Books, books and more books

A postscript to my last post - besides the ECPA book awards, other Christian organizations have their own awards as well. The Logos bookstore chain has their Logos Book Awards, and I was thrilled to find out this week that two of IVP's books won Logos awards this year - God in the Flesh by Don Everts in the Christianity/Culture category, and Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton in the Spirituality/Devotional category.

Don is one of my authors, and Ellen and I had a great dinner with him last night. Don is best known for his book Jesus with Dirty Feet, and he's one of the key people in IVP's new Likewise line of books. He's an area director with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship here in Colorado, and he drove in to the convention center to discuss various editorial issues and to just catch up and hang out. I was very happy to be able to inform him of his Logos award, since I worked with him to develop God in the Flesh. It's a great book, and I'm glad it was recognized.

I've had a good week at the convention both as an editor and as an author. As an editor, I've met with various folks, some of whom are already IVP authors, others who are potential authors. As an author, I did a booksigning for my book and did some media interviews with print and radio. I even had my first podcast interview. The ICRS convention is also fun for me because I get to see a lot of publishing industry friends, especially fellow Gen Xers and twenty/thirtysomethings in the business. We catch up, compare notes, talk about trends and funny things other publishers are doing. Book geeks hanging out with other book geeks - this is my tribe.

Part of the convention experience is seeing what new titles and authors are being featured for this next season. A lot of stuff doesn't interest me or intersect with me; for example, I don't edit fiction or children's books, so I mostly ignore those displays unless I see something that would be fun for Ellen or the kids. But there are some books that warrant notice. Some of the recent and new books that caught my eye here include:

The Great Omission, Dallas Willard's new book on discipleship from HarperSanFrancisco
Eat This Book, the next volume in Eugene Peterson's spiritual theology series from Eerdmans
The Missing Gospels, by Darrell Bock (Thomas Nelson) and What Have They Done with Jesus? by Ben Witherington (HarperSanFrancisco), both of which are responses to Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, Elaine Pagels, Dan Brown and other recent authors and books touting alternative gospels and early Christianities (IVP's own book in this vein is the forthcoming Fabricating Jesus by Craig Evans)

I also picked up a copy of Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus (W Publishing), which came out a couple of months ago, and Celtic Treasure by J. Philip Newell (Eerdmans), which came out last year. There's many more books that could be listed, but these are some of the highlights, the one's I'm excited enough to bring with me on the plane home this afternoon.

It's been a good week, but it's also been almost five days away from our kids. This is the first trip where both Ellen and I have been away from the boys since Elijah was born, and we're eager to get back to them. Heading home soon.