Reader Question: What are your top 5 books of the Bible?

What are your top 5 Books of the Bible and Why? -Joseph
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I have spent entirely too  much time thinking about this question, and so I am just going to answer it and get it out of the way. Thanks again, Joseph, for complicating my life.

First, a brief explanation for the non Bible Geeks out there: The Bible looks like a book, is packaged and sold like a book, but would be more accurately thought of as an anthology, a collection of works by different authors spread out over a great deal of time. This anthology is divided up into different books, each of which often have a unique tone and subject matter. Some were written as histories, others as lawbooks, some as philosophy, still others as collections of poetry. Others were simply letters. So reading them like chapters of a larger work will only leave you confused.

Picking a top 5, though...

I'm self-nerd sniping again. ALL RIGHT, HERE WE GO!

1: Genesis- There's just so much goodness in here, and since a lot of people have at least parsed it somewhat because of the infuriating Creation/Evolution debate, it's the one I can usually talk to people about and assume at least some level of literacy. But it is also the book that, perhaps more than any other, shows the building blocks of how the Hebrew Scriptures as we know them came to be. Multiple creation stories, attributed to what were once known as different Gods, right next to each other in the canon. And of course, as always, tons of sex and violence.

2: Job- Job is a great book to get get folks to loosen expectations of Scripture they may have picked up in Sunday School, and expand the way they look at the Bible as a whole. It is a work of philosophy, a thought experiment, and once you get people to see that, suddenly lots of new possibilities get lifted up, all in an engaging debate over the question of why bad things happen to good people. It also features the most sarcastic voice God is ever given in the scriptures, and I always love me some sarcasm.

3: Psalms- So often in my work I get people telling me that they are doing their faith wrong. That they are mad at God and shouldn't be, that they should be joyful and praising all the time. And when I need them to see that isn't the case, I refer them to the book of Psalms. A collection of worship prayers and hymns, the Psalms contain emotion from every facet of the life of faith, from joy, to awe, to fear, to sadness, to unquenchable rage. It's all there, all of it beautifully, truly, sometimes horribly human. It doesn't deal in rights or wrongs, shoulds or shouldn'ts. No judgement. Just prayer, and the knowledge that prayer isn't wrong.

4: Mark- You just have to love a portrayal of Jesus as a healing ninja. Mark is the Gospel at its least pretentious, making few overt claims and allowing the actions of Christ speak for themselves. And in the word, Christ is at a constant sprint, immediately going from one place to another, and constantly spreading the word... "DON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT ME." Which, of course, they always failed. Jesus Christ- Great Healer, Poor Ninja.

5: Romans- I don't typically get that into Paul. He writes great stuff, don't get me wrong, but when a guy spends a chapter or two telling his followers to aspire to be as humble as he is, you spend a decent amount of time rolling your eyes. But Romans is, perhaps, the primary treatise of the faith, at least in the way I practice it. The building blocks of my faith are found here, and none more profound than the following:

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Honorable Mentions:

And now, some books that I couldn't quite place in my top 5 but needed a mention, because they're awesome...

Ruth- Two impoverished women make their way in a landscape arrayed against them by playing the rules of the system and trusting each other, written both as a funny bar story and as a middle finger to the prophet Nehemiah, who thought Judah should be getting rid of foreign women.

Judges- An early history of the Hebrew Nation before the Kings. It reads almost like a comic book, with great heroes making rises and falls. As I have talked before, it also features Deborah, the crowning proof that God does NOT oppose women in leadership positions.

Hosea- I am always tempted to put this in the church reading when my most prim and proper church lady is my liturgist, to see how many times she can say the word "whoredom" without getting flustered.

Habakuk- I just like the name.