Emotional' is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake."

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4. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It would be nice to pretend like I picked up this book because I'm incredibly cultured, but it was just because I really liked the Sherlock TV show that BBC made. I was browsing the aisles of Half Price Books while waiting for an insultingly low offer on the used paperbacks I wanted to sell, when this tattered doorstop caught my eye. It took me a bit to get through it all, but the collection of short stories allowed me to put the book down for a bit, move onto other things, and then revisit Mr. Holmes and Mr. Watson with new interest— especially if the incident tied into an episode of Sherlock I just watched. That show is sweet.  

However, my favorite part of the entire book may be the description of Arthur Conan Doyle on the opening pages. I haven't found a good Arthur Conan Doyle biography, but there must be one somewhere:

"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University and settled in London, but his less than thriving practice left him with a great deal of spare time. It was then that he began to write the famous Sherlock Holmes stories. His first success was A STUDY IN SCARLET, which appeared in Breton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. Following the publication of THE SIGN OF FOUR in 1890, he left medicine to devote himself to writing. While he wrote many other stories of adventure and historical romance, it was his detective fiction featuring the great Sherlock Holmes that brought him fame. In fact, when Doyle tired of the character and killed off Holmes in "His Last Bow," published in 1893, he was forced by public demand to restore him ingeniously to life. Arthur Conan Doyle lived a varied and adventurous life. He was a historian, whaler, athlete, war correspondent, and spiritualist. He personally championed two cases of injustice, using his own detective work to prove the men innocent of crimes for which they were convicted. Conan Doyle was knighted in 1902 for his work in a South African field hospital during the Beor War. He died in 1930."

Did you catch that? Fucking Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted for SOMETHING THAT HAD NOTHING TO SHERLOCK HOLMES.

What a badass.

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5. Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller

Most of my mental energy in 2014 was spent despairing over girls and work. I had just accepted a job that I had no idea how to be productive in, and, as a card-carrying meritocrat, this translated into constant feelings of utter failure. So, I thought a lot about 'idols,' and this was a pretty good read along those lines. If I read it in another season of life it likely wouldn’t have cracked the top 10, let alone the top 5, but Keller has a knack for taking a weighty topic and boiling it down to its core components. I needed that back in 2014.

"We learn that through all of life there runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment. You are never going to lead a wise life until you understand that."

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6. Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis

Here's my hot take: I'm not a big fan of the Psalms.

I never have been. The style of communication doesn't naturally resonate with me and I have a hard time placing myself in the middle of someone's sorrows when I don't know the context of the situation. I could do that research (and sometimes I have), but the visceral 'go read the Psalms' response that I have heard many times during seasons of heartbreak or depression has never been satisfying to me.

That's probably why a book written by the master logician Lewis resonated. He was willing to walk through all the 'here's why it's not totally inappropriate for David to demand murder of people he's unhappy with' threads while still capturing the essence of worship that the book of the Bible was intended. It was a good read.  

I still don't really like the Psalms though.

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is appointed consummation."

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7. Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkien

Who knew Tolkien wrote anything shorter than 700 pages?

I first heard about this short story from Keller's ‘Every Good Endeavor’.2 Keller likes to find a parable to illustrate a point. In describing how our work often feels fruitless and dissatisfying— yet still holds meaning— he drew upon this tale of an unremarkable artist named Niggle who spent more time dreaming of painting the beautiful tree in his mind’s eye than he did actually painting it. Due to constant interruptions, Niggle only got done with a leaf. And Niggle dies.

Bummer, right?

In his afterlife, Niggle discovers that not only has his tree been made real, but it had grown into an entire forest, more perfect and beautiful than he could have imagined.  

I found a .pdf of the entire thing illegally scanned and stashed in the corners of the internet. I went back and re-read it for the first time since 2014. I still love the story. Often we feel our grand dreams will never be realized, and often we're right about that, but maybe there's more to the story than we can immediately see.

