Not So Great

Despite the name of this blog, I’ve mostly wandered away from what are considered (even if only under protest) the “Great Books.” In the first years, I had plenty to say about Greek tragedians and German philosophers, about medieval theology and modernist scientific treatises. But these things don’t fill my reading schedule now. If certain nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novels can be included in a canon of Great Books, then I guess exlibrismagnis still occasionally lives up to its name. But science fiction? Historical fiction from the last few decades? Recent presidential biographies? You have been indulgent and gracious to stick with me through those classic-adjacent books. At least I haven’t (often) written about Tarzan and Hercule Poirot!

But I’m also interested in what might be called the Great Subjects, and good American history treats all of them: religion, ethics, politics, science, education, and (to quote Gilligan’s Island) the rest. (What makes Great Television is a matter for a different blog.) So part of my plan for this ten-year schedule was reading the Oxford History of the United States. And now, after all that introduction, I’m ready to tell you a short story of how my wish to read the OHotUS led to me reading a Not So Great Book.

I started putting together this plan around 2015. The Oxford series didn’t have a volume on the early colonial era, but it had at least a plan for nine other volumes covering everything from the Revolutionary era to the twenty-first century. What could be better? I picked a different book on early American history to read year 1, and then had a handy 9-volume series to fill out the decade perfectly. The only potential hitch: Bruce Schulman’s entry, covering the years 1896 until 1929, wasn’t out yet. But I remember when I first saw the plan on OUP’s website, it said the book was expected in 2014 (hmm, maybe I started planning earlier than 2015), and I didn’t need that book until 2023, so the Plan seemed safe. 

But then Oxford Press changed the date. I definitely don’t remember all the steps, but every couple of years, the publication date crept back slowly until they finally just started showing “TBD.” Even the title changed. Still, other secondary sources – Amazon and Wikipedia, for instance – held out hope for the book, all saying at one point that the book would appear in November 2023. Just in time! Alas, November 2023 rolled around, and there was no Brand Name America or any other title by Bruce Schulman forthcoming. So I skipped ahead (a trial for my low-grade OCD) and read David M. Kennedy’s very good book on the Depression and WWII. Surely there was just a little delay, and I’d get my Bruce Schulman book in 2024. To boost my confidence, amazon.ca and amazon.uk started saying the book would come out in September 2024, they listed an ISBN, and they started accepting payment for pre-orders. But, woe is me! September 2024 came and went, with no new book on American history, 1896-1929. So again I read ahead, enjoying James T. Patterson’s excellent Grand Expectations, covering 1945 until 1974. 

But I couldn’t take the out-of-orderness of it all anymore. The fabric of my space-time continuum was tearing. I either had to read Bruce Schulman or find a substitute. It occurred to me to write to Oxford University Press. I got a very lovely reply confirming the ISBN I found on the other nations’ Amazon sites and saying that the book would come out in 2025. I wrote again in a few months to ask if they had any better ETA and got a less lovely reply saying only that clerk A would have to ask clerk B, who presumably knew better, and get back to me. It finally occurred to me to write to Bruce Schulman! I don’t know why it’s taking him so long to write his book, but it doesn’t take him long to write an email. I heard back from him within 24 hours, and he said that the people I talked with at Oxford must have incorrect information since he hasn’t finished writing the book, so it couldn’t possibly have an ISBN.

*sigh*

OK, this “short” story isn’t turning out to be so short.

*sigh*

I started looking for a substitute. But do you know how hard it is to find a book on American history that covers 1896-1929? Can you imagine how difficult it is even to find a combination of books that covers the period? I finally found John Milton Cooper’s Pivotal Decades, covering 1900-1920. I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Cooper’s biography of Woodrow Wilson, so I was sure this book would fit the bill. He’d probably say a bit about the end of the previous century and fill in the 1896-1900 gap. Now I just had to find a book on the 1920s.

Wait a minute! As it turns out, I remembered that the first grown-up, professional history I ever read was on the 1920s. I remember vividly reading it in my basement when I was about 15. I think it took about three days. I didn’t know what Prohibition was really like. I didn’t know gangsters had anything to do with Prohibition. I didn’t know about President Harding’s mysterious death. Wow! If this is what actual history books were like, why were the schools making me read textbooks?!

