Part of the series “My Year In…”
Our inaugural Editorial Director Andrew Moody shares his top reads for 2025. Titles include subjects such as sanctification, culture, history, and linguistics.
Sanctification
Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners (Dane Ortlund)
I still haven’t managed to read Dane Ortlund’s Gentle & Lowly, but I read this sequel and was greatly encouraged by it. Ortlund commends sanctification like a modern Richard Sibbes, exhorting, encouraging, and comforting us by urging us to realise what we already have in Christ.
… this is a Saviour who draws near to us, who is repelled only by self-righteousness but never by acknowledged shame and weakness, there is no limit to just how deep a transformation is possible in us. It is at our point of deepest guilt and regret that his friendship embraces us most assuredly, most steadfastly.
This Teeming Mess of Glory (Matthew Pullar)
Matthew Pullar’s first poetry collection, This Teeming Mess of Glory, was a deserving finalist for the Sparklit awards this year. It was richly deserved. This is a book of great beauty, melancholy, and hope. This poem is both wholly human and deeply Christian:
As day tapers into waxen rest—now and at the going down of the sun
I have left much undone
I have left much undone
and I will rise
threefold-God my refuge
to the battle raging still,
the battle won.
Culture
On Magic & Miracles: A Theological Guide to Discerning Fictional Magic (Marian Jacobs)
Marian Jacobs’ On Magic & Miracles is a wonderfully sane and clear-eyed book that applies biblical theology to questions of magic and the supernatural in fantasy fiction. Jacobs gives herself a huge task. She defends the role of fantasy and the imagination in Christian life while also laying out a broad theology of the supernatural. Jacobs does this well. The principles and questions offered will help readers (especially Christian parents) weigh the good, neutral, and dangerous in genre fiction. The case study on Harry Potter is especially valuable. There is a great deal of wisdom here for all comers:
Humans are both spiritual and physical beings. We long for that which our modern society often refuses to acknowledge exists. We shouldn’t assume that a child who pretends she has superpowers or magical abilities is always acting against God’s commands.
The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (John Hendrix)
John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers (2024) is a thoughtful, informative, and sometimes moving graphic novel that traces the friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien within the context of their time, literary context, and mythopoeic aspirations. The Mythmakers is beautifully illustrated and captures some of the tragic/elegiac that is always present in the greatest writers. The sad fading of their own friendship is one more hurt to be healed in the undying lands.
In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory (Tolkien).
City of Thieves (David Benioff)
City of Thieves by David Benioff tells the story of Lev, a Jewish teenager in besieged Leningrad who is sent on an egg hunt by a corrupt Party official. It is a hugely entertaining caper that swerves between hilarity, profanity, horror, and deep tragedy. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Kolya, Lev’s charismatic accomplice, seems to have been lifted straight out of The Brothers Karamazov.
Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Laura Spinney)
Laura Spinney’s book Proto, on the reconstruction of the Indo-European family tree, is a whirlwind tour of archaeology, linguistics, mythology, and genetics. I don’t know how to relate the deep history of the Yamnaya people and their heirs to the biblical stories of Eden, Ararat, and Babel, but reading the book did reinforce the idea that human beings are fundamentally one people. I had not realised before that all alphabetic writing systems come from one family tree beginning with Proto-Sinaitic. Fascinating.
The phenomenon that scholars are attempting to understand is ephemeral: the emanations of long-vanished brains that caused long-vanished eardrums to vibrate.