Even the guy that wrote ‘The Lord of The Rings’ felt that way sometimes.

" ‘But it did not look like this then, not real.' said Parish

‘No, it was only a glimpse then,' said the man;

‘but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worthwhile to try.' "

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8. The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

If you ever get stuck and need a provocative quote for a sermon, you can do what most Pastors do and use the following:

"What comes into our minds when we think  about God is the most important thing about us."

Whatever your sermon topic, this bad boy will do the trick.

The rest of the book ain't bad.

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9. Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

In 2013, this memoir of a free black man that was abducted and sold into slavery for (you guessed it) 12 years was made into a movie and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. And it earned it. The movie is chilling and brutal, but reading the account first-hand from the man who lived it is heartbreaking. This kind of shit actually happened.

What bothered me most was how the culture of racism was so imbedded within our society that it was impossible for many to see on the surface how cruel and horrible it was. We'd like to think we would have been better than the generations before us. That there is no way we would tolerate such a systemic and unspeakable oppression of another people. History tells us that we're capable of far more horrors of ignorance than we could ever imagine.

"It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him. Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears, that the rod is for the slave's back, he will not opt to change his opinions in maturer years."  

It stuck with me, and I never quite looked at slavery, or human nature, quite the same since. It was a stark reminder.

And much more effective than the time I went to a New Orleans plantation and they wrote the names of every slave that worked there on the wall of a former slave quarters— but chose to do it in comic sans font.

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10. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

My buddy Tim let me borrow this book written by the founder of Patagonia clothing. We chatted about it after, along with my mixed feelings about Chouinard's views.

Tim’s advice: “take the good, leave the bad.”

Pretty good advice.

Chouinard has some admirable views on sustainability, work-life balance, and corporate ethics. I was challenged by a lot of the sacrifices he made both personally and corporately to uphold those values.

I also made the personal decision to never purchase any Patagonia products after learning that a portion of their profits every year support abortion and Planned Parenthood.3 Hard for me to reconcile that in my consumer purchases.

That being said, I was given a Patagonia pullover and backpack when I was finishing up my MBA. I didn't pay anything for them, I just had to post a picture of me with a paper cut out of Billy Bluejay while on vacation. I absolutely love both of them, they're two of the most well-made items I own.

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Share By C.S. Beaty

2. Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller

3. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

4. You Herd Me! by Colin Cowherd

5. This is a Book by Demetri Martin

6. Good to Great by Jim Collins

7. A Death in the Family by Jim Starlin

8. King's Cross by Tim Keller

9. Clients for Life by Jaydish Sheth and Andrew Sobel

10. Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plot of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey

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I wanted to share my annual lists of Top 10 Books Read, but I debated where to start. On one hand, it would seem more relevant to begin with the most recent and work backward. Certainly, those reading choices say more about how I think today and what is shaping my worldview, interests, and desires. But then again starting at the end betrays the destination. Sure, you know where you are, but the person you are has had the benefit of firing away all the impurities over time. All the dumb ideas. All the bad influences. All the stupid opinions.

Or so it seems.

This is obviously not the case, but it is our perception. The reality is, we just hold our current dumb ideas in much higher regard simply because they're current. We think we’ve learned, and maybe we have, but we also don't know what it is we're still learning. So, despite my current infatuations, it is impossible for me to know how the things I read just last year will fit in the totality of my makeup. I believe reading fundamentally shapes who we are and who we are to become. But the process doesn't end when the book is placed on the shelf. It is rather just beginning. As we forget the things we underlined but vividly recall certain anecdotes. As we botch the quotes but recall their substance. As we look back and think, "why the hell did I like that way back then?"  I won't pretend to have these questions all answered for this particular list. But I am 11 years further into that process when I look back on my favorite reads of 2013 than I am for my favorite reads of 2023. Also, I just thought of this. Cut me some slack.