OK, now all I had to do was remember the name of that book, and my ten-year history-reading plan was saved. I knew it had the word “decade” in the title. But I couldn’t figure out how to construct a search query to find it. “book american history 1920s decade” didn’t do it. I talked to my son about it. He pointed out to me that I was still searching the way I did in the oughts. Back then, you could ask a question with all the little words, but the search engines just worked on the keywords. So I’ve just been searching by keywords for twenty years. But AI understands language well enough now that you can ask specific questions. So I searched, ‘What’s the title of a book written before 1980 on the U.S. in the 1920s that has the word ‘decade’ in the title?” Google replied, “There is no well known book written before 1980 about the U.S. in the 1920s with the word ‘decade’ in the title, but here are some other books that might work for you.” Then it listed a couple of books about the 1920s and a couple of books with the word “decade” in the title. Stupid AI! “No well known book”?! If it were well known, I wouldn’t have had to ask you! I depend on the internet to know less-than-well-known things! So I gave up on finding that book and chose another. I settled on Nathan Miller’s New World Coming.

All right. October 2025. Time to read these histories and learn about 1900 to 1929. Cooper’s book was good, although he was much less critical of Wilson than he was in his biography of the President, written about fifteen years later. I agree with his later, negative critique, so I found his unqualified admiration for Wilson in Pivotal Decades surprising and disappointing. Still, good book. Written well. I learned a lot.

Next I started Miller’s book and loved the prologue about F. Scott Fitzgerald. To frame a general history with a story about one person, and that person an author and not a politician, was novel and intriguing. Things boded well for Miller. 

But then a surprising problem came up. After the prologue, the main narrative started, and Miller dipped back into WWI quite a bit as context for the 1920s. As a result, his subject overlapped Cooper’s in the matter of several years. Curiously, as I read along, I noticed that many details overlapped, as well. What are the chances that two authors would use the same anecdote to illustrate one point, that same quotation to summarize another point, the same statistic to emphasize yet another? Then I read a paragraph that I had just read a few days earlier. Gahhh! Over ten years of work choosing a history of the 1920s, and I had to choose one by a plagiarist! (Cooper's book came out several years before Miller's.) I’m still reading it. I’m fully into the 1920s now, well past anything Cooper wrote about, so my fits of déjà vu have gone. It’s very interesting and written well, but I can’t help wondering what talented author wrote this part originally.

Ugh! Yesterday I remembered the name of the book I read in the 70s: The Shattered Decade. I looked it up, and it’s long out of print. There’s one copy available on thriftbooks.com. I’m going to get it (don’t you buy it first!), but I’ll finish Miller. I’m too far into it now, and I have a schedule to keep.

A Villainous Post

I just wrapped up a season of fantasy baseball in a position typical for me: I finished 6th out of 8. I’ve loved playing this game for the last thirty years, but I’m so bad at it! I think the problem breaks down into three parts. (Thanks for reading while I work out my frustration in print!) First, I have a stubborn loyalty to ideas that I think ought to work, even if statistics suggest otherwise. Second, and maybe this is the same thing, I’m a slow learner: if I don’t see some relationship or pattern, memorizing a formula doesn’t work for me until I can finally internalize the reason for the formula. And I usually have to try something over and over and make, in my estimation, a hundred mistakes before the right way really settles into my brain. Third, fantasy baseball essentially boils down to having a drafting strategy in March and then watching for six months to see how that strategy works. It takes way too long for me to make my hundred mistakes in a game in which each turn lasts a year!

Yes, I’m a slow learner. It seems I’m often confessing my weaknesses in these posts, things about literature or the life and people and ideas depicted in that literature that didn’t really make sense to me until I was over 50 . . . or 60 . . . or 65. A few months ago, I wrote about realism in some heroines that many people don’t think are realistic. Today I want to write about realism in a villain that I didn’t really understand as realistic until just two days ago. I just finished C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for the third time. I probably read it for the first time when I was about 20. The book has two villains: Devine, who wants to exploit Malacandra (we know it as Mars) because its abundant gold will bring him power on Earth, and Weston, who doesn’t care a fig for any single human being but wants Humanity with a capital H to survive forever by taking over the galaxy, even if that means killing sentient extraterrestrials. It’s Weston I want to talk about today. (I think I understood greed even when I was 20.)

