100 Books

   At the beginning of 2019 I seemed to be reading a lot and by the end of January I realized that I had read 10 books! It got me thinking - it seems that it would be possible to read 100 books in the year -  so I set myself that goal and the adventure began.
   In the end I'd have to say that this was not a chore at all, and was even enjoyable, and that while it took a solid commitment, it was very rarely onerous. I think I read at the rate of about 50 pages an hour so my reading averaged out to about 1 hr. 40 min. per day. So I still had lots of time to do other stuff! We painted 3 rooms in our house this year, plus helped with painting at some of our children's houses too. We don't watch a lot of TV but I have been following the Leafs this year and we did binge watch Jane the Virgin this summer (highly recommended).
   I track my reading on an app/website called GoodReads which I find very useful. At the end of the year it gave me some interesting statistics, but I've kept a few of my own as well (some shown in the photo at the bottom of this post). 70 books were paper versions, 19 were ebooks (read on my iPad), and 11 were audiobooks. 66 were from the library but 34 were books that I actually own. Most of the books were newer, with over half of the books (51%) having been published since 2017, and 30 of these were brand new in 2019.
   In the last number of years I've noticed that my tendency is to read mainly non-fiction books. While I enjoy good fiction, it seems my reading is more about lifelong learning (as we used to say in the teaching biz) and inspiring life stories.  So only 2 of the books from this year are fiction and about 40 of the authors would identify as Christian, with most of them writing about spiritual topics. While some people talk about 'getting ready for heaven' as they age, I think I read to try to live the best (read 'abundant') life here on earth with the time I have left. There's a lot of wisdom out there and I want to understand things the best I can (got a long way to go though).
   GoodReads has a star rating system that I find helpful for evaluating the books I read. It also is good for deciding if I think a book is worth reading, as thousands of people also give their opinion about many of them. I'm kind of astounded by how many of the books I read this year I rated as great books (66%) or good (28%). Of the 21 five star books from this year I'm going to try to narrow them down to a top ten, beginning with what I think would be the best 3 books I read this year.

Finding Meaning by David Kessler - the subtitle is The 6th Stage of Grief, and Kessler worked closely years ago with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who came up with the famous 5 stages of grief. David Kessler has experienced his own loss as well, and he writes with great empathy and wisdom about working through grief by trying to find meaningful ways to remember the loss of a loved one.
 

Paul: A Biography by N.T. Wright. This was one of the longer books I read this year but it also was one of the most informative and inspiring. N.T. Wright certainly helped to bring the Bible to life by writing a very scholarly but also highly readable story about the world-changing ideas and life of the apostle Paul.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. Apparently this has the highest GoodReads rating of any of the books I read this year (though based on 576 ratings as compared to almost a million for Ellie Wiesel's Night). Comer is a pastor in Portland (who apparently reads 125 books every year - my kinda guy!) and this book comes across as an awesome extended sermon on what is most important in life and how to develop habits and practices that can enhance your spiritual life.

   The next 3 books on my top ten are all about spirituality: Peter Enns' How the Bible Actually Works, Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmat's Romans Disarmed (who I got to hear speak locally this year), and Brad Jersak's A More Christlike God.
   And the next 3 are not about the Bible at all but are amazing books: How to Raise Successful People by Esther Wojcicki, The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong, and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.
   And to round out the top ten I'd add in The Originals by Adam Grant.

   Soooo, having accomplished this goal for this year (with 5 days still to go in the year I guess I could read another book, but that seems like a bit much) I don't see myself ever trying to do it again. Next year I'll go back to my more reasonable pace of 50 books. But I've decided that after reading so many newer books that my rule for 2020 will be to only reread great books that I have read before.

(click photo to enlarge - even though you still might not be able to make out enough detail)

Christmas Music I Love

Beth and I just got back from driving back and forth to Florida so we spent about 45 hours in the car - and we listened to Christmas music pretty much the whole way! We recently had friends over who I was shocked to learn only owned about 6 Christmas albums - I said I have over 100! (118 to be exact), and I sent them home with 2 cds to add to their collection. And while Beth & I weren't able to listen to all of my Christmas albums on our trip, we did make a pretty good dent - maybe I'll try to listen through them all this year.

But it got me thinking more about some of my favourite Christmas music. The 6 albums pictured in this post are ones I listened to (multiple times) every year. [I should say though that the Oh Hellos album is a new listen this year, but I love it and it belongs on this list]. The Savior album by Sovereign Grace moves me to tears with some of the beautiful music and theologically rich lyrics. Don Ross's Wintertide is acoustic guitar instrumentals at their best, and Mike Janzen's Carols has amazing jazz piano versions of favourite songs. Come Let Us Adore Him is a creative take with production and songs by Steve Hindalong and Derri Daugherty from the great band The Choir. The Acoustic Christmas album is a compilation I made up many years ago now, consisting of favourite carols and original seasonal songs [Beth says it's getting a bit dated but so is she and I still love her (and this album)].

If I wanted to round out this list to make it a top 10, I'd probably need to include Bruce Cockburn's Christmas, Glad's An Acapella Christmas, Riki Michele's Come Let Us Adore, and Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb. There are lots of other great albums on my list (click on the picture below if you want to see them all) - we listened to the old Michael Card album The Promise on the trip and I was reminded what beautiful songs he's written on this theme. Plus, Marc Martel released his Christmas Collection this year, which is amazing. Oh, and Apologetix's Have Yourself a Parody Little Christmas is both hilarious and profound! I also want to give a shout out to local musician Kevin Ramessar for his great Snow on Snow album. We also listen to Jacob Moon's This Christmas album, and taking in one of his awesome live shows is a recent lovely Christmas tradition.