Eventually I'll get to present day. And maybe I'll have something to say. But maybe not. I might have to get back to you in a decade.

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●●●

I have kept a journal since March 6th, 2009. I use the term journal loosely. It's mostly a notebook filled with things that I felt compelled to write down. Reminders, lists, outlines, sermon notes, fart jokes, reflections, stuff that happened, quotes, love songs to Margaret Thatcher. There's a reason the word diary sounds so much like diarrhea.

In 2012, I was living alone in a shitty studio apartment and had most evenings completely to myself. No roommates, a recently acquired ex-girlfriend, no pets. I made it through every active season of Breaking Bad on Netflix and would orient my afternoons around when Jeopardy! came over the air on my TV antenna. I was thick in the process of wrapping up my Graduate year of engineering school, so I had little desire to read for fun after spending the day reading nerdy articles about the proper aggregate size of standard-cured molded concrete cylinders, and then writing about the proper aggregate size of standard-cured molded concrete cylinders. My creativity had atrophied during my years in engineering school. My desire to read along with it.

At the end of 2012, I created six different Top 5 lists.  None of them included books of any form.

Here were the victors:  

• Top Movie of 2012: The Dark Knight Rises

• Top Team of 2012: The USA

• Top Album of 2012: The Peace of Wild Things by Paper Route

• Top TV Show of 2012: Duck Dynasty (It also won spots 5 through 2)

• Top Thing of 2012: No New Transformers Movie

• Top Winner of 2012: The World (After surviving the Mayan Apocalypse)

As the calendar flipped to 2013, I became reflective. This was my final semester as a full-time student. I had already accepted a job and knew that my field of study was completely irrelevant to my future employer. I cared a lot less about learning structural engineering. I worked hard to finish strong, and even won a few awards along the way for our final engineering project (the irony was not lost on my fellow classmates). But I knew adulthood was coming, and I wanted to be ready for it. And that adulthood would have very little to do with the properties of steel gusset plates or shear walls.

Looking through the old lists in my journals, I was trying pretty hard at this self-reflection thing.  On March 11th, 2013, I made three new lists: books to read, monthly expenses, and "goals to help make a healthy transition to real life.”

Despite its omission from my prior Top 5 lists, the first 3 goals all had to do with reading:

• Start reading often for fun

• Start reading to stay up to date

• Start reading for personal/spiritual development

I didn't do a lot of the other things on that particular list, but a decade later I can say that these first three objectives have been met. I still think they're pretty good goals.

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My wife likes to underline books, and it drives me fucking crazy. I have zero interest in seeing what other people thought was interesting. It completely deadens my experience of reading. The underlines overtly shout what the most important pieces are, rather than inviting you to unearth those discoveries on your own. If I have any interest in reading the copy of a book I purchased for her, I give her specific instructions that she needs to mark her most salient moments elsewhere and not directly on the page.

But in the event I really want to read The Three Musketeers but don't want to purchase a new copy, there is one saving grace from the terrors of a graffitied paperback. Her underlines always lose steam 50 pages in or sooner. Toward the middle, and certainly at the climax, her experience of reading has shifted from 'let's make sure I'm being a smart person capturing all the smart things,' to either: a person just trying to get through the book (glass half empty), or someone that's been thoroughly caught up in the actual experience of reading (glass half full).

I've noticed this phenomenon in not just my wife, but also in the underlined books that I have purchased from used bookstores. Even the manuscripts of things I've written are handed back to me with the editor’s ink front loaded. Our interactions with text tend to shift as we go along. We either enjoy it more or enjoy it less, either way we seem less inclined to get a pen out and vandalize in the meantime.

I only read 13 books in 2013, and as you can tell from the Top 10 list, a few of them were a stretch of the definition of 'book.' But it was a start. People have written a bunch about what it takes to start a habit, insert your favorite Malcolm Gladwell quote here. But in the annals of my journals, there are signs of a slightly more valiant effort than my initial list shows. I had a lot of false starts on different books people told me to read.