To be fair to my younger self, the villains of my childhood and youth were all exaggerations. Snidely Whiplash (from Dudley Do-Right) and Dick Dastardly (from Wacky Races) took what were already exaggerations from melodrama and cartoonified them. The Joker and the Riddler (either the comic-book versions or the TV versions) could be taken either as mere personifications of weird ideas or as caricatures of serial killers. I’m not sure I ever took an outlaw from Cisco Kid or Gunsmoke seriously enough to think of him as a depiction of a character from life. Of course there were mad scientists, swamp creatures, the Blob, Frankenstein’s monster, Wells’s (and Welles’s) Martians, and other imaginative antagonists that didn’t appear anything like realistic to me. Then when I was 18, I met Darth Vader; it never occurred to me then even to wonder whether the man in the spacesuit who spoke while his machinery breathed for him and choked underlings with a hand gesture was realistic. Even the very idea of a villain, a character who constantly goes about trying to do harm to a given person or group, seemed to me more like a plot device than a realistic human being. I didn’t know anyone like that. Even the bullies at school just sat around being bewildered most of the time and only occasionally thought that abusing me might be fun. It wasn’t until I started reading lots of Dickens (I’m sorry I always seem to get around to him!) that I found out that a villain in a story might be something as mundane as a businessman who cares more about continuous profit than the well-being of his neighbor. It probably helped that I started paying attention to the news in the 1980s and learned about blackguards like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Back to Lewis. Weston is taken by the Malacandrians (who are good, unfallen creatures) to meet Oyarsa, who is, as I understand it, the angel of the planet. He sees people living simply and assumes they are uncivilized and ignorant and superstitious. He hears the unbodied voice of Oyarsa and assumes a witch-doctor must be using ventriloquism. He identifies someone he believes to be the shaman (actually an old creature who has merely fallen asleep) and tries to tempt him with a cheap necklace from Woolworth’s. He dances around shouting “Pretty! Pretty!” to all the other creatures while trying to get them interested in the plastic baubles. All of this display only makes the Malacandrians laugh. I think I thought I was supposed to laugh at the ludicrous character myself. In an angrier mood, he tells them they have no idea who they’re dealing with and that if they don’t do as he says, “Me go Poof! Bang! and you dead!” You don’t understand the primitive mind, he tells his fellow earthlings when they urge him to stop. All of this looked to me like it came straight out of the recipe book for fictional bad guys, not out of observations from life. It was reasonable but inexperienced of me to think this way: I had read about people like Weston in stories and seen characters like him in movies, but I had never met anyone who did or said these things in real life.

But the other day, it occurred to me that I had actually known many people like Weston. Take out the details of the dance and the cheap necklace and the threat with the gun (I thank God I’ve never had to deal with that threat in real life!), and Weston is completely recognizable. He assumes he is the smartest person in any group he finds himself in. He assumes that a simple life, or any life unlike his own, indicates stupidity. He assumes a stupid person is of inferior worth. He thinks of all relationships in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing. He cares only about his own wishes and believes he can manipulate anyone by means of his superior skills into suiting those wishes; if he ever thinks about the others’ wishes that he is violating, it’s only to think that their wishes don’t matter as much as his on some objective cosmic scale. And yet for all his supposed superiority he depends on tools – guns and trinkets – to get his way. I’ve known many people like Weston. I’ve worked with them. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners with them. I’m sorry to say I’ve gone to church with them. It was an amazing, awesome, satisfying, revealing, sad, powerful moment when I suddenly found, in the middle of a fantasy about space travel, a stark bit of earthly realism.

Over the River

I’ve achieved a milestone: I’ve finished Galsworthy’s nine-volume Forsyte Saga. In some ways this last entry, Over the River, was the least satisfactory of the nine. Along with the interesting characters and mundane-yet-urgent conflicts, I’ve enjoyed the series most for the way each book critiques the old ways and then, in a surprising twist, critiques modernity. Over the River certainly had the solid characters and the poignant conflicts and the critiques of humanity’s ways, but it didn’t surprise me with a clever philosophical twist. Still, as a final volume, its main business was summarizing, I suppose, and it did that fairly well.

