Spring semesters are always the worst. Maybe “worst” is a bad word for it, but they’re always way faster than fall semesters, and so along with that comes an absurdly tight schedule for the amount of work that needs to get done, which really puts a damper on the amount of time available for things like reading for pleasure.

All this to say, I only finished 2 books in April, though I’m still pretty happy with that, given the context of, well, being the spring semester. It still brought my total for the year up to 31/75, which is a considerable amount of the way there already.

In the spirit of past months, here are the books in all their glory, with accompanying reviews (with it really being a bit of a bummer that I have no choice in what to review).

1. What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics by R.C. Sproul
2. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

1. What is Reformed Theology?: Understanding the Basics by R.C. Sproul

Typically I really enjoy Sproul’s writing, and I still think that his book The Holiness of God is one of the most thought-provoking and convicting works I’ve ever had the privilege of engaging with. I admire his ability to paint pictures with words about incredibly abstract, difficult theological topics, and to relate the reader to such ideas in a way that genuinely makes sense. He traditionally has a gift for making the obscure legible and the familiar profound.

And, truth be told, there are parts of this book that demonstrate those talents. But the majority of it is actually remarkably confusing, making the subtitles claim to aid in “understanding the basics” a bit dubious to my mind. I know a decent amount about church history and the various councils and confessions that have shaped the contemporary Church, yet there were many extensive references to events, places, and people that flew well over my head, and were offered with little to no explanation. Additionally, the language of the book waffled from lucid to academic without warning, with Sproul often using dense theological terms extensively without qualifying them, and generally demonstrating an assumption that the reader is already comfortable with their use.

As a whole I think I got a few things out of the book, but wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to reformed thought, or even necessarily as a text for personal study. Unfortunately, I think it has to be approached mostly as an academic text meant to be deployed in some other pragmatic, practical manner, a real shame given the depth of wisdom that Sproul has displayed in his other works that I’ve read.

2. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

I’d like to think that I appreciate classical music, but what I learned from this book is that my use of such music as an aid to study is far from appreciating and understanding the nuances of the genre. While that may have been obvious to me with a little reflection on my general lack of knowledge of even the titles of different works or the difference between a sonata and…well, something else, what I did not know was just how intimately the connection was between the appreciation of the work and an understanding of the composers who produced it. Alex Ross’s biography of music in the twentieth century is a remarkably lucid description of the culture of music and listening, a culture that I was fascinated to learn more about and to be able to explore throughout this work.

Ross for the most part does a great job depicting the culture of music that various composers came up in, and the way that their music in turn created culture. The fortunes of classical music have waxed and waned at various points in the last century, and these ups and downs are given their full due here, complete with intriguing profiles of individual composers, as well as a birds-eye view that shows the complex web that the world of this music and its devoted followers have interwoven with the ebbs and flows of history itself. That this is done in an entertaining, engaging manner with clear prose and detailed but interesting writing is a great credit to Ross’s ability to turn something that many people may find dreary into something that is living and vibrant for us today.

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