It took me a little while to discover what kind of books I liked, I hadn't read by choice as an adult yet. Thick in the early pages of the 2013 journal editions are copious notes from Gospel by JD Greear, The Mortification of Sin by John Owen, and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I remember little from any of these books, other than I never finished them. And have no intentions to.  But I got a lot of quotes written down. I still hadn't learned how to spend my time on reading that captured my interest. I was doing a lot of reading that I thought I was supposed to be doing, not reading that I actually wanted to do. I've gotten a lot better at that over the years.

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1.      Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas

Sometimes our opinions of books change over time because of the subject, other times they change because of the author.

I attended a lecture by James K.A. Smith and everything was going pretty well until the Q&A.  There was a system in place to screen questions, but we had time on hand and this crowd seemed civil, so they opened it up to the audience. An old man wearing a homemade t-shirt with some sort of slogan ironed on stood up dramatically. I would say with gusto. Collectively the room took a deep breath and thought, “oh boy, here we go.”

In a firm tone, he began his critique with: "Eric Metaxas said..."

It was uncomfortable. Clearly this dude had some sort of axe to grind, and he had been sitting on it the whole time. It’s got to be uncomfortable sitting on a dull axe through an entire lecture. Luckily James K.A. Smith wasn't as caught off guard as I was.

"I find that quote interesting given its author’s opinion of our current President."

The year was 2017.

ZING!!

My opinion of Eric Metaxas hasn't aged well. I don't spend a lot of time dissecting him, but I've found associating with people I find immoral and despicable (or going beyond and esteeming them) a pretty reliable way for me to value your opinion less. We can all have bad ideas and be nice to each other about it, but I don’t really want to read your books. I have others on my list that I can work through first.

There’s a lot of irony in re-reading my Bonhoeffer notes and considering our current political climate.  I want to tread carefully here. There's a saying about how it only takes a certain number of exchanges on social media for someone to be compared to Hitler or called a Nazi, this is not my attempt here. But what I found most profound about Dietrich Bonhoeffer was his unwavering desire and courage to call out evil, particularly institutional evil, when he saw it. He did this despite myriad forces externally that told him he was either wrong or simply foolish to do so.

Just check out these quotes:

"Bonhoeffer's three conclusions- that the church must question the state, help the state's victims, and work against the state, if necessary- were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three." -Metaxas

"But the other piece of this puzzle has to do with the confusion that inevitably arises when the Christian faith becomes too closely related to a cultural or national identity. For many Germans, their national identity had become so melted together with whatever Lutheran Christian faith they had that it was impossible to see clearly. After four hundred years of taking for granted that all Germans were Lutheran Christians, no one really knew what Christianity was anymore."- Metaxas

"(Hitler) knew quite well how to deal with these Protestant pastors. 'You can do anything you want with them,' he once remarked. 'They will submit... they are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them.'”- Metaxas (and that one Hitler part)

Sounds familiar to me. If history is a meant to teach us a lesson, well I'm not sure what all of Mr. Metaxas's research of Mr. Bonhoeffer did for him. I’m sure it shaped him. It’s hard for me to see. But maybe you can.   

There are some other good quotes in there about other stuff too:  

"What made (Bonhoeffer) stand out, to some as an inspiration, to others an oddity, and to others as an offense, was that he did not hope that God heard his prayers, but knew." -Metaxas

"It's not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage sustains your love." -Bonhoeffer

"And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God's cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be 'unsuccessful'; and yet be on the right road. But this is where we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm."-Bonhoeffer

I don’t really understand what the phrase "simply cannot be constant" means, but I think I get the gist of it. I did Google it again, along with “what does simply cannot be constant mean.” The internet didn’t know either. I still like it though, even if I don’t really like Mr. Metaxas so much.  

