Well, in 2009 it appears that I read 54 books, which is quite a bit less than each of the last three or four years, but is not surprising given everything that happened last year.  Also, given that most of my ‘academic’ reading time has been designated for the thesis/book I am writing on Paul, it’s not surprising that the fiction category dominates.  In each category I’ve placed a (+) next to the book I considered the best in that category and a (-) next to the book I considered the worst.  In some categories, this was harder to determine than in others.  My ‘book of the year’ award would be a tie between Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Dunn’s second volume of Christianity in the Making.
Biblical Studies (9)

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.
• Carter, Warren. John and Empire: Initial Explorations.
• Dunn, James D. G. Beginning from Jerusalem: Christianity in the Making, Volume 2. (+)
  
• Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them).
• Hardin, Justin K. Galatians and the Imperial Cult: A Critical Analysis of the First-Century Social Context of Paul’s Letter.
• Jennings, Jr., Theodore W. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice.
• Kim, Seyoon. Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke. (-)
• Meggitt, Justin J. Paul, Poverty and Survival.
• Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul.

Theology and Christian Life (6)

• Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.2: The Doctrine of God. (+)
• Benson, Bruce Ellis and Peter Goodwin Heltzel (eds). Evangelicals and Empire. Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo.
• Gutierrez, Gustavo. The Power of the Poor in History.
• McLaren, Brian D. The Last Word and the Word After That: A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christian.
• Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Inner Voice of Love.
• Woodley Matt. The Folly of Prayer: Practicing the Presence and Absence of God. (-)

Philosophy and Social Theory/Commentary (11)

• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. (-)
• Churchill, Ward. Pacifism as Pathology.
• Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization.
• Gelderloos, Peter. How Nonviolence Supports the State.
• INCITE! (ed). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
• Kropotkin, Peter. Fugitive Writings.
• Lenskyj, Helen Jefferson. Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging Olympic Power and Propaganda.
• Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Rise of Russian Socialism.
• Rancière, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. (+)
• ________. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

Literature, Poetry, Plays, Art (28)

• Baldaev, Danzig (ed). Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Vols. 1 & 3.
• Burns, Charles. Black Hole.
• Camus, Albert. The Just.
• Egil’s Saga (Penguin Classics Edition).
• Goncharov, Ivan. Oblomov.
• Goya, Francisco. The Disasters of War.
• Hesse, Hermann. Demian. (-)
• ________. Gertrude.
• McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West.
• ________. Child of God.
• ________. No Country for Old Men.
• ________. The Road.
• Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.
• Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus. (+)
• ________. Uncollected Poems.
• Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead.
• Salinger, J. D. Franny and Zooey.
• Saramago, José. Blindness.
• Stegner, Wallace. The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
• Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindnes.
• Undset, Sigrid. The Wreath.
• ________. The Wife.
• ________. The Cross.
• ________. Gunnar’s Daughter.
• Updike, John. Rabbit is Rich.
• ________. Rabbit at Rest.
• Zigrosser, Carl (ed). Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz.

