For the reading-inclined, here are seven books from my 2007 reading list that I'd like to recommend.

A.J. Conyers, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit. This work explores how the now-cliched modern understanding of toleration developed, how it marginalized Christian conviction, and argues for a return to a more pre-modern understanding of toleration that resembles humility more than indifference.

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Being a bestseller, it's probably familiar to many readers. It's got great discussion about how ideas take flight and take root.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. There are certain authors about whom I have to say, "but of course I don't agree with everything he says." Wendell Berry is one of those guys. He probably wouldn't approve of the time I spend commuting in my truck, my fancy phone that keeps me hooked up to the office 24/7, or my fondness for frozen pizzas. By the same token, I think he could stand to read a few books on economics. But he is a good corrective to many of the more/faster/now obsessions of contemporary life.

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. On a bad day, Wendell Berry is not half as depressing as James Howard Kunstler. When he was a small child, someone in a car on a suburban highway must've done very bad things to him. And he is still not happy about it. Kunstler needs to lighten up a little bit, but if you take seriously his claims about how suburban sprawl has marred the American landscape, it's hard not to join the pity party with him, if only a little bit. What's good about this book is it's not the fact of development he rails against, but the throwaway aesthetic that has latched onto it. What's bad is he doesn't offer much in the way of solutions (for that you'll have to read his other books), he lapses at times into environmental determinism, doesn't pay much attention to any valid reasons why suburbia was (and remains) a preferred option for many, and fails to recognize that suburbia isn't (to my way of thinking, at least) not so much a place as a distillation of the modern mind, operative as well in the inner city and rural America.

Leithart, Peter. Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature. I can't get enough of Leithart.

Lewis, Michael. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. This is a fantastic sports book that should engross even those who are passionately apathetic about football. It's part "Hoosiers" and "Hoop Dreams," telling the story of an illiterate inner-city kid who dreams of athletic stardom. It's part Lifetime TV-movie, telling how this neglected homeless kid of a drug-abusing mother was taken in and nurtured by a gentle, yet demanding mother figure. It's part sitcom: gigantic black teenager with no money and no life is taken in by a rich family with the former Ole Miss sorority girl mom to smother him, the business executive dad to play the stern patriarch, the cheerleader teenage daughter to be his surrogate sister, and the goofy younger boy to be his video game buddy. All this came to Michael Oher for one reason: a wrinkle in modern football strategy. The NY Times has an excerpt from the book here.

Yunus, Muhammad. Banker to the Poor. When liberals read about Yunus, they probably don't think "capitalist." Neither do some conservatives. I wish they did. Yunus is the founder of Grameen bank, which pioneered the use of micro-lending as an escape hatch from poverty for poor Muslim women in Bangladesh.