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2.      Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller

This dude has not had the same issues, my respect for Keller has only increased over the last decade. Probably a good thing since he shows up on this list twice. It would have been pretty embarrassing otherwise.

This is one of those books that I still think about, explicitly and implicitly. It’s Keller's treatise on the nature and design of work from a theological perspective. How work is not a curse, but it is cursed. How fulfillment can't be found apart from work, but it cannot be found in work alone. It's pretty well thought out, and resonated both with someone just entering the full-time workforce and from the perspective of someone that has been at the same job for a decade. You should read this one.

Keller will make a few more appearances, both in 2013 and beyond, but to this day Every Good Endeavor is the work of his that I reference the most.

"Part of the curse of work in a fallen world is frequent fruitlessness."

"(Fruitlessness) means that, in all work, we will be able to envision far more than we can accomplish, both because of lack of ability and because of resistance in the environment around us."

"Work will always fall short of what you imagined it could be because we are not meant to be fulfilled in this world."

"...a worldview is not merely a set of philosophical bullet points. It is essentially a master narrative, a fundamental story about (a) what human life in the world should believe, (b) what has knocked it off balance, and (c) what can be done to make it right."

Pretty good stuff.

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3.      Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ok, I was ahead of the curve on this one. I don't care if you don't believe me.  

Remember that random book list I mentioned in the introduction? Probably not since I’m sure you just skipped the intro and decided to skim the reviews of the few books you’ve heard of.  But this one was on it.

I knew a guy who kind of made a big deal about how reading was his thing. He was gifted a book-a-month subscription for Christmas, where you fill out a list of books that you like, and then someone randomly mails you a new book that they think you might enjoy based off the list you compiled. (I ended up getting Paige a subscription to this as a present. It was moderately successful).

Ready Player One was the first book they sent him, and he thought it was awesome.  One day I was eating tacos with this guy and said, "I'm trying to get back into reading, give me a biography and a fiction book that I should read."

He suggested Wizard by Marc Seifer about Nikola Tesla, which I started but never finished (I'll try again one day), and Ready Player One.

I devoured this read on the Kindle Paperwhite that I was gifted for graduating college. I grew tired of reading on Kindles after a while, and last Christmas Paige bought me a hard copy of Ready Player One just so I could put it on my shelf and look at the spine. It’s got a real sexy spine.

If you've never heard of this book, well then, you’re definitely not reading my book list. So, there's no point in me explaining it to you. But I loved it, I listened to a podcast describe it as 'eating cotton candy.'

I really like cotton candy.

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4.      You Herd Me! I'll Say it if Nobody Else Will by Colin Cowherd

I listened to a lot of sports radio during this era. This was the heyday of ESPN Radio. It was great. The early work commute had Mike and Mike in the Morning. The afternoon timeslot was the Scott Van Pelt Show. The late afternoon was some miserable local sports guy that made your ears bleed and further appreciate how good the pros were. And then there was my favorite. Sandwiched between 10:00AM and Noon, a time that I was never actually in my car but always wanted to be, was the joyous The Herd with Colin Cowherd.

The Mikes and Scott Van Pelt were good. They were smart. But Colin Cowherd was brilliant. I could listen to him analyze paper towels, but he just so happened to talk about sports. He was so well thought-out and so well-spoken that if I ever heard one of my idiot friends say, "oh I hate Colin Cowherd" I would roll my eyes the same way I would if someone said, "oh I hate Plato."

(For the record, I have told people that "I hate Shakespeare." Shakespeare makes me feel stupid.)

It's fine if you don't agree with everything Colin Cowherd thought or said.  But you would have a hard time convincing me that you are more thoughtful or well-spoken on anything sports related and I should value your opinion more. So, when he wrote a book, I felt like I had just been invited to the cool kid in class’s birthday party. I was so excited.

"Two things make smart men stupid. Beautiful women and sports."

"Hating an athlete for being arrogant is like hating a bat for being nocturnal."