Well, a couple of really good books to end the year:
1. Beginning from Jerusalem: Christianity in the Making, Volume 2 by James D. G. Dunn.
I have an ever increasing amount of respect for James Dunn as a scholar.  In fact, I am beginning to think that he is the quintessential scholar.  He is extraordinarily thorough in his research and appropriately cautious in his conclusions.  He is aware of the various angles taken on the matters at hand, and he is also aware of the limits confronted by those who study material that is a couple thousand years old.  Further, of all the biblical scholars I have read (and I have read a good many of them), Dunn seems to be the person who is most genuinely trying to confront the biblical con/texts on their own terms, instead of pushing his own agenda.
All of this is put into practice in Beginning From Jerusalem, Dunn’s 1300+pp volume on the development of Christianity from approximately 30-70CE.  Understandably, the bulk of the work is focused on Paul’s life and letters, and it was interesting to see how Dunn’s thinking on Paul has progressed since he wrote his (also impressive) The Theology of Paul the Apostle.  I was particularly interested in Dunn’s understanding of the social status of Paul and the members of the ekklesiai he helped to develop, as well as Dunn’s understanding of the importance of the imperial cult and Paul’s relation to it.  I was glad to see Dunn paying more attention to these matters and highlighting their significance to a greater degree than he has done in the past (he admits, in conversation with N. T. Wright, that these matters weren’t on his radar when he wrote his book on Pauline theology and since that conversation — in that conversation he seems more hesitant to ascribe significance to political affairs, but in Beginning from Jerusalem, it seems that he now sees more of a tense relationship between Pauline theology and the imperial ideology [see here for that conversation]).  However, Dunn doesn’t come to many conclusions about these things in this volume, which was a bit disappointing to me.  He simply makes some observations, states some of his hesitations (for example, he thinks that Justin Meggitt overstates his case in Paul, Poverty, and Survival but he doesn’t say why he has come to this conclusion), and does not draw any comprehensive conclusion about Paul’s relationship to the dominant politics of his day (of course, given that such an endeavour would have probably added another 100pp to this already massive volume, it’s understandable that Dunn draws the line where he does).
That said, let me repeat that this is really an extraordinary book and one that I think should be required reading for anybody studying the New Testament or the origins of Christianity.  I look forward to reading Volume 3.
2. Church Dogmatics II.2: The Doctrine of God by Karl Barth.
I have discovered something surprising as I have been (very slowly) working my way through Barth’s dogmatics.  The surprising thing is this: Barth is pretty much the only author I read who consistently stirs up ‘devotional’ feelings in me.  That is to say, when I was younger I used to do a lot more ‘devotional’ reading that would somehow make me feel as though I was closer to God or communing with God or whatever.  In the last half dozen years, that feeling has mostly disappeared from my reading (although those like Nouwen and von Balthasar can still sometimes stir it in me).  However, for whatever reason, I find that reading Barth leads me to feel that way fairly consistently.  This is pleasantly surprising (to me, anyway) given that the Church Dogmatics are often considered to be an daunting and heavy theological enterprise.
Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the first half of this volume, which was focused upon the concept of election.  Much of what Barth had to say in that section was very beautiful and I loved the way he reworked the traditional Calvinist notion of double predestination — according to Barth, it is Jesus Christ who is predestined to face the damning wrath of God so that all humanity is predestined to be saved in Christ.  Indeed, after reading through the dogmatics up to this point, I am having trouble in seeing how Barth can be anything but a (hopeful) universalist.
The second half of the volume, focused upon theological ethics, was a little more dry and disappointing.  I was hoping for a little more direct ethical engagement but the section focused more upon the foundation of ethics (which is appropriate, I guess, given that this section falls within Barth’s doctrine of God).
All in all, a good read, and I’m looking forward to moving on to CD III.1 (and I’m also relieved to have finished this before the end of the year, as I’ve been intending to read at least one volume per year, until I finish the CD, and I didn’t think I was going to make it this year).
3. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.
This is a really fantastic collection of essays, written by scholarly activists, personally invested in a range of local community organizations.  It should be required reading for most people involved in social work, non-profits, or the ‘helping professions’ more generally (especially those in positions of management).
What this book does is explore the various ways in which non-profits have been co-opted and used to divert social movements from their intended goals of engaging in the radical transformation of society.  Thus non-profits, despite the good intentions of those invested in them, become a way of maintaining the (oppressive) status quo, rather then being agents of significant socio-political and economic change (hence, the ‘non-profit industrial complex’ (NPIC) is defined as ‘a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movments’; thus, the NPIC is a natural corrolary to more famous remarks that have been made about the ‘prison industrial complex’ and the ‘military industrial complex).  This is then demonstrated in relation to multiple movements that occured in America in the last sixty years — the black civil rights movement, the American Indian Movement, women’s movements, and urban movements to build community and overcome poverty.  Some areas that face particularly heavy criticisms are those related to funding and philanthropy, those related to the professionalization of social workers and of management (and the gap that grows between the two), and the ways in which non-profits become removed from intimate connections to the community of people whom they claim to serve.
I very highly recommend this book.
4. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault.
In this book, Foucault explores the various ways in which ‘madness’ was understood in Europe (and especially in France and England) during the period spanning from the late middle ages to the modern period.    By studying madness in this way, Foucault comes to the conclusion that madness is, in fact, a cultural moral construct — i.e. what madness is understood to be, and how one is to relate to it, is determined by one’s historico-cultural location and one’s moral paradigms and presuppositions.  This, then, challenges psychiatric and medical views which rose to hegemonic positions during the modern period, for these views (attempt but fail to, according to Foucault) remove madness from the realm of culture and of morality, and locate it as an independent ontological entity within the realm of medical science and psychiatry.
Like Foucault’s other histories — particularly those related to criminality and sexuality — I find this to be largely convincing.  I think that Foucault is continually offering important correctives to the ways in which we have been culturally conditioned to think of these things and his conclusions certainly align well with my own experiences as I have journeyed alongside of a good many who have been called ‘mad’, ‘criminal’ or ‘perverse’.  A good read.
5. Egil’s Saga (Penguin Classics Edition).
After reading and enjoying some books by Sigrid Undset (the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and Gunnar’s Daughter), all of which were inspired by the old Norse and Icelandic sagas, I thought I would go back and begin to read some of those actual sagas.  So, Egil’s Saga was my first foray into that territory.  It focuses upon the life and family of Egil Skallagrimsson and covers the period of time from c.850-1000CE (although one should note that the earliest written fragment of this saga dates to 1240CE).  It was a fun read, full of adventure, betrayal, murder, battles, and all the good stuff that one imagines when one thinks of vikings.  Furthermore, although the nature of this sort of literature is quite different than the modern novel, it is interesting to note the complexity of character that is created — Egil is both vicious and petty but he is also intelligent, poetic, and fiercely loyal.
Also, as a bit of an aside, this book made me glad that I wasn’t born in the age of vikings.  I never would have survived.  From here, I’m hoping to track down either Njal’s Saga or the Laxdaela Saga.  Good fun.
6. Demian by Hermann Hesse.
This book was something of a let down.  Hesse can be a really good writer and can certainly string together some beautiful and insightful sentences — take this example from the Prologue (pardon the androcentric language and some of the German Romanticism):

