What I Read This Year

Here be the list of all that I got through this year:

The Boy from the Snow - Maria Johnson

As Kingfishers Catch Fire - Eugene Peterson

Follow me Back - Nicci Cloke

Shoot Your Shot - Vernon Brundage Jr

Ronaldo: The Phantom Carrot Snatcher - Maxine Sylvester 

The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris

Racing Through the Dark - David Millar

Rob Roy - Walter Scott

A Journey of Three Degrees - A L Kent

A Life’s Ambition - Alexandre Dumas

Mortom - Erik Therme

The Journal of Madame Giovanni - Alexandre Dumas

The Prince of Thieves - Alexandre Dumas

The Neapolitan Lovers - Alexandre Dumas

A Dark Night’s Work - Elizabeth Gaskell

Extinction of All Children - L J Epps

Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France - Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dewey - Vicky Myron

The French Revolution and what went Wrong - Stephen Clarke

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Broken Sky - L A Weatherly

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

A Stranger in the House - Shari Lapena

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

Defiance - Jason Krumbine

Related by Blood - Holly Sheidenberger 

Darkness Follows - L A Weatherly

Everyday Church - Tim Chester & Steve Timmis

The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill - James Charlesworth

Zeal Without Burnout - Christopher Ash

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

The Shadow Doctor - Adrian Plass

Lock Every Door - Riley Sager

Who on Earth is the Holy Spirit - Tim Chester & Christopher de la Hayden

1984 - George Orwell

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Night - Elie Wiesel

Sofa Spotlight - Night, Elie Wiesel

It isn’t a Christmassy book to be finishing on but as it was the shortest day over the weekend it kind of fits. As well as that, it finishes off a year of reading that has unintentionally involved many books on the Holocaust or concentration camps. So what’s one more.

I’m not sure you can rate books like this against each other, but because of its length I would probably be inclined to recommend this one over the others. It is also readable and poignant beyond what words can describe.

The writer of the book shares his experiences of his time at Auschwitz. His arrival there is towards the end of the war and on his arrival prisoners are shocked that the new inmates have allowed themselves to be brought there. They had known, or at least heard rumours of what was happening to the Jews so why had they not already fled to safety. Wiesel describes his experiences of the concentration camp and also his struggle to reconcile what was happening to him and others with the God that he had been brought up to know. 

Like I say it’s not a long read, but it is certainly a powerful one that provides much food for thought. 

Sofa Spotlight - The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I don’t know about you but sometimes there are books out there that you know you should read but somehow you never get around to it. For me this was one of those books. And given how short a book it is there was no excuse at all! Short as it might be, there is some serious power in its pages.

The story follows a crashed pilot who has landed in the desert. There he meets the little prince who is visiting Earth from another planet. He tells the pilot his story, about the planet he is from and the other planets he has visited on his journey. From each part of his journey come lessons that can be drawn from the threads of the lessons that the little prince is also learning. 

I loved this book. It was over far too soon and I was so sorry to see the little prince go. He has been one of the hardest characters to say goodbye to when a book is finished. So if you’ve never read this, take an afternoon over Christmas and open it up and enjoy it. I’m certain that you won’t regret it. Although the question I’m left with right now is, how did I never hear of this book when I was a child? 

Sofa Spotlight - 1984, George Orwell

I’ve heard so much about this book and it being an important book that I thought it was about time to read it. It was a much easier read than I thought - I was under the impression that it would take a lot of getting my head round it. But I soon found myself wrapped up in the story.

What I found the most interesting was how this seems to be the forerunner of all the dystopian YA books I’ve been reading. The year is 1984, which in the book is in the future, and the world has been transformed and the part that we are dealing with is run by Big Brother. Our main character, Winston, is feeling rebellious about the thought police and  is trying to find a way to rebel further.

The scary thing about this book is how realistic it is. The technology that is imagined isn’t far away from some of what we have today. And the actions of the government resonate with some of the dictatorships that arose in the last century. So yes I would agree that this is an important book and worth a read. It fit in well with my reading of Solzhenitsyn too.

Sofa Spotlight - Who on Earth is the Holy Spirit - Tim Chester & Christopher de la Hayden

This is a short not too intense book that manages to cover quite a big topic. If you’ve read any of the books in this series you will know how clearly the subject is explained and how objectively different points of view are described. And it goes for this book on the Holy Spirit too.

As I say it’s not a long book, but each chapter covers a different aspect of this tricky subject. Early on in the book it is rightly pointed out that there are many ways of talking about the Spirit and how the Spirt works. Untangling what they all mean can be difficult but this book sets out to do just that and makes clear what the Bible does say about the Spirit.

What struck me most about this book is how comforting it is. Learning about the Holy Spirit isn’t meant to be frightening or confusing and from reading this book I was reminded of how much God loves and cares for us and wants to develop a relationship with us. I would highly recommend this book as a starting place for getting clear on what the Bible has to say about the Holy Spirit and how those passages have been interpreted differently by various viewpoints. What is great is that despite these differences there is stable common ground.

Sofa Spotlight - Lock Every Door, Riley Sager

This was nominated for the goodreads thriller of the year award and I was very sad to see that it didn’t win! If you were with me at any point when I was reading this you would know that I loved it, couldn’t stop reading it nor would I shut up about what I thought was coming next.

The idea is that a luxury apartment building, The Bartholomew, needs apartment sitters to keep an eye on the empty apartments. Qualifications for this job seem to be that you have no family or friends who would come looking for you. They don’t say that outright but you get the vibe. Enter the main character who has come to sit one of the apartments.

At first I thought I’d picked up a ghost story but it’s much much better than that. The Bartholomew is full of secrets and odd characters. One of whom is an author who wrote a book set in The Bartholomew.

Like I said, when I read this I couldn’t put it down. Nor could I stop trying to guess what would happen. I nearly got it right but I was close enough to the truth to be both satisfied with my efforts and how the book ended. If you read any book this year it should be this one.