Dinny Cherrell took a prominent position again, which suited me just fine since I really like that character. But the main plot involved her sister, Clare, who has left her husband in India because he has experimented with the sadistic use of a riding whip. The case ends up involving a trial, which I read both literally and metaphorically. Clare has spent a platonic night with a male friend in a broken-down car out in the countryside on a dark night, and the rejected husband uses this event as the basis for a suit of divorce, since adultery remained at the time the only grounds for divorce among non-royals. Sadism isn’t on trial since Clare refuses to testify about the issue. The old rules for divorce are certainly on trial since both parties want to be free from each other and can only achieve their end by convincing a jury of a lie. (As far as this main point goes, I think Waugh did a better job skewering the practice in A Handful of Dust.) If modernity is allegorically on trial in the literal trial, it is only in its acceptance of a casual friendship between a young man and a young woman, and Waugh doesn’t seem to think the new social norm very bad, if only people aren’t so careless about it as Clare and her friend have been. 

Of all people, Dinny’s Uncle Adrian sums up the critique of modernity at the end of the novel and the series. Society changes with time, he says, and this is inevitable. Humans are imperfect, so change is always needed. Modernity sees to have changed too much too fast, though, throwing out everything without pausing to distinguish the baby and the bathwater. People need some of the good things from the nineteenth century (I agree!) and they need continuity. But he doesn’t give details, and then he apologizes for being too philosophical. So it’s not the powerful commentary I so enjoyed in earlier volumes. I’ll share just a couple more quibbles. The characters go to see Cavalcade on the stage a few times, and I think Galsworthy lets this other artwork do a little too much of his work. (I sympathize with what I take to be his dislike for the show, though; I hate the movie.) Then there’s the confusion over the metaphor in the title. At one point the narration says time is a river and we can only go along with the flow, we can’t go over the river. But later Dinny is said to have gone over the river by getting married. Confusing. It seemed to me that Galsworthy would want to have said that she was moving against the flow of time’s river by participating in a traditional institution, not crossing over it. OK, a third quibble: Dinny marries a man she admires but doesn’t love just because she thinks she needs tradition as a shield against modern times. She, the series, and the philosophy deserve a better end.

I’ve achieved another milestone: exlibrismagnis.com now has over 300,000 views. I wish I could say they were all actual human visits, but I can’t. I had a lot of Russian bots back in 2016. The eager blogger, in hopes of being internet-famous, would check the list of referring URL’s and, hoping to find a mention of this site on some other blog or message thread, would click the sites on the list trying to see some actual referring link. Alas, I mostly got sites in Russian that seemed to be inviting me to gamble online. Blogspot’s host learned to block them soon after that, and then for many years I had only a handful of visits every day, which seemed like a legitimate representation of what a world of 7 billion people might do with my rambling thoughts. But in the last month or so, I’ve started having hundreds of views per day again. Yesterday 40 visits supposedly came mayo clinic dot org. (I spell it out in an attempt to protect against a robotic search.) Forty more came from what purports to be another healthcare organization. What’s that about? I understand the bots from nine years ago tricking me into clicking their link in an attempt to catch a fool ready to separate himself from his money. But why would there be a link for my blog on the Mayo Clinic’s site? On the other hand, why would a scammer pretend to be the Mayo Clinic? The link didn’t take me to a donation page or anything. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Anyway, if you’re reading this because a healthcare site (or a Singaporean university’s site) had a link to me, write to let me know. Or if it’s a scam and you understand it, explain it to me, please!

Quick Roundup

In between mini-trips, I’ll just drop some short notes on recent reading.

I continue my plan to read Finnegans Wake over the course of fifteen years, the time it took Joyce to write it. After having consumed my annual slice of Finnegan Pie for 2025, I can say that it remains as wacky as ever with its nonstop wordplay and elusive sentence structure. But I think the man (who has several names and stands for several people, I think, or maybe all men) goes to an inn, has a drink and a meal, and then hires a woman. If this is the passage that got the book banned for pornography in some places, then I’m pretty sure neither the boards who did the banning nor their kids – assuming they even read this far – understood it or got any excitement from it. I don’t see anyone ever reading Finnegans Wake and then thinking, “Oh, now that I’ve read that, I can’t wait to commit adultery!”

