A 2024 Reading List for the Perplexed (v.1)

It’s already mid-January, but I want to think that I can still move forward in fresh start mode as if it’s New Year’s Day.

This list will no doubt morph throughout the year. As it is, I buy and download books and hardly make time to actually read them. I want to change that this year, especially as the sense of my own mortality has grown exponentially in recent months.

I purged my library of most of the hardcore Catholic stuff (mainly Opus Dei-aligned books and other like-minded material) and found myself with lots of Merton, Nouwen, Jesuit-authored works, and St. John XXIII.

The list so far (excluding the abovementioned authors for now), which will forever remain in progress:

  • Crying in H Mart, M. Zauner
  • Everything is Spiritual, R. Bell
  • The four Gospels (NLT and Message versions; I might purchase the First Nations Version of the New Testament this year)
  • A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis
  • Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others, B.B. Taylor
  • How Do You Live?, G. Yoshino
  • Introduction to a Devout Life, St. Francis de Sales
  • It’s OK That You’re Not OK, M. Devine
  • Kierkegaard for Beginners, D. Palmer
  • Learning to Walk in the Dark, B.B. Taylor
  • Praying Our Goodbyes, J. Rupp
  • Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way, C. Wood
  • Saving Time, J. Odell
  • Searching for Christ: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day, B. Merriman
  • Understanding Guilt and Bereavement, B. Baugher
  • Why Be Catholic?, R. Rohr

(This, of course, is no guarantee that I’ll actually read them; I also reserve the right to call an audible and read stuff I happen to come across in my stacks or on my Kindle. I also figure on much of my reading including audiobooks.)

I’ll likely add books by Pope Francis, Eugene Peterson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Brian Zahnd. Thinking a lot about grief, universalist theology, brain health, and aging, so I expect more reading about all that.

Honestly. Death can really do a number on one’s life.

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