"Social media: don't do it after a cocktail or in your underwear."

"Bowling is the only sport where the better you are, the less attractive you are to the opposite sex."

"We often demand total transparency but, number one, total transparency doesn't exist, and two we're probably all happier if we don't know everything about everything."

“I asked my seven-year-old what love is. 'If someone fell off a cliff and died and I was sad.' Yep. Pretty much nailed it."

"Love your life, like your sports."

"How you do under pressure always reveals who you really are as a person. When you're in dire straits, the way you act …determines who you really are."

"If you resent success, you will never achieve it. Be excited about it, even if the success is not your own. Bitter people are rarely happy or successful."

The Mikes got split up, one got his own TV show and the other got a worse partner. Scott Van Pelt also got his own TV show and was forced into staring at a camera and just talking. I preferred when he was just talking.  Only Colin stuck to what he was good at and kept the whole radio thing going. Except he now works for Fox and I have no idea if I get that radio channel. I'd like to know, but apparently not enough.

●●●

5.      This is a Book by Demetri Martin

My brother let me borrow his copy of this book and I then lent it to my other brother. I'm pretty sure it never made it back to its home. I feel bad about that.

Demetri Martin is probably my favorite stand-up comedian. The fact that I'm stopping to think, "do I like any other stand-up comedians better?" is probably proof enough and I can stop wracking my brain. Wracking? Is that the metaphor? Like the Medieval torture device where they would pull all your limbs out of socket? Yeah, I can probably stop doing that to my brain. It needs to be in its sockets.

If you know Demetri Martin's humor, it's simple yet smart. He does a lot of visual comedy, and this book is his opus to that artform. I don't remember any of the jokes, but I remember laughing a lot. He's the only comic I've seen in person twice. The last time I even bought one of his sheets from a flip chart that had a joke on it he told during the show. I tried selecting one that would be funny without any explanation. One that people could just look at and say ‘ha, that's funny.' Turns out that's not how his jokes work. No one I've shown the flipchart to has gotten the joke without explanation. And my explanation isn't as funny as Demetri's. But I still like looking at it above my laptop in my home office.

His book isn't like that.

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6.      Good to Great by Jim Collins

This was the year that I started my real job, so I felt like I had to get 'businessy.' I bought businessy clothes. Got a businessy haircut. And read a lot of businessy books. More on that later.

This is one of those books that gets recommended all the time in businessy circles. I was reading it per a suggestion from my boss, primarily on airplanes during businessy trips. On one airplane ride I eavesdropped on my seatmate while he was reading and noticed he had his own copy of Good to Great. I pulled out my copy shoved in the seat back pocket between the safety card and puke bag and showed it to him. He was 'trying to apply some of the principles' to his own place of business. That’s what businessy people do. They apply principles to things.

Overall, it's a decent book. I appreciate how most of their conclusions about what makes a successful company ostensibly come from research. However, that research doesn't look so hot in retrospect. Ten years later, I’m not so sure of the job that Collins and his group of grad students that made him famous did. Other than obviously selling a lot of books. They did that part really well. Ultimately, it feels a little more like the cardinal sin of research: determine your conclusions first and then torture the 'data' enough so it can support those conclusions.

The premise is that Collins studied a bunch of companies that were just ‘good.’ And then years later they were 'great.' I'm sure he has a definition for what 'great' means, but for the purposes of this review we’ll just simplify it to 'whatever will get you to buy this book.’

But here lies a bit of a sticky point. Years later, the list of case studies doesn't feel so 'great' or even 'good' or even 'NOT a basket of deplorables’ or ‘NOT a sampling of some of the worst possible companies you could try to emulate.'