George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow is the first of the Scottish pastor's novels I’ve really enjoyed in at least three years. There is no wise old man this time, the kind that in other books me wonder if MacDonald saw himself in these lofty characters. There are no polemics in which some leading character decides that anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. with George MacDonald) isn’t doing Christianity right. The protagonist is a young rural woman who understands God the best she can, which is to say that she understands Him better and more biblically than her mother or silly neighbor. But then all of them understand and serve God the best they can, as well. There are no judgments, just discussions and respectful attempts to explain or to persuade. The differences are nothing as compared to the difference between the belief of the faithful and the disbelief of the local baron’s son. There’s also a brother with some kind of mental developmental issues and a big snow that causes some deaths and a neighborly intervention before fornication (which didn’t involve reading James Joyce!), and all these events lead to very interesting thoughts and discussions about life in all its complexities and how best to live it in service of God and neighbor.

Finally, I will merely recommend Anthony Trollope’s short story (with eight chapters it could really be called a novella) “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices.” 

I’ll have more after the next trip!

Furiously Taking Notes on Orlando

I’ve written before about the importance of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to my reading project. I wish I remembered what work by C. S. Lewis mentioned Orlando and made me want to read the classics that the good professor knew so well. But I do remember the exact spot I was standing on – on a sidewalk in Norman, Oklahoma – when I read the Lewis passage. And I remember how excited I was when I finally got to Orlando a few years later and found that it was indeed worth reading. My only regret about my first encounter is that I read the epic over six years, one sixth of the long work each year. This time through, I’m reading it in thirds. The next go around, I’ll probably read half of it at a time.

Reading a third of it in the last two or three weeks makes me realize that the plot is more tightly constructed than I previously thought. There are lots of cuts from one strand of the tale to another and many groups of characters that meet or get separated while wandering in the woods, narrative devices that give the book a feeling of being only a wobbly web of randomly arranged episodes. But when the girl captured by pirates in canto XIII finds her lost love in canto XXIII, you know Ariosto sees the connections between all the parts. In canto XXII, when Ruggiero and Bradamante are freed from their magical illusion, see each other clearly, and kiss again for the first time in a long time, only then to be separated when Bradamante runs into the woods after Pinabello, who stole her horse in canto III, you know Ariosto has a plan. 

So I’m taking lots of notes – some in a separate file, some in the margins of the book itself – to help me when I read Orlando a third time: notes like, “This is the letter Ruggiero wrote in XXV, 85-92.” Supposedly contemporary readers or listeners had no trouble keeping track of the multitudinous threads. The poem is written in 46 cantos, and it helped me a lot to realize a few years ago that it must have felt then like a 46-episode television series. Just as any one episode of LOST or Stranger Things or Rings of Power cuts abruptly from one subplot to another, and just as some subplots in any of those series are sometimes set aside for a couple of episodes, and just as a guest character in season 1, episode 4, may return and become a major character in season 2, episode 7, so Ariosto juggles his storylines and hits on two or three in each canto. But I have my own issues with attention, and I live in an age of video, and it’s harder for me to keep track of it all when I’m reading than it is when I’m watching – and it’s pretty hard for me when I’m watching, to begin with! I’ve tried different methods of keeping notes on Renaissance epics before. I made a giant spreadsheet for Faerie Queene, but I decided it didn’t do much good after all that time compiling it. For Orlando Furioso, besides my marginal notes, I’m writing a canto-by-canto summary as well as character-by-character synopses. It helped immensely to keep referring to the ones from last year as I read this year’s third of the work. So I’m hoping it will all help me keep the storylines straight the third time I read Orlando. But I have to say that I love every bit of storytelling that happens in Orlando Furioso, even when I’ve forgotten the context.

As I was writing this post, I started thinking, “Will I ever read Orlando a fourth time?” Then I had a curious thought that, if I get the chance to know someday that I’m in the process of dying, I might want to comfort some of my hours with Ariosto’s great poem. When my dad was dying of cancer, he wanted me to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit to him, just because it was the last Dickens book he had obtained. (I had given it to him the previous Christmas.) I already know that if I find myself in that situation, I’m going to have one of my kids, or maybe my grandson, read Dombey and Son to me. But I may want to give Orlando some time, too. I guess it’s a version of the desert island question: if you knew you had six months to live and felt too weak to hold the book yourself, what book would you want a loved one to read to you? You can let me know if you come up with an answer.

