Review: My Accidental Jihad by Krista Bremmer

My Accidental Jihad: A Love Story

by Krista Bremmer

(c) 2014 by Krista Bremmer. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 237 pgs.

3 1/2 out of 5 Stars

I came across this book because I normally go to one of the local libraries to write my sermons, and typically tend to sit right next to the biography section because it has a plug for my laptop. As I am contemplating what to say next, I will look at the titles of books and this one caught my eye and so I decided to check it out.

Krista tells the story of her relationship with her husband who is an immigrant from Libya, fleeing from Gaddafi's rule, and also a Muslim, contrasted against her Americanism, and sort of secular religion.  I say sort of secular religion because while she talks a lot about Ismail's religious practices, her religious devotion seems to consist solely in Easter and Christmas, but without any really theological meaning behind them.  It's not clear what her background is, nor is it really clear what her Jihad is if it is defined, as they have on the cover as, "an individual's striving for spiritual and intellectual growth."

Krista meets Ismail out running in the woods and it might be seen as a story of opposites attracting, except that we never really learn much about who Ismail is other than surface observations. I'm guessing this is done first because this is more about Krista's journey rather than his, and also, perhaps, to provide him with some level on anonymity even in his own story. But when I reached the end I never got the sense that I truly knew him or his level of growth in their relationship because surely Krista could not have been the only person who was changed by this relationship bringing together different cultures and religions.

A large portion of the book is spent recounting a visit they made to see Ismail's family in Libya. It was this experience that began to change her mind and opened her up to the reality of how she sees the world, with the assumption that she sees it the correct way, and therefore others are wrong.  She comes to see this for what it is, a sort of paternalism, that she can look down on others, even extend charity and compassion to them, without ever really seeing them for who and what they are, other than the other, someone, in my words, below her.

It is this insight that provides the greatest strength to this work. Her recounting of hearing of Gaddafi's arrest and death on a television in a restaurant, an event that was noticed by the other patrons but quickly dismissed so they could go back to their normal lives as something that happened "over there." Whereas this had real import for their family, and although Ismail "hated" Gaddafi, with all the important that that word entails, he could not stand to see the inhumanity taken out on him, even though he had done inhuman actions. (and can they really be inhuman if they are in fact done by a human?)

It is also her daughter's decision as she enters into the awkward tween years to begin wearing a head scarf that causes her to be uncomfortable, to face her own prejudices, and also to see the world in a new way and the liberation that her daughter finds in the scarf.  Seeing a young girl in a bikini at the pool, and seeing herself as a teen in that moment, she says "Now I imagined Aliya in a bikini in only a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling."

She comes to see that the world is not black and white, that America is not always good in it's treatment of women, and that Islamic culture is not always bad because of it's treatment of women, that there are positives and negatives to both. That there was a sense of freedom, enjoyment and relaxation found in her female in-laws in Libya, in spite of how she might have originally seen them, that she did not have in America, nor did she know other women to have either.

If there is enlightenment to be found in the pages it is clearly in her exploration of all the assumptions she had held so dear, as so many of us do.  My only hesitation in rating it higher was the fact that I wish that I could have gotten to know her husband and her daughter (her son is almost entirely absent from the book) as more than just characters, perhaps even stock characters, that help her come to a new sense of enlightenment.

Getting Close To God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Exodus 34:29-35 and Luke 9:28-42:

We start today with a confession.  This week we will celebrate Ash Wednesday, although perhaps celebrate is the wrong word to use, but in the Christian calendar the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday is known as Transfiguration Sunday, the day in which we hear one of the accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain with three disciples.  A few weeks ago as I was doing worship planning, I wasn’t really thinking about this being the last Sunday before Lent, and so turned to the lectionary readings for today, and said, “Oh man, I don’t want to preach on the transfiguration again this year.”  While nowhere near as significant for most people, this story is sort of like Christmas and Easter in that it comes around every single year and we preachers get to a point and think, “what can I possibly say about this that hasn’t already been said.”  So my intention was to ignore Jesus on the mountain and instead talk about Moses on the mountain, which is also one of the traditional  readings for today.  But as I began to think about it more and more, I found myself seeing the connections and similarities between these two stories, and because God has a sense of humor, found myself coming back to preaching about the transfiguration, while at the same time trying to ignore it, because what I felt a pull towards in these two stories was not really what happens on the mountaintop, but instead what happens afterwards.

