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We are all about books here at The Good Book Company. Books that serve Christians of all ages by being biblical, relevant and accessible. We also, from time to time, read books from other publishers too (I know, shocking).
2021 appears to have been the year for the TGBC team to brush up on their history, whether that be taking a deep dive into ancient Rome, or following a voyage to Egypt to uncover hidden Bible manuscripts. Amongst our suggestions, we hope you’ll find plenty of inspiration to get stuck into a book this coming year.
So, without further ado, here’s what our staff have loved reading in 2021.
Mus Yusuf, Junior Software Developer
This year our evangelism group at church has loved reading Tactics by Gregory Koukl.
We are not all closers. In sales, the salesperson closes the deal and gets the other person to buy in. The evangelism equivalent is the person who clarifies the gospel message to an unbeliever, who then trusts in Jesus. Tactics shows that an unbeliever normally has many encounters with Christians before coming to faith. One sows and another reaps. Our roles are different and may even just be giving the other person something to think about. This takes the pressure off significantly.
My past goal in evangelistic conversations was to say the gospel. This resulted in anxiously and awkwardly trying to force the gospel into a conversation. Now our group is better equipped to gauge where people are at and calmly play our part in helping them along in their journey to God.
Richard Roper, Senior Buyer
Sisters of Sinai is the tale of two wealthy, polyglot Scottish Presbyterian twin sisters in the late 1800s, who defied convention and the academic establishment to travel in Egypt and the Near East. Agnes and Margaret Smith were key to the discovery and recovery of many important early Biblical and Church manuscripts in Syriac and Aramaic. Their discoveries were foundational in verifying the authenticity and accuracy of modern Bible translations by helping to verify early Greek manuscripts, and so defending the Christian faith in the face of attacks from contemporary sceptical academic theories. The sisters had a genius for languages, a strong Christian faith, an independent mindset and wealth providentially bestowed upon them by an unlooked-for inheritance—and they made it their lives’ task to discover, preserve and translate as much early Church material as possible. Their story, as told by Professor Janet Soskice of Jesus College, Cambridge, reads like an adventure novel but brings with it great insight into the quest for evidential support for the Bible that consumed European academic energy in the Late Victorian period.
Avery Powers, Marketing and Events Assistant
This year, I finally got around to reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I loved this book's use of imagination—as Christians, I think it's easy to forget the importance of creativity, since it's not exactly a spiritual characteristic or discipline. I never feel closer to God than when I'm indulging in something imaginative, however. Reading The Hobbit reminded me that the struggle between wanting to feel comfortable and wanting something more is pretty human (or hobbit-ish). That struggle always points me back to God, the source of home and adventure.
Katy Morgan, Editor
This kind of list wouldn’t be complete without a C. S. Lewis book, would it?! But this one surprised me. I read it without realising it was the second in a trilogy; but having since read the other two, I think this is the best of the three, and you really don’t need to have read the first one to understand it. It’s a beautifully imaginative science fiction story, complete with spaceships and aliens and funky geography: you have to really pause over Lewis’ lavish descriptions of floating islands and alien trees and try to visualise them. But it also turns out to be kind of theological: he’s setting the story of humanity and Jesus into an interplanetary context. You wouldn’t have thought that would work, but it does. I was very moved!
Tim Thornborough, Publishing Director
My secular book of the year has to be Dynasty by Tom Holland (the British historian, not the Spiderman actor). It is a history of the Julian dynasty of the Roman Empire (Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero, Claudius, Caligula, etc), during which Christianity came to Rome, and slowly grew. The scholarship is superb, the stories and characters endlessly fascinating. But what I loved about this has been the insight it gives into the bankruptcy and oppression of politics, culture and religion, which proved to be the fertile soil in which the gospel of grace took root. The good news of Christ was deeply challenging to the Roman way of life, but at the same time liberating in a multi-faceted way—which gripped all levels of society, from the lowest slave to some of the highest aristocrats.
Thomas Seidler, IT & Purchasing Director
Schaeffer’s The Christian Manifesto contains a summary of an older book from 1644, Lex Rex by Samuel Rutherford. It taught that the king is not above the law, but he too is under the law. As Christ fulfils the law, he is the divine law that judges all laws and kings. When a king rebels against divine law, he is not acting as God’s servant, but as a transgressor or an outlaw. At this point he cannot lawfully rule; he is a tyrant.
Some choice quotes: "Since tyranny is satanic, not to resist it is to resist God—to resist tyranny is to honor God… It follows from Rutherford’s thesis that citizens have a moral obligation to resist unjust and tyrannical government... when there is a ‘long train of abuses and usurpations’ designed to produce an oppressive, authoritarian state, ‘it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government…’."
Bethany McIlrath, Digital Marketing Manager
I'm not quite in the age bracket for The Promise and the Light by Katy Morgan, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway. This retelling of the Christmas story captured my imagination. I knew the Christmas story already but still found myself wondering what would happen in each chapter and empathetically putting myself in the characters' shoes. I loved Katy's notes about which parts were from the Bible and which parts she imagined (and why!) In the end, I spent this book marveling at Jesus becoming man and God's plan for his people afresh!
Geoff Dennis, Vice President of Sales
My favorite book that I read this year is called A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Set in 1922, Towles masterfully and beautifully details the life of Count Alexander Rostov. A Bolshevik tribunal determines that he is an unrepentant aristocrat and sentences him to house arrest in the exquisite Metropol hotel. "Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery" (taken from the book description on Amazon.com).
As many of us have wrestled with the difficulties of isolation due to the impact of Covid, this book will set your heart free to soar above the landscape of this important time in human history.
Carl Laferton, Editorial Director
Dominion is not exactly a leftfield pick, but the first section on the moral framework of the pre-Christian Roman world and the last part—on how the UN’s human rights basis, the sexual revolution of the sixties, and the #MeToo movement all exist in a current borne along by biblical ethics—is genuinely paradigm shifting. Plus, Holland shows how to write with depth without drowning the reader.
Has this whetted your appetite for opening up a new book? Browse all our upcoming titles here.
Michael is our Digital Marketing Specialist, managing the company's video content and working alongside our authors to promote their books. Before joining TGBC, he spent time at CNN where he contributed to an Emmy award-winning animated series. He attends Cheam Baptist Church.