By the way, I reached the part this year where Orlando becomes furioso. He’s been in love with Angelica since the beginning. But I’m giving the plot away and telling you right now: if you ever read this book, don’t waste any time hoping that 1500 pages later Lando and Angie will get together and live happily ever after. Halfway through the epic, just before she leaves the tale forever and Ariosto tells us he’s glad to be rid of her, Angelica runs off with a fellow named Medoro. They carve their names in entwined knots on trees and leave notes in caves telling the world how much they love each other (and how much fun they had in the cave). Orlando sees it all and goes crazy. Whatever will Charlemagne do now that he’s lost his greatest paladin? Will Paris survive? Or will history change? Everything up to this point including enchanted castles and magic shields has been absolutely historical, of course. But maybe Ariosto wants to veer into alternative history now and let the Saracens take the French capital. Or maybe Astolfo will ride a hippogriff to the moon to search for Orlando’s lost wits! 

So Does Obscure Mean Wretched?

I had read that Jude the Obscure was the most shocking and controversial of Hardy’s novels. Then I found in the last couple of weeks that it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. (Dreading?) I guess I forgot all these years that the people shocked by it were Victorians, who were, as we know, somewhat easily shocked. Yes, Jude slowly rejects the Christianity of his youth. Yes, he gets divorced, falls in love with another woman and entices her away from her marriage, has sex once with his ex for old times’ sake, has a little trouble understanding why his fiancé is upset about that, and . . . OK, you get the idea. Yes, clearly Silas and Eulalia were scandalized. And I would have hated it forty years ago, too. But at this point it seems to me that the story is the kind of story that happens in real life and that Jude is just a person that I might know. 

I noted in a post back in May that I’ve learned to be less judgmental even about fictional characters. And I find myself less judgmental about authors. Hardy had an admirable talent for writing compelling fiction, and in Jude it seems to me he finally became completely honest with the public about his doubts – doubts about the Church, doubts about the Bible, doubts about society’s judgment on people who didn’t fit the mold (Jude loses his job as a manual laborer because of his marriage to a divorced woman, and Sue’s first husband loses his teaching position because he lets his adulterous wife have a divorce instead of teaching her a lesson and making her stay). And it’s not like he can’t see anything right about the Church or faith or social norms, either. So since he was so forthright and so able to outline his characters’ positions sympathetically and so willingly to look at both sides of all issues, I was able to go along with him, agreeing sometimes, disagreeing at other times (probably more often), but respecting him always. I will warn you, though, any of you who think you might read Jude the Obscure based on this short review, that it is probably the saddest book I’ve ever read, with one unforgettably, gut-wrenchingly tragic scene.

By the way, I don’t think even Hardy had sympathy for his character Arabella, so is it all right if I’m a little judgmental about her?

A Star is Born – and a Heart, and a Black Misery Drop, and a Green Book

I have an exciting announcement to make to my readers today – so exciting that it calls for the first-ever embedded image on exlibrismagnis! How exciting is that?

Forty years ago I thought of designing a board game based on the novels, novellas, and stories of Dickens. The idea was that each player would play one of the lead characters from a novel – David Copperfield, for instance, or Florence from Dombey and Son – and would slowly acquire acquaintances, employers, friends, love interests, and enemies in the form of cards representing other characters from perhaps other novels or stories. Each card would correspond to a page in a book that told all the possible actions that that character might take, the current action being determined by a die roll.

Twenty-five years later, the card game Dominion appeared, and the deck-building game came into the world. I was ahead of my time in conception but abysmally behind my time in practical application. So the creative thoughts began flitting again: maybe, as in these new deck-builders, all the necessary information and possible actions could be printed on the card itself. But still, what information would I need? What would a card look like? How would this game go? How could I test anything without cards? But how could I make cards without knowing what the game was like? How could I do any of it without beginning to reread the novels while taking careful notes on every character that appeared?

