Book Awards – 2025

Year 9 of my Third Decade of planned reading reaches an end today. You know what that means. It’s time for America’s favorite awards show: the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2025!

On this last day of 25 squared, I see that a year ago I wrote that I was most looking forward to reading Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées. Will any of them win awards? Let’s get started and find out!

Author whose name most closely resembles “Charles Dickens”: Charles Dickens
Yes, I always give my favorite author his own category so that other fictional writers have a reasonable chance of an award. I wrote in my personal notes for this year that the words “dismal,” “lugubrious,” “melancholy,” “moody,” “moodily,” “gloomy,” and “sullen” came up frequently in Our Mutual Friend, but I still found it a joyful book. I do love the book itself, but a big part of my attachment to it is the memory I have of reading it the first time together with my dad and my fiancé some 45 years ago.

Best On-List Fiction: Scott, Ivanhoe
This book was so much better than I remembered and so much smarter than any of the other wonderful Scott books I’ve read in the last few years! Just reread my post on it from March to see why it won this award.

Best Off-List Fiction: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
The best recent fiction I’ve read in a few years! At a time when we need a stern reminder that the nobility has a horrible habit of abusing its privilege and should be narrowly proscribed, this lovely book shows us that nobility, i.e. greatness of heart is healing and generous and must be free to expand as far as possible, especially to children in need.

Best New Read in History: William J Cooper, Jefferson Davis: American
I didn’t write a post about this book earlier. While I think face-to-face political conversations are important, I usually try to avoid hot political topics in social media, and, unfortunately, Davis is the subject of very recent political actions and high emotions. But this biography is getting an award, so, with your indulgence, I’ll stray from my normal policy for just a moment. Some people argue that tearing down a statue erases history. Rejoinder 1: Tearing down a statue only erases “history” for someone who doesn’t read. Rejoinder 2: A statue is more than history: it exalts a person and the cause he stands for, so tearing it down is more about approval or disapproval of a part of history than it is about telling that history. Now I will be briefly political and state a position that I still can’t quite believe is controversial: I don’t think we need statues in this country venerating a man who broke his solemn oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and who instead directed armies to kill U. S. soldiers in order to preserve a supposed right to enslave human beings. But I think we need lots of books about him. And this was a good one! Political mode is off now.

Most Confounding Read in History: Nathan Miller, New World Coming
In my long, frustrated post from October, I said that I found in Miller a paragraph that I had just read in John Milton Cooper’s Pivotal Decades. After I wrote that, I found the passage in Cooper, and now to be totally fair I should say that Miller didn’t follow Cooper (who wrote a couple of decades earlier) word for word and that Cooper’s passage was about twice as long. Nevertheless, the two passages were very similar: Miller referred to four of the approximately eight points or examples that Cooper had listed in his passage, he gave them in the same order, and he used similar language. I would accept the borrowing as ethical if Miller had only given credit, but he didn’t refer to Cooper in the prose, and Cooper isn’t mentioned in footnotes or the biography. And yet I learned a lot from Miller’s book. Confounding!

Most Historians Read This Year with the Same Last Name: William J. Cooper and John Milton Cooper

Best Drama: Shakespeare, The Tempest
Do I really need to defend this award?

Best Reread in Poetry: Milton, Paradise Lost
Or this one?

Best New Read in Poetry: Thomas Warton, “The Pleasures of Melancholy”
I had planned for ten years to spend two to three weeks with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and of Edwin Arlington Robinson this year. On the other hand, I read some of Warton’s poetry in two days near the end of the year because of some stray tip that I got from a forgotten source. And yet it was Warton that moved me most. I’m sure the topic of this particular poem was a big part of the reason.

Best New Read in Religion: Richard Baxter, Practical Works, ch. 3
I was shocked to find that this chapter was 300 pages long, too long for the amount of time I had allotted to read a single chapter of a book, but grateful to find it written in a highly organized outline format that allowed me to skim it meaningfully. Even though I didn’t read every word, the words I did read were very good, and I strongly need to consider the plan I suggested in my earlier post: to reread the maybe 200-300 topic sentences this year, one per day, and let each one roll around in my soul for a few hours.

Best Reread: Pascal, Pensées
Even though, as I reported earlier this year, I was disappointed to find that this collection of notes and thoughts and ideas for a great religious treatise didn’t hit me in the gut this time the way it has in the past, I still consider this life-changing volume the greatest book never written.

I apologize for the straightforward, relatively unimaginative awards post this year. I read over last year’s awards in preparing to write today and was quite pleased with the way the muses moved me 365 days ago. But the job has been done, and the world has been enlightened. As usual, I’ll take a couple of lines to say what I’m most looking forward to next year. It’s hard to narrow down a list I’m very excited about, but I’ll say that my anticipation centers most on The Lord of the Rings, Jon Meacham’s recent biography of Lincoln, Romeo and Juliet, Sidney Lanier’s A Boy’s King Arthur, and Les Miserables. I’m also looking forward to attempting to read Around the World in Eighty Days in the original French. Now that I think about it, I may have to restructure next year’s awards to accommodate a lot of rereading!

May your New Year’s Day be filled with happy memories of good books (and other highlights!) and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 2026. I’ll be with you through the last year of my Third Decade plan, and at least one of my posts in the coming year will offer highlights of my plan for a Fourth Decade. Happy New Year!

