One of the few traditions here is to post the year’s reading—or, at least the books that I’ve read cover to cover. I always enjoy seeing what other people have been reading, so I figure that posting my list may—however minutely—increase the net amount of enjoyment in the universe. Despite intentions to the contrary, I’m not accomplishing much today, so adding a scrap of enjoyment to the universe seems like a decent use of time.
Explanations and caveats: I’ve put my favorite books of the year in bold face for each category. The categories, as previously, reflect my own idiosyncratic organization rather than the objective order of Being. Most, but not all, of the reading has been background for the dissertation, though I did much better this year than previous years about mixing fiction in with all the philosophy and theology. Of course, I’m eager to hear what other folks thought of the books here, as well as the books that should make my list for 2014.
So… an apt quote from Bernard Steigler and then the list:
“Stupidity is never foreign to knowledge; knowledge can itself become stupidity par excellence, so to speak. And this is so because knowledge, and in particular theoretical knowledge as passage to the act of reason—or more broadly noesis—only occurs intermittently to a noetic soul which constantly regresses, and which, as such, is like Sisyphus, perpetually ascending the slope of its own stupidity.”
Theology:
Adam Kotsko, The Politics of Redemption
Jose Comblin, Retrieving the Human: A Christian Anthropology
Stanley Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei
Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue
Elizabeth A. Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit
J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology
Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology
Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self
Peter Scott, Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology, and the Post-natural
Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil
Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy
James Cone, God of the Oppressed
Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World
Celia Deane-Drummond, Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser, and David Clough, eds., Animals as Religious Subjects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives
Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion
Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection
Anthony Paul Smith, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought
Lisa H. Sideris, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection
Philosophy:
Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign II
Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
John Dupre, Humans and Other Animals
Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: the Ecological Crisis of Reason
Judith Butler, Frames of War
William Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
History/Historiography:
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks
Biography/Memoir:
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome
Science:
Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene: Humanity’s Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature
Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals
Fiction/Literature:
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1079.
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 343.
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion, 329.
Teju Cole, Open City, 259.
Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 337.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 527.
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, 338.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 106.
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain, 226.
Self-Help/Self-sabotage:
Stan Hieronymous, For the Love of Hops: A Practical Guide to Aroma, Bitterness, and the Culture of Hops, 319.
Poetry:
Kelly Davio, Burn This House, 82.
eric daryl meyer 
Great list! I’ve been trying to read Infinite Jest for 10 years. If I read that in one year, I would read no other novels. Also, I have loved The Sexual Politics of Meat since college. It helped me understand why rhetoric matters and how sexism infiltrates everything. Lots of other good ones here! Thanks for sharing.