Three years ago, I realized that if I didn’t get started soon, I would get a chance, long before any game actually materialized, to ask Dickens himself face-to-face how he would have designed it. (It’s highly probable that, in that blessed state, neither of us will care enough about board games to hold the conversation.) So two years ago, I worked for a while and came up with a card design, based on measurements and specifications from a custom game printing company. Last year, I took careful notes (all arranged systematically on a spreadsheet) while reading Great Expectations and filled in a few cards. This past winter, I reread some more and added a page in my spreadsheet for almost 100 characters from Our Mutual Friend. Then I laid out card designs for about 30 of those characters and filled out a few more from Great Expectations. A couple of months ago I uploaded the designs to the printer, and a few weeks ago they arrived. And now, my friends, like a very proud papa, I show you a picture of a sample of this first draft!

Almost all the illustration come from nineteenth-century editions of the books. I had to borrow a few from novels by Trollope and Thackeray, but their all Victorian. The mechanics of the printed text aren’t very consistent: remember that I don’t really know how this game is actually played. But essentially, most characters provide either red hearts (love and emotional support), yellow stars (action and practical aid), black drops (misery), or green books (eccentric qualities). Some characters just do what they do, but many will attempt to do useful things only if you have the hearts or stars to pay for the action. Some Dickens characters don’t provide exactly love and don’t make practical contributions but are absolutely essential to the atmosphere of a Dickens story; these provide the green books, which a player can spend to improve the chances of success on any heart or star action.

Speaking of atmosphere, it’s important to me that every card have a description taken from the original text, which should be read aloud whenever the card is first acquired, and, if possible, a quotation of something the character says. Sometimes you’ll play a card and find that all you get out of it is being able to read the quotation aloud. Take John Podsnap, for instance, one of the cards featured in the picture. Podsnap never attempts anything; he simply is what he is. So his actions cost nothing; the player simply rolls two dice whenever the card is played. Should no “successes” be rolled (a success being defined as a 4, 5, or 6), the player reads the quotation: “We know what England is. That’s enough for us.” If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action – also taken from, if not exactly quoted from, the original text: “He clears the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him with a flourish of his right arm.” Actions like this have nothing to do with winning the game and everything to do with enjoying the game! Should the player be so fortunate as to roll two success, he takes a green book token, a benefit indicated on the card as “+1P.” For right now, I’m calling the green books Plot Points, hence the P, and yet that’s exactly what they aren’t because these eccentric characters do nothing to propel the plot toward either conflict or resolution!If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action

How does one acquire these cards? Each player will have a personal character board that outlines specific needs of one leading hero or heroine from one of the novels. Are you an orphan who needs to go to school? Go through the draw deck, looking at the backs of the cards, on which is printed some essential generic information about each character, until you find one that says “Teacher,” and then add that card to your private deck. You might be lucky and end up with the kind Mr. Mell from David, or you might be very unlucky and draw Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. I say “unlucky,” but what’s life, or a book, or a game without some challenges, right?

And speaking of challenges, what exactly are the goals of this game-in-the-making? Each main character has problem to overcome; Bella Wilfer, for instance, has to get over her mercenary view of life. Each main character has a secret to find: Pip has to find out who is providing him with money. An orphan must end up with a kind protector, while all heroines and adult males must end up married with a steady, reputable source of income, however small. (A penitent Bella will actually score higher if her husband’s income is small!) All grief tokens must have been removed by hearts. (Esther from Bleak House forms an exception to this rule since she, more than others, gets wisdom from sorrow.) All a player’s enemies must be caught or dead. Most of a player’s friends must be alive, happy, and preferably married. It’s essential to me that the game can have 0-to-n winners. If no one meets the goals, no one wins. If two of three players meet their goals, the two of them win, while the third has to be satisfied with a Pip-like ending to his story. 

There’s a lot yet to do. For one thing, I have to play with these cards and figure out how the game goes. How does one play through one’s private deck of characters? How many cards are in play at a time, and how can a player manipulate which cards stay and which go away (so as to get advantageous combinations in play together: a detective and a criminal, for instance, or a couple of young, eligible friends that really do need to fall in love)? Is there a map to move around? My original conception, as innovative as it was, was forged in the era of board games in which choices were limited and fates were determined by the roll of dice; the game that emerges from these last few years of thought and effort must present the player with a lot more choices. All of that means that I have to change some of the cards I already have, because I haven’t put real choices on enough of them. And, of course, I need to read a lot more and make a lot more cards – once I truly know what to put on them. Right now I have 53 cards in my little draft deck, but I envision that the game should end up with something like 800.

But right now, at last, I have a draft copy of some cards to play with!