Here's an update on how a few of Collins's teacher pets are doing:

• Circuit City: Bankrupt

• Fannie Mae: Helped create the global housing crisis and Great Recession of 2008

• Pitney Bowes: Has lost 88% of its stock value since the book published according to the blog I read

• Wells Fargo: Paid $3B to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle claims against it, then turned around and paid another $3.7B in fraud related charges for creating 1.5 million fake customer accounts. However, my Wells Fargo mortgage is very real. It also doesn’t feel so ‘great’ to pay it.

Doesn't look so hot at the moment. There are still some ‘good’ or maybe even ‘great’ companies in his initial list too, but that’s kind of how a random sampling works. And this wasn’t supposed to be random. Supposedly he had cracked it. He told us so.

So, can we just go ahead and all agree that, in fact, Jim Collins doesn't actually know what makes a great company because it’s wildly random and trying to codify it is a ridiculous notion that sells books at airports but doesn’t actually help any Chief Executive Officers?

HELL NO.

I heard someone pimping this book a few years ago at some training that was supposed to make me a better person and such. Because this is the kind of person I am, I asked the obvious question.

“Aren't a lot of those ‘Good to Great’ companies terrible now?"

The response from the ‘expert’ that our companies had paid hundreds of dollars for us to listen to went something like:

"Well Collins actually has a lot to say about that. Just because they were 'Great' companies when he looked at them doesn't mean they were going to be 'Great' companies forever. Things can change in a company, and they can fall away from the principles that made them ‘Great’, but that doesn't mean his core observations are wrong."

Of course they're not.

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7.      A Death in the Family by Jim Starlin

This one you might take issue with. That's fair. You could tell I wasn't exactly reading a lot of books back then, at least not enough to make a Top 10 list without dipping into comics.

Every year I buy my brother a few classic Batman graphic novels (pretentious way of saying a bunch of comics) and read them before I give him a birthday present. It’s mutually beneficial. If you're into Batman, there are a few that get brought up a lot. One is A Death in the Family about the amazing time they killed the single character that was in most dire need of a gruesome murder: Robin.

From what I've gathered, the DC Comics Execs realized that their current version of Robin was, how do you say it, terrible? So, they decided to write him into a real pickle and have the fans vote on whether or not he made it out.

Caesar issued his ruling. Thumbs: Down.

The comic itself has a great story, but man, as someone who’s loved Batman his whole life and has taught his son to say: "you like Robin" as the ultimate insult- it felt so satisfying to have Joker beat the shit out of him.

Almost as satisfying as when Carl got eaten by a zombie.

Sorry if you haven't gotten to that part yet in The Walking Dead. It's not like you haven’t had time.

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8.      King's Cross by Tim Keller  

This one was re-published as Jesus the King, but I like the original name better. I helped lead a Bible Study on the book of Mark over the summer and we read this as a group. I don’t remember it much, or the study really, but it happened. I have notes to prove it. I'm sure Tim Keller was real smart in it.

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9.      Clients for Life by Jaydish Sheth and Andrew Sobel

It's kind of brutal to write an essay where, by design, the topics get less interesting the longer you write. It's pretty obvious now why most of these Top 10 lists go backward. Then again, you would have never made it to the good stuff if I started with this muck.

No one is going to go out and buy this book after reading this review. And you shouldn't. My boss gave me that list of businessy books I mentioned earlier, and this was just the least painful of the rest. My old boss might read this, so I feel compelled to say that he was an excellent first boss. I’ve just decided that the entire genre of businessy books are mostly money grabs.

I had some spots in my list to fill to make it to magic number 10. I should have just done a top 7. It’s God's favorite number after all.

The best quality about this book is that it wasn't one of the other following books that I read in my cubicle while pretending to work:

• Why Good Clients Fire Great Companies

• What Your Boss's Don't Know

• Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers

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10.  Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plot of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey

9/27/13

“I had a half hour to kill, so I walked into Target with the thought, 'maybe I can find a Batman Pez dispenser.' Walked out with an autographed copy of Captain Underpants. If that's not a good consolation prize, then I don't know what is.”

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I really hope these lists get better as we go along.