Moses has been up on the mountain talking with God, want to guess for how many days? 40.  And he comes down with the two tablets with the ten commandments in his hands.  This is actually the second set of tablets because he had shattered the first set he was given when he came down off the mountain and found that the people had constructed a golden calf and were worshipping it.  So Moses goes and meets with God again and comes down with a new set, which are the ones that end up in the Ark of the Covenant which makes Indiana Jones necessary.  But, when he comes off the mountain this time, in addition to the tablets, Moses’ face is also glowing from being in the presence of God, and the people are afraid to come near him, so Moses ends up putting a veil on his face, not to protect the people from what they see, but in order to try and quell their fear about what it means.  To put a distance between them and the presence of God.  Moses takes of the veil when he is with God, but then puts it on when he is with the people.  As an aside, when this passage was translated into Latin for the Vulgate, which is the Latin Bible, Jerome translated the word glows as horns, which is not really as strange as it may sound based on the Hebrew here, but that’s why sometimes you’ll see Moses as being portrayed with horns on his head, Michelangelo.

Review: Living with a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbelievers Search for the Truth About Everything

by Barbara Ehrenreich

(c) 2014 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Twelve Books. 237 pgs.

2 ½ out of 5 stars.

I was disappointed in this book, and perhaps that had more to do with what I was hoping to find within its pages rather than what Barbara Ehrenreich has to present.  I have read and greatly enjoyed many of her books, with Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch being near the top. I have also tried to “read” another of her books, Dancing in the Streets, but had to stop.  I have read in quotes because I was actually listening to it and therefore assumed that one of the reasons I couldn’t get into it had nothing to do with the book but instead with the narrator. Perhaps after reading Living with a Wild God I need to reassess that situation.

Based on the title, which also includes the fact that she claims to be an atheist, I was expecting her to explain her struggles and wrestling with God (however she might define that term).  I was hoping that it might be similar to Nevada Barr’s excellent biography Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat: A Skeptics Path to Religion in which she too is a non-believer who comes to encounter God in a unique way. But that expectation on my part was never closely matched.

Ehrenreich is born into a family that not only has rejected the idea of God, but proudly has rejected that and seems to hold that as deeply as others hold onto God, and perhaps just as unquestioningly.  She begins by going into a long history of her family, close and extended, and their various dysfunctions, and then continues through her college and early adult years.  It was never really clear to me why this information was important, or where it was leading, nor is it clear why she stops telling us this information when she does.  A constant refrain I had throughout the book was “what does this have to do with the subject” which I thought was living with a wild God, and coming to terms with a mystical/spiritual event she has as a teenager.  I thought about putting the book down on several occasions but kept hoping it would get to the point and it would get better.

Ehrenreich’s experience is really more than just one event, but is centered around one significant experience in which it seems like her life became sort of like a Picasso painting in which everything lost shape and colors swirled while at the same time having a significant vitality that “glowed and pulsed with life.”  This left her unmoored, although it might be argued she was already unmoored by relying on solipsism, or the belief that the only thing she knows to be real is herself.  I say that it seems like this is what happened because Ehrenreich never really explains in a way that is understandable, at least to me, what actually happens.  Perhaps this is because, as William James says, one of the attributes of mystical experiences is that they are ineffable, or can’t be put into words.