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.  If, however, we were not something more than unique human beings and each man jack of us could really be dismissed from this world with a bullet, there would be no more point in relating stoires at all.  But every man is not only himself; he is also the unique, particular, always significant and remarkable point where the phenomena of the world intersect once and for all and never again.  That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; and why every man while he lives and fulfils the will of nature is a wonderful creature, deserving the utmost attention.  In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Saviour is crucified.

Unfortunately, apart from a few stand-alone passages, I found this book to be rather dull.  Basically, Hesse’s book is an exploration of the creation of a synthesis between Eastern mysticism and Western romantic individualism under the supervision of Nietzche’s reflections upon the revaluation of values and the Übermensch.  So, while this may have been new and/or exciting at the time that Hesse wrote this book, it’s the sort of thing that has been done a thousand times since then and, to be honest, the sort of thing I find a little wearisome.  Not recommended reading.

Late as usual (but also longer than usual):
1. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek .
In this book, Žižek explores the collapse of capitalist liberal democracy first in the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 and then in the farcical events of the global financial meltdown in 2008 (Sept. 11 is only mentioned in passing and the economic events of 2008 remain the enduring focus).  In exploring these events, Žižek also points to the Left’s failure to exploit the situation in order to create an alternative and so — instead of supporting the views of those like Klein or Hardt and Negri — Žižek proposes a return to communism with its concomitant exercise of force (here wielded primarily in solidarity with those who are excluded and assigned to ‘the place of no place’ within global capitalism).
As with most things Žižek is writing these days, I found this book to be both enlightening and entertaining.  I particularly enjoyed his (ongoing) exposition of propaganda, fetishism, and ideology and remain convinced that this is the sort of argument that any ‘person of faith’ should employ in order to think about his or her own belief system.  I also enjoyed Žižek ‘s focus upon the centrality of those who are excluded, a thought that he as continued to develop since In Defense of Lost Causes, and a thought that has many parallels in liberation theology.  More off topic maybe, but I also enjoy that way in which he (and Badiou) write about ‘the Event’, as I think that this is an almost perfect description of Pauline apocalypticism.  My only main objection to this book is that Žižek ends up leaving his form of communism as rather vague and undefined (in this regard, he reminds me of Hauerwas’ writings about the Church — it’s all very beautiful and inspiring but when you look for where the rubber hits the road you end up a little confused and a little disappointed).  So, yep, recommended reading.
2. Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Rancière.
In this short book, Rancière explores the ways in which modern Western, or parliamentary, democracies are actually sustained by very anti-democratic beliefs and practices.  Thus, members of the ruling class are motivated by a very deep hatred of democracy, for it is genuine democracy that challenges their so-called right to rule.  Or, as Rancière puts it, from the perspective of the ruling class “there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization”.
Genuine democracy, then, is one that refuses to privilege any group of people with some sort of preordained right to rule (whether through wealth, or familial connections, or title, or whatever else).  It is hear that Rancière looks back (with admiration) to some of the Greek poleis that Plato criticized.  Here, representatives of the people were selected through the drawing of lots.  Rancière comments:

If the drawing of lots appears to our ‘democracies’ to be contrary to every serious principle for selecting governors, this is because we have forgotten what democracy meant and what type of ‘nature’ it aimed at countering… the drawing of lots was the remedy to any evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning… good government is the government of those who do not desire to govern.

Thus, what democracy means when it speaks of “the power of the people” is “not that of the people gathered together, of the majority, or of the working class”; rather, it is the power of “any one at all” to govern and to be governed.
Personally, having spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize within a particular community of people (and having had many negative experiences of the practice of power, representation, and leadership in a multitude of communities), I find this thesis to be quite fascinating and compelling.  I wonder what would happen if we started organizing ourselves based upon this principle?
3. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger.
Originally published as two separate but connected stories, Franny and Zooey tells the story of two siblings coming of age and negotiating the space between a messed-up world that is not as it should be and the hubris that comes with being raised with intelligence, taste, and privilege.  Mostly it consists of three prolonged conversations (the first between Franny and her boyfriend, the second between Zooey and their mother, and the third between Franny and Zooey), and it builds to a great conclusion.  In fact, I got goosebumps on the final page and a half, and I can’t remember the last time the climax of a novel did that to me.  Recommended reading.
4. Gertrude by Hermann Hesse.
My wife owns a whole bunch of Hesse novels and I’ve kind of poked away at them over the years.  I remember not being too impressed with Siddhartha, but Narcissus and Goldmund was fabulous.  Anyway, on a whim, I pulled this book off the shelf and opened to the first paragraph:

