My Husband's Essential Summer Reading

We’re moving in less than a week now.

I’ve shared how each member of the family has selected one shelf’s worth of books for their summer reading. Last packed, first unpacked. In a couple days, we’ll each narrow it down to just one or two titles to have in our backpacks.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows him that my husband had the hardest time limiting himself to a single shelf, but he managed it. Technically. He normally wouldn’t stuff a shelf like this. In his defense, half of his books are needed for writing articles like this and this.

Sharing one’s reading is a surprisingly personal thing, so I made sure he was okay with it before I snapped some pictures to share with you all.

I’m going to borrow Shopclass as Soulcraft from him. I’d worried that it had gotten packed with our other books until I found it on his shelf.

• The Spirit and the Vision by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona

• The Lawgivers: The Parallel Lives of Numa Pomilius and Lycurgus of Sparta, As Told by Plutarch, translated by C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks

• The Statesmen: The Parallel Lives of Cato the Younger and Phocion of Athens, As Told by Plutarch, translated by C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• A Time to Build by Yuval Levin

• Nature and Culture by Barbara Novak

• American Painting of the Nineteenth Century by Barbara Novak

• The Mortification of Sin by John Owen

• The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin

• Bone of His Bone: Going Beyond the Imitation of Christ by F.J. Huegel

• The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius

• The Landmark Xenophon’s Anabasis

• Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909 by David Schuyler

• A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken

• Shopcraft as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawfod

• Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt

• Life in the Negative World by Aaron Renn

• Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

• A Place of My Own: An Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

• Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God by Malcolm Guite

• The Life and Works of Thomas Cole by Louis Legrand Noble

• Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources

• Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England by Richard Abels

• The Confident Years 1885-1915 by Van Wycks Brooks

• The Puritan Dilemma by Edmund S. Morgan

• The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

• Assorted writings of Thomas Cole

• Land and Freedom by Reeve Huston

• The Federal Theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642-1704) by Samuel D. Renihan

• Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster