I had a new year's resolution last year which I actually managed to keep. It was probably the first time ever. :)

So. I read 30 books last year.

And I've tried to come up with some sort of a chart in my head and rank the books which is a difficult thing to do as they were all so different. But basing my evaluation on the emotional effect they had on me, here are the top 5 of my 2014 books.

1. Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase
2. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain
3. John Ortberg, Who Is This Man?
4. Alice Walker, The Colour Purple
5. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

1. I love love love good memoirs and autobiographies! And Karen Armstrong has written a brilliant autobiography. She's got such a unusual and extraordinary life - from a young Catholic nun to an atheist, from an academic failure in Oxford to one of the most prominent speakers on God and religion in the world (TED Talks, The Oprah Winfrey Show, UN General Assembly, and such). But it's not a typical success-story, it's a story of a troubled soul and a troubled life and numerous setbacks and failures. And yet, and yet. The way one's life can be built up again after all hope is abandoned, how something beautiful can spring from the ashes of one's dreams, and how meaning can be found even in the hardest of circimstances... Wow. It was a truly inspiring story. And I could relate to her in more than just one way. So if you need a good autobiography to read and a real story to relate to, that's the book!

2. William Dalrympleeeeee! He's no doubt one of the best travel writers in the world (just take a look at the endless list of his awards). But for me the story is more personal. I remember reading first one of his books (titled In Xanadu) as a teenager, the picture of me and my good friend M. sitting on the stairs of our music school and reading it together is ever so vivid in my memory. And I remember how this book made me feel. Or how W. D. made me feel - he was this adventurous twenty-something guy from Cambridge university (looking dashingly handsome on the book cover, just so that you know) who took a backpack and traveled through Asia in the footsteps of Marco Polo and who then wrote the wittiest book on it. And I was, uhmmm, a teenager. Of course I had a secret crush on him at the time. And now looking back, for all I know, he might be one of the reasons why I admire highly intelligent and educated men so much, haha! Anyway, one of the last books I read in December was another one of his brilliant travel books called From the Holy Mountain. It's about his travels to the ancient birthplace of Christianity and Byzantine empire. He's 20 years older on the book cover so no teenage crushes any more, but I still very much admire his genius and wit and writing style. He's one of the kind!

3. After Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew, John Ortberg's Who Is This Man? must be the best book I've read on the life of Jesus. Every page of it was just pure delight. Seriously.

4. I read The Colour Purple at S.'s place in Sweden and it's one of those books which on one hand you really don't want to read (because it hurts so much) and on the other hand you're unable to put down (because it's so good). I hated and loved it at the same time. And I felt really ignorant and uneducated as reading it. There are some things I know more about, but then there are those things I barely know anything about, racism and slavery and segregation falling to the latter category. So sometimes I just feel I need to know more. And I need to remember more. It's the same thing with Auschwitz memoirs I force myself to read every now and then - there's nothing I can do about what has happened, nothing I can do to help these poor people, but as a member of the human race I need to remember. It's my duty to remember. That's also what reading The Colour Purple was all about. Knowing and remembering.

5. The Divine Conspiracy was the first book I read last year. Which means that I picked it up about two weeks after my mum had died. And read about the Kingdom of God being here in our midst in our everyday life. It was a strange and a bit eerie and at the same time much needed reading. Our loved ones die. Our worlds come crashing down. And yet, the Kingdom of God is here...