7 theology books I've actually read cover to cover

1. Holy Bible, AV1611

2. Concise Theology - J. I. Packer

3. Manual of Christian Doctrine - Louis Berkhof

4. Institutes of the Christian Religion (abridged) - John Calvin

5. Marrow of Theology - William Ames

6. Biblical Theology - Geerhardus Vos

7. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan

Cover to cover reading of course is a relative thing. You can read a book cover to cover and get as much from it as if you'd skimmed it, or whatever. But there IS also something about starting a project and finishing said project. There is a force that builds within the effort, and reading a book cover to cover, especially one that doesn't mechanically draw your attention to it (like a swift-moving genre novel or bestseller or whatever, i.e. one that actually extends your limits of attention and understanding) is a classic example of a well-defined project with a beginning, middle, and end.

Most everyone of course reads theological books as one would read a reference book, which is a practical approach for most kinds of theological learning. The "So what did Calvin say about this in his Institutes...?" type of scrounging around. You go through a thousand sources doing that (especially when you have access to the internet).

Often you can learn more from short articles than from full-blown massive books too. In the various subjects of theology.

And reading a book just once is not exactly getting the most from it, if it has anything to offer to begin with. It goes without saying. Yet with theology it often is like reading the same book over and over when you just go from a more beginner type work to a little more intermediate to more advanced. So reading Packer's Concise Theology once, then reading Berkhof's Manual of Christian Doctrine is really like reading the same book twice in this sense.

Ultimately notes and lists have to be made or nothing is kept.

With the Berkhof book I went through all the questions he formulated at the end of each of the chapters and wrote out the answers to each one. 600 or so questions.

I regret not yet reading Calvin's Institutes in a dedicated, cover-to-cover effort (though obviously I don't yet regret it enough to start doing it right now). For massive tomes like that I will often read an abridgement first just to have something. It's better than having read the first 250 pages of a thousand page book before abandoning the effort. I.e., having a complete sample of the whole book is better than having an abandoned effort where you only got the beginning few hundred pages. But with Calvin's book I've mined it in a reference book way, and also read complete chapters from it. That's different though.

I've never read Part Two of the Pilgrim's Progress. It's like the way some purists regard Book 2 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier -- like it doesn't even exist. Like it shouldn't exist. Book 1 is the pure, complete work. Same with Pilgrim's Progress. At least that's how I see it until I actually summon up the energy and resolve to read Part 2, if ever...