A 90-Second Book Review (series)

It's my bite-sized rec. of books on the arts.

I’m starting a new thing on Instagram: what I’m calling a “90-Second Video Book Review” that’ll happen once-a-week. It’s less a review, granted, than an enthusiastic recommendation, but hopefully it’ll introduce folks to good books that could nourish the mind and heart, or expand their imaginations, or acquaint them with a new author or community of artists, or scholars, or arts advocates and patrons, or serve readers in some practical way.

(If I had more time, I’d do a proper book review, or a Five-Minute Video Review. But I’ve already got a full-time job, and my part-time job, as a priest, keeps me plenty occupied, so this is the best I can do under the circumstances. But something is better than nothing, I figure, and with the habit of reading of books plummeting like a rocket booster by 40% over the past twenty years, I’ll do what I can to increase it infinitesimally.)

As I’ve written my book on the calling of artists for Brazos Press over the past year, I’ve had a chance to re-read books that I’ve collected over the past 30 years as well as read books that I’ve acquired for the work at hand.

Some of those new books I discovered serendipitously, in the footnotes of other books, for example, or in hidden corners of the Internet, published by obscure publishing houses. There are so many good ones.

The sad reality of a book like To Set the World Aflame is that you can’t quote every book that you’ve loved, or even include it in the endnotes.

I have added a series of appendices at the back of the book with various recommended reading lists (e.g., “Theology Books for Artists,” “Art Books for Pastors,” “Novels about Artists”), but even that section doesn’t allow me to tell readers about all the amazing books on the arts that exist in our world.

So this is my chance to rectify that fact...mostly.

My 90-Second Reviews will include five sections: The Who, the What, the Why, the For Whom, and a Fun Fact. In the case of my review of this week’s book by Lanta Davis, Becoming by Beholding, it’s a book that I would have purchased for the title and subtitle alone. But the contents are quite fabulous too.

Hope you enjoy it!