Ehrenreich actually uses that term several times, although not ever really in reference to her own experience, and sadly doesn’t even make reference to James’ The Varieties of Religious Experiences: A Study in Human Nature until some 200 pages into the work.  Since Ehrenreich is someone who is known as digging deeply into the history of ideas I was expecting much more wrestling with these experiences throughout history, which really doesn’t happen.  Nor does she ever really wrestle with the idea of God, or the Other as she begins to call it, until the very end, and then it’s still very superficial.

She concludes the book by saying “But this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, it’s designated function beyond all mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not our of any intention to ‘worship’ it.  But because ultimately we may have no choice in this matter.  I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out.”

Does that mean that she has shifted from an atheist to a troubled agnostic? It’s unknown.  Perhaps others will get a lot more out of this than I did, and perhaps my expectations of the work when I entered, in judging the book not so much by its cover but at least by its title, impacted my view of what Ehrenreich presents (and perhaps, like many authors, she had nothing to do with the title). It had great potential, but I think she should have left much of the “living” out an instead struggled with the experience and what it might mean to have a “wild God” or at the very least to have explored how an scientist and atheist ultimately comes to terms with the question of “why?” rather than leaving that to the last few pages.

All You Need Is Love

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was 1 Corinthians 13:1-13:

Perhaps no other subject has been written and sung about more than love.  I’m sure that almost all of us could name at least five songs dealing with love without even thinking about it, for Paul McCartney is probably right, “You'd Think That People Would Have Had Enough Of Silly Love Songs.  But I Look Around Me And I See It Isn't So.” Of course McCartney, as part of the Beatles, would probably have at least one song on any list of love songs that we created.  For me at least, I can’t think of love songs without several Beatles songs popping into my head, not counting Helter Skelter, and I think their focusing on this subject was directly related to what was going on at the time when they were writing.  The 60’s were a time of turmoil and crisis.  The nation was deeply divided over many issues; we were fighting a war with no clear end in sight that some said was absolutely important to protect America and to others it seemed meaningless and believed that we were led into the war by deceit if not outright lies.  People didn’t trust the president or congress, and things generally seemed to be getting worse rather than better.  Who says that history doesn’t repeat itself?

And yet in the midst of this turmoil, musicians were singing about love and we were being told that all you need is love.  But could that really be true?  Could love solve all of our problems?  Is love really all we need?

Part of the problem of answering that question lies in the definition of love.  What is love?  What does it look like?  What does it feel like?  These are not easy questions because in our culture love is a lot of things.  We talk about falling in love, as if love is a hole or a pit, and for some maybe it is.  And we use the same word to describe our feelings about lots of different things.  So I can say I love my wife and I love my daughters.  But, I also love Italian food, I love to read, I love baseball and I love God.  Certainly, the meaning of love is not the same in all of these things, so what is love?  What does it mean?  What does it look like?  And what do we do with it?  Perhaps Eliza Doolittle is right.  In My Fair Lady, she cries out “Words, words, words!  I’m so sick of words!  Don’t talk to me of love, don’t talk to me of June, don’t talk to me of anything at all, just show me!”  I think that is what Paul is trying to do in this passage.

Spiritual Gifts

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was 1 Corinthians 12:1-11:

This week, my youngest daughter asked what I was preaching on this week, and then asked how it was that I came up with something different to say each week. I was a little surprised by the question because normally she is spending all her time at the back of the church in the Kid’s Korner, and certainly acting as if she is not paying any attention to what I have to say each week, although occasionally she will make some comment about the sermon, or ask me a question about it, so I know she’s at least occasionally paying attention. But I certainly never expected her to ask how I decided what to preach on, and it’s a question that few people have asked me over the years.  I told her there were lots of things that went into it, and one of the most important was what I thought that we needed to hear, and as a corollary of that what I was feeling called to preach on. 

