I must confess that my affinity for reading was slow to develop. During my teenage years, I perceived reading to be a nuisance and necessary evil. At some point during my college years, however, I learned to enjoy reading, not just for assignments or entertainment, but for personal growth.

As a pastor, in addition to Bible study and sermon preparation, I need to read widely to stay current and relevant. More importantly, in my current stage of life, I need books like I need food, to satisfy cognitive hunger and to probe intellectual curiosity. Books stimulate my thinking, exercise my memory muscles, and challenge my presuppositions.

Typically, I read a variety of genres including fiction, spirituality, theology, history, and biography. And I usually keep from three to five books going at the same time, a discipline that was recommended by Opal Lovett, one of the most influential faculty members from my college years. This practice invites a variety of authors to be conversation partners in my internal dialogue.

For the past several years, around the first of January, I make a list of books that I plan to read during the coming year. While I hope to read 40-50 books this year, I have already compiled a list of seventeen of the books I want to be sure to read in 2017:

1. Simplify: 10 Practices to Unclutter Your Soul by Bill Hybels
2. Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send by J.D. Greear
3. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
4. A Way other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent by Walter Brueggemann
5. An Other Kingdom:  Departing the Consumer Culture by Walter Brueggemann
6. The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World by Peter Scazzero
7. Rediscovering Discipleship: Making Jesus’ Final Words Our First Work by Robby F. Gallaty and Ed Stetzer
8. The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People by John Ortberg
9. The Question That Never Goes Away: Why? by Philip Yancey
10. Buechner101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner by Carl Frederick Buechner and Anne Lamott
11. The Gift of Hard Things: Finding Grace in Unexpected Places by Mark Yaconelli
12. I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World by Malala Yousafsai and Patricia McCormick
13. Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most by Marcus Borg
14. Half-Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn’t Say by Adam Hamilton
15. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott
16. Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To: Spirituality without Stereotypes, Religion without Ranting by Lillian Daniel
17. Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Reading books written by authors who write from diverse perspectives stretches my thinking and expands my capacity to relate to variety of people.

This year I would encourage you to read “outside the box” of your personal ideology. In other words, don’t just read the kind of stuff that reinforces what you think you know with certainty. Dare to read something that challenges you to think about life and faith from a different point of view.

Happy reading in 2017!

(Barry Howard serves as the Lead Pastor at the First Baptist Church in Pensacola.)