When I consider my life objectively, it does not seem particularly happy.  Yet I cannot really call it unhappy, despite all my mistakes.  After all, it is quite foolish to talk about happiness and unhappiness, for it seems to me that I would not exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones.

Wow.  After reading that I was hooked and quickly read through what turned out to be a story of unrequited love (it has been awhile since I read one of those).  Of course it is also more than that and deals with the ways in which we unintentionally harm the people around us and with other themes like maturity, sacrifice and humility (another quote: “Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others”).
Then again, this book also got me thinking about the theme of unrequited love and the cultural shift that seems to have occurred in this regard.  Once upon a time, this was a dominant theme amongst ‘people of culture’ (just to name a few, think of the way it shows up in literature from Hugo’s Hunchback, to Leroux’s Phantom, to Rostand’s Cyrano, to Goethe’s young Werther).  However, in our contemporary context, it seems like the theme of unrequited love belongs almost exclusively to teenage pop culture (the Twilight Series being the most recent blockbuster to exploit this theme).
So how is it, I wonder, that the theme of unrequited love has moved from being a favourite topic amongst the cultural elite, to being a favourite topic in one of the most looked-down-upon pop cultures of our day?  I’d be curious to hear any theories that people might have about this.  Personally, I wonder if it is because we have given up on love and have ceased to believe in it the way in which people once did.  Indeed, it is almost as though giving up on love becomes part of the rites of passage that we face as we move from childhood to maturity.  Instead of seeing love — including unrequited love — as inherently worthwhile, noble, and beautiful, we learn to temper our views with cynicism, pragmatism, and the desire to avoid any pain or loss.
Anyway, all this is rather tangential to the book at hand.  Recommended reading.
5. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
I have been thinking about this book for the last several months even though I haven’t read it since highschool.  Basically, I kept coming back to Biff’s final confrontation with his father:

Biff: Pop!  I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you! … I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you.  You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like the rest of them!  I’m one dollar an hour, illy!  I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it.  A buck an hour!  Do you gather my meaning?  I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home! … Pop, I’m nothing!  I’m nothing, Pop.  Can’t you understand that?  There’s no spite in it any more.  I’m just what I am, that’s all.

Basically, I went back and read this play because I’ve been trying to internalize that message — to be able to confront my own insignificance and failures but to do so without any spite.  It is a difficult line to walk.  On the one hand, I am filled with a longing to see something more in life — to see new life, new creation, new love bloom in places of death, destruction and despair — but, on the other hand, I have also seen how my efforts to pursue those things have ended up harming others and leaving me constantly disappointed.
There is a quote from Rilke that a friend of mine taught me some time ago: “I’m afraid if my demons leave me, my angels will take flight as well”.  When he said this, Rilke was talking about why he rejected (Freudian) psychotherapy, but I’ve always understood this quote as pointing to more than that — as fitting well with what Paul says about power being perfected in weakness and with what Jesus says about losing life to find it.  Perhaps both our brightest and our darkest aspects are two indivisible sides of the same coin.
But if that’s the case, then one wonders if we need to throw away the coin.  In fact, it seems to me that this is exactly what most people do — they give up both their hope and despair to live in the now; they give up both their love and their hate to live with indifference; they give up both their angels and demons to get through their bullshit 9-5 jobs.  This is how people learn to survive this gong-show that we call life.  Me, I’ve been clinging to my hope and despair, my love and my hate, and my angels and demons… but I don’t know how sustainable that is anymore.
Anyway, this is also tangential to the book at hand, but these are the things I getting thinking about when I read.  I recommend this play (also, in light of this tangent, it is interesting to note how it is the final in-breaking of love, into the life of Willy, that leads to his ultimate act of self-destruction — Willy can only survive as long as he does not know that his son loves him).
6. Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz selected and introduced by Carl Zigrosser.
As I’ve stated before, I’ve never connected much with the visual arts.  This is partly why I’ve been so stunned by the works of Kollwitz — they caught me completely off guard and struck me speechless.  I honestly don’t know how to describe her work, but I very much enjoyed (if that’s the right word) this book of prints and drawings, as well as the essay providing background information on Kollwitz herself.  So, instead of trying to describe the art, I’ll just link to a few examples:  Death and Woman, Poverty, Woman with her Dead Child, and Sleeping Mother with Child.