Now they say that a normal preacher has only one sermon that they deliver every week, just in different ways.  Good preachers have two sermons they give over and over in different ways.  And great preachers have three sermons that they give in different ways.  Now whether I am a great preacher or not, I like to think that I have at least three different sermons that I preach, and yet for the past few months, it feels like I keep coming back to the same messages again and again.  Perhaps I’m like the new preacher who gave exactly the same sermon on loving our neighbor as ourselves for the first three weeks he was at the church.  When the leadership told him perhaps it would be a good idea for him to preach on something else, he said “Once you’ve got a hang of loving all, then we’ll move onto something else.”  Or, perhaps, I’ve simply become a little unoriginal in my messages.

Why Do Fundamentalists Publish Books On The Bible?

"The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it."  That statement is one common amongst fundamentalists in America.  They feel they can say that because they also believe that the language of the Bible is plain and easily understood, and thus doesn't need to be interpreted by anyone.  If scripture is not easily understood then it runs into the problem of needing to be interpreted for people, which brings in personal bias, rather than hearing God's "unadulterated" word. (Well temporarily ignore the fact that reading brings in its own bias.)  Thus they can try and make the claim that the Bible clearly says it and they don't have to think about it and therefore it is settled.

One of the lectionary readings for this week is from Nehemiah, which says "They read aloud from the scroll, the Instruction from God, explaining and interpreting it so the people could understand what they heard." (8:8 NRSV)  Now it could be that some of the people did not speak Hebrew and thus that is the reason it needed to be explained and interpreted.  But I think a better reading is that scripture is often hard to understand and needs to be explained and interpreted for people, which is what Ezra and others were doing.

Indeed, what I spend a large amount of my time doing as a pastor is interpreting and explaining scripture to people. Scripture is not usually explicit in what it means, and often there are different meanings and interpretations.  This is especially true when reading it in a language other than it's original language, where interpretation has already been done.  I often tell people that as soon as they think they have a passage figured out they should go back and read it again because they have probably missed something.

Which leads me back to the fundamentalist perspective, and something that occurred to me as I contemplated that passage, is that if scripture is plain and easily understood, then why do fundamentalists have preachers to tell them what they could clearly get for themselves if they simply read scripture.  And more importantly why do they ever publish any books on scripture which certainly not only seek to interpret scripture but also make sure that people interpret it in the correct way. If it's so clear shouldn't we be able to figure it out on our own?

Preach the Good News

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 4:14-21:

In a speech I saw by Bishop Will Willimon, he recalled the first time he went to visit a prisoner on death row.  He said he was a little nervous going in knowing that the person he was going to be meeting with had committed some atrocious crime.  After arriving at the prison he was searched and then given a long set of instructions about what he could and could not do and could and could not say, and when he entered the room he had no idea what was going to happen.  After the prisoner he was meeting with sat down, Bishop Willimon asked him what he wanted to talk about; he said “Do you think the United Methodist Church is doing enough to reach out to a new generation offering them Christ?”  That was not really the question he expected to start the conversation out with.  As they continued to talk, Bishop Willimon found out that the man had become a Christian while on death row.  When asked how he came to Christ, the man said “well I heard a lot about Jesus and he thought he and I had a lot in common.”  To which Bishop Willimon said, “are you Jewish too?”  “No,” the man said, “Jesus was on death row and was executed by the state, and I’m on death row waiting to be executed by the state, so I think we’ve faced the similar things.”

That comment came back to me this week as I was thinking about he radical claim that Jesus is making in this passage and what it actually means for us, and what it means for others as well.  We often sentimentalize Christianity, and it’s message, removing some of the teeth and the call, removing the fact that we worship a man who was arrested, tried and executed, not because he was a nice guy, the state tends not to kill nice guys, but because his message, his good news, was seen as a threat not just to the religious leaders of his day, but more importantly because he was seen as a threat to the Roman empire itself.  There are significant costs to being a prophet.  Tavist Smilley said, “You can have people like what you say, or you can offer a prophetic message, but you cannot do both.”

