Change & Decay In All Around I See

Tuesday 30 December 2008, 12:47PM

My favourite books read in 2008

A rather predictable topic for a blog post, I know, but here are the books I’ve enjoyed reading most this year. They weren’t necessarily published in 2008; in fact I don’t think any of them were: they are just books I happened to pick up over the course of the year.

I’ve tried to rank them in order, because I think these sort of lists are always a bit more fun that way. The links point to the book’s entry on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk - whichever has the best reviews.

1. Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself by Ann Wroe
   An unusual, absorbing book - I reviewed it in the my last post, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself - A Review.
2. After Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life by Mark Vernon
   An unexpected jewel. I nearly passed it over when I came across it in the bookshop, assuming from the cover and title that it was another atheist polemic or a rather dull exploration of the relationship between religion and science. In fact it is an elegant argument for the recognition of agnosticism as a respectable, coherent and wise philosophy of life, which has just as deep and wide a heritage as theism and atheism. For Vernon, the figure of Socrates epitomises the agnostic spirit, his relentless questioning seeking out and clarifying the parameters of human knowledge. An attitude of wonder, rather than indifference, is characterisitc of the true agnostic.
3. Augustus: A Novel by John Williams
   As a true obsessive when it comes to historical novels set in the ancient world, I was amazed to discover this book only this year, and to find that it was first published in 1973. It’s a beautiful evocation of the politics and thought-world of the era of the Roman emperor Augustus.
4. Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
   This novel is so well crafted the prose seems to shimmer: almost every sentence is a line of poetry. It takes the form of an elderly preacher’s letter to his young son that, with great humility, seeks to pass on the spiritual fruits of a lifetime.
5. Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
   Another exceptionally well written and moving novel, this tells the story of perennial outsider Father David Anderton’s attempts to make sense of his life in the light of his youthful idealism as a 1960s student radical.
6. Callista: A Tale of the Third Century by John Henry Newman
   A Victorian ‘Christian Romance’ without a iota of sentimentality: it’s a harsh, astringent and slightly scary read. It’s the tale of the spiritual journey to Christian faith and eventual martydom of a young Greek artisan, Callista, under the persecution of Decius in 250AD. Newman is unashameably polemical, using the narrative to express his belief that the Christian God has endowed everyone, no matter what their cultural background, with an innate sense of conscience that presses them toward recognition that they have been created in the image of a supreme being who has created them for a purpose. The historical setting and geography are superbly realised, and the urgency of Newman’s intent cuts through the mannered dialogue (inevitable given the conventions of historical novels written in Newman’s era).
7. Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen
   A clear exposition of the religious beliefs of the Founder Fathers of the United States. Contra the Christian Right, they were not evangelicals or fundamentalist Christians. But nor were they atheists: this calm study looks at the beliefs of six of the Fathers - Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and Washington - and finds that they all had interesting, thoughtful faith positions, typically some form of Enlightenment Deism.
8. Winnie and the Wolf by A.N. Wilson
   An ambitious exploration of how a sophisticated nation such as Germany could ever have embraced Nazism. Wilson’s novel focuses on the friendship between Hitler and the Wagner family who ran - and continue to run - the Bayreuth opera house.
9. Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: Questions from Great Philosophers by Leszek Kolakowski
   An interesting exploration of the fundamental questions raised by the work of 23 great philosophers. Kolakowski avoids the tendency to skip straight from the ancient world to the Renaissance, offering interesting portraits of medieval thinkers such as Anselm, Aquinas, Ockham and Eckhart.
10. On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
    A little book that examines the relationship between aesthetics and a sense of justice: Scarry argues that the two are connected, that a keen appreciation of beauty can help encourage a sense of the just ordering of relations amongst people and communities.