15 Books in 15 Minutes

I typically don’t respond to the facebook notes stuff – or the quizzes on which cars should be in my garage or which city I should live in (though I do find all that fascinating to read about you). But listing 15 books that will always stick with me captured my imagination – but it was really hard to do - a lot harder than I thought.

I limited myself to only one book by an author, counted multiple volume series as one, didn’t include the Bible and still ended up with 16 books on my list of 15:

Prince of Tides – Pat Conroy (Conroy’s My Losing Season really should be on the list too)
Velvet Elvis – Rob Bell
Simply Christian – NT Wright
Banner in the Sky – James Ullman (my favorite book in 4th grade)
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson (really any Bryson book could be on the list)
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Lord of the Rings (the three volumes together) - J.R. Tolkien
The Seven Lamps of Architecture – John Ruskin
The Agony and the Ecstasy – Irving Stone
Learning from Las Vegas – Robert Venturi (if I had to leave one off to get to 15 I guess it would be this one)
Blue Like Jazz – Don Miller
The Chronicles of Narnia (all seven volumes) C. S. Lewis
Same Kind of Different as Me – Ron Hall and Denver Moore (the last book that made me cry)
Run with the Horses – Eugene Peterson
Basic Christian Leadership – John Stott
Life and Holiness – Thomas Merton