Splish Splash

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The scripture was Luke 3:15-17, 21-22:

I know that most of you are too young to remember the game show To Tell the Truth, so let me give you a quick summary.  Each week, there would be three people all pretending to be the same person, although one of them was the actual person, and then the panel of four celebrities would ask each of the contestants a series of questions to try and determine who was the real person and who were pretenders, at the end of the show, the host would say “would the real Joe Schmoe please stand up.”  At the beginning of today’s passage we have a short version of To Tell the Truth taking place.  John the Baptist is out at the Jordan River making a unique, or somewhat unique, proclamation about God and calling for people to come and repent and be baptized, hence his name.  Some of the people are beginning to wonder if John might be the Messiah, or the Christ in Greek, when Jesus shows up on the scene, and suddenly people are saying will the real Messiah please stand up, except that rather than the host making that call, it is John himself, at least in Luke’s gospel, that makes the call.

The Baptism of Jesus, which we remember today, and always the first Sunday after Epiphany, represents the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in many ways, but is also unique amongst the gospel stories.  It is unique because it is one of the few stories that is actually found in all four gospels.  That puts it right up there with the passion story.  We like to think that all the gospels tell the same story, or stories, but they don’t.  They have their own unique perspective and their own unique stories that only occur in their gospels, or perhaps in another.  So for example, only two gospels give us birth stories, and they are nowhere close in telling us the same story, other than the rough outline that Mary and Joseph had  a baby named Jesus and it happened in Bethlehem.

By A Different Road

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Matthew 2:1-12:

Most of us have particular roads on which we like to travel.  For the most part, we always go to and from work the same way, we go to the grocery store the same way, we go to church the same way.  We do this so much that there are times when we totally disengage while driving and we end up, usually at home, and we don’t remember doing the drive at all.  We know the route so well that we don’t even really have to be involved in doing it any more.  Now this does not mean that this route is necessarily the best route to take, the easiest or the quickest, although we would probably argue that it is, but it is the route that we are most used to and so it’s what we do.  And we stay on that route unless something pushes us off of it, construction, and accident or perhaps a major snow storm.  Normally, there are multiple ways to do something, multiple routes to take, but we don’t take them because it’s not how we normally go and we don’t really want to change anything.  We like our particular road just fine, thank you very much.  Even if it’s not really working for us anymore, we’re going to stick to it, because gosh darn it we’re not quitters.  Finding a different road isn’t really all that hard, most of the time, but it’s making the decision to go home by a different road that’s the tough part.

Of course the church is not necessarily the best place to be talking about trying new things, not just because new things tend to be resisted by many people, although I haven’t yet heard any complaints about the new seating arrangements, but even more because the church itself likes to keep things the same.  It’s part of that whole tradition thing, and we could sing right along with Tevye, and the fact that we celebrate the same things every year, and so we find ourselves today, just like this time last year, celebrating Epiphany which is the arrival of the wise men who come to see and worship Jesus.  The actual celebration of Epiphany is January 6, as today is only the tenth day of Christmas, and I hope to find my ten lords a leaping wrapped in my office after worship, but we celebrate epiphany today since I don’t figure most of you would be here for worship on the 6^th, plus the fact that the 6^th is the anniversary of Linda and my first date and so she wouldn’t be really happy with me if I was to be here.

2015 Books

This is a list of the books I read in 2015.  (This is more for my memory than for everyone else to know).

1. 1066 by Jennifer Paxton
2. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
3. A Disease Called Childhood: WHY ADHD Became an American Epidemic by Marilyn Wedge
4. A Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games by Michael Weinreb
5. A Spirituality of Fundraising by Henri Nouwen
6. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality and American Religion by Anthony M. Petro
7. Against the Tide: Rickover's Leadership Principles and the Rise of the Nuclear Navy by Rear Admiral Dave Oliver
8. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, trans. by A.W. Wheen
9. Allegiance by Timothy Zahn
10. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon
11. Bellow Stairs by Margaret Powell
12. Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey
13. Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick
14. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
15. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster
16. Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
17. Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism by Bartow J. Elmore
18. City of Dreams by William Martin
19. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson
20. Coronado by Dennis Lehane
21. Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader by James Luceno
22. Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson
23. Death Star by Michael Reeves and Steve Perry
24. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
25. E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth's Core by William Joyce
26. Entreleadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches by Dave Ramsey
27. Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel
28. Five Marks of a Methodist: The Fruit of a Living Faith by Steve Harper
29. Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
30. Free: Why Science hasn't Disproved Freewill by Albert R. Mele
31. From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History by Kenneth Hammond
32. Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
33. God's Chosen Fast: A Spiritual and Practical Guide to Fasting by Arthur Wallis
34. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Other's Don't by James C. Collins
35. Grave Robber: How Jesus can make Your Impossible Possible by Mark Batterson
36. Gregor and the Curse of the Warmblood by Suzanne Collins
37. Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins
38. Gregor and the Prophecy of the Bane by Suzanne Collins
39. Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins
40. Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter by Nina MacLaughlin
41. Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams by Michael D'Antonio
42. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr
43. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise by Chris Taylor
44. How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins
45. How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis through Revelation by John Dominic Crossan
46. Humor Code: A Global Search for what Makes Things Funny by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner
47. In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic by Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld
48. Innovate the Pixar Way: Business Lessons from the World's Most Creative Corporate Playground by Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson
49. Intangiball: The Subtle Things that Win Baseball Games by Lonnie Wheeler
50. Inventing Hell: Dante, the Bible and Eternal Torment by Jon M. Sweeney
51. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
52. Kenobi by John Jackson Miller
53. Knuckleball: The History of the Unhittable Pitch by Lew Freedman
54. Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
55. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute
56. Leading Change by John Kotter
57. Lords of the Sith by Paul S. Kemp
58. Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World by Carolyn Custis James
59. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei
60. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers by Valerie Lawson
61. Mayflower: A Story of Community, Courage and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
62. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by John Krakauer
63. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
64. Multiplication is for White People: Raising the Standards for Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit
65. My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg
66. Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King by William Joyce
67. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
68. Our Great American God: A Short History of Our Ever-Growing Deity by Matthew Paul Turner
69. Renovate or Die: 10 Ways to Focus Your Church on Mission by Bob Farr and Kay Kotan
70. Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau
71. Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
72. Shift: Helping Congregations Back into the Game of Effective Ministry by Phil Maynard
73. Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger
74. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
75. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
76. Surprise!: Embrace the Unpredictable, Engineer the Unexpected by Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger
77. Sycamore Row by John Grisham
78. Taking People with You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen by David Novak
79. The 13th Gift: A True Story of a Christmas Miracle by Joanne Huist Smith
80. The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds and Forgeries in the Art World by Anthony M. Amore
81. The Big Moo: Stop Trying to be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable by The Group of 33
82. The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett
83. The Bookwoman's Last Fling by John Dunning
84. The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander
85. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote by Truman Capote
86. The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell
87. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
88. The Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett
89. The Great Evangelical Recession: 6 Factors that will Crash the American Church and How to Prepare by John S. Dickerson
90. The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry
91. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo
92. The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage by Anthony Brandt
93. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert Edsel
94. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price
95. The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make all the Difference by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval
96. The Real Life of Mary Poppins: The Life and Times of P.L. Travers by Paul Brody
97. The Sacred Art of Fasting: Preparing to Practice by Rev. Thomas Ryan, CSP
98. The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead by Elsa Tamez
99. The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy by Paul Sullivan
100. The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into which They Married by Elizabeth Kehoe
101. The Woman Who Can't Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science by Jill Price
102. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
103. Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephan D. Dubner
104. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
105. Toothiana: Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies by William Joyce
106. Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor by Warren Bennis, et all
107. When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age by Justin Kaplan
108. Why Suffering?: Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life Doesn't Make Sense by Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale
109. Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand
110. World Gone By by Dennis Lehane