I Owe John Dewey an Apology

It’s amazing how reading a philosopher can differ fro hearing about a philosopher. I appear to have had a wrong understanding about John Dewey for quite a while. I thought he stood for the destruction of all I hold dear in education and the promotion of all I hold silly. But earlier this month, I read his Experience and Education and came away with a very different view of him.

I’ve had teachers tell me that the days of teachers claiming authority and imparting information is over, that students must teach themselves, that social control is constricting, and that true learning is about doing and not about thinking. And I’ve heard these people praising John Dewey. “What are you talking about?” I’d say. “Well, have you read any John Dewey?” they’d respond. Now notice that, even if they were right about what John Dewey said, by claiming that reading John Dewey would set me straight, they’re admitting that John Dewey proved himself an authority, had information to impart, and expected me to think his way, thus undermining everything they said he stood for.

But they weren’t right about Dewey. Or, at least, they weren’t right about the way he represents his philosophy of education in this book. Dewey says that teachers do have a position of authority founded on their greater knowledge and experience, but he says they must exercise it in a way more conducive to learning than simply by expecting every student to sit still for long periods every day listening to said teacher’s monologues. He says that social control is necessary and that done right, as with the social control effected by the rules of a game, social rules can bring about freedom. He says that students must be active participants in their education but never says anything that could be taken to mean that they will learn all information and skills by themselves if only given the chance; he says instead that the teacher, with greater knowledge nd understanding of goals, must be the leader of a group activity. And, far from saying that learning is about doing and not thinking, he makes it very clear that one of the most important lessons for young people is to learn to think before acting.

The book had some problems, and I certainly didn’t agree with everything. But for now I’ll just say that I owe Dewey an apology: for years I’ve mentally accused him of saying things that he didn’t say. Again, at least not in this book. I’ve only read the one, so I’m not an authority!

Friends in Arcadia

I finished reading my list for year 9 yesterday. We have big plans for Christmas week, and I have some sleep to catch up on, so I thought I’d try to write about two books in one post today. That strategy hasn’t saved time in the past, but I’m determined today!

First up is Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship. Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century monk, loved Cicero’ treatise On Friendship but regretted the world not having a guide to friendship with specifically Christian content because, as he says, without Christ true friendship is not possible. I loved reading through this happy little book of medieval philosophy. Aelred portrays a friendship based on complete trust and mutual enjoyment of good things. For such a relationship, he says, one must select candidates and “test” them (through observation!) before approving them. Reject the irascible, the unstable, the suspicious, and the verbose, he advises. But if a person passes the test and becomes your friend, stick by that friend in almost all circumstances. Even if he plots treason, warn the state quickly, but don’t give up your friendship. Notice that the commandment of love is perfectly compatible with sending your friend to prison (for his good and the safety of the community). But, wow! If a traitorous plot doesn’t end friendship, can anything? Yes, Aelred tells us. My heart thudded when I read these words describing a sadly familiar feeling: “Nothing tortures the spirit more than abandonment or attack by a friend.” Your friend can become a former friend through five means: slander, reproach, pride, betrayal of secrets, or a “treacherous blow.” Even should such a heart-breaking split occur, though, out of respect for the former friendship, one must still be ever willing and ready to offer help and advice if asked for. What a lovely guide for a world filled with broken, self-centered, cruel beings!

Now I must say a few words about Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. I’ll avoid the story of trying to figure out whether I was buying the “Old Arcadia” or the “New Arcadia.” I got a Complete Works on Kindle and read the longer of the two options. If you’re ever in the mood for a 600-page, 16th-century pastoral, I recommend you do the same. I will warn you, though. I found Sidney a little harder to understand than either Chaucer or Mallory in their original language and spelling. There may be translations into modern English, but, as I hinted at before, I don’t know which of those contain the short, original version or the “director’s cut” that he produced later in his life. 

I enjoyed the story a lot. It felt like reading a novel-length narration of a Shakespeare story, and for good reason: it includes a lot of bits and pieces that commonly made their way into stories and plays back then. Take the case of young Pyrocles, who disguises himself as a girl named Zelmane (for reasons I never really fully bought). The king of Arcadia falls in love with “her,” and the queen, seeing through the disguise, falls in love with Pyrocles. This part reminded me of Twelfth Night. So Pyrocles attempts to solve his problem and theirs by inviting them both to a tryst in a cave at night. This part reminded me of any number of Shakespeare comedies. Pyrocles’ plot doesn’t unfold according to plan, of course, and Sidney gets another hundred pages out of the mix-up. There are shipwrecks and rescued princesses and love potions — OK, speaking of heartbreak, yesterday’s tragic news makes me think I couldn’t come up with a list better than the one we hear from Peter Falk’s “Grandpa”: It has “fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles . . . .” Not so much with the monsters, but everything else fits perfectly. If I didn’t have family coming and last-minute Christmas duties and a new reading list to start in two weeks, I’d start reading Arcadia all over again right now. Maybe instead, I should go watch The Princess Bride.

It’s All Good

In my master Plan, I have written for year 9, “Richard Baxter: Dr. Johnson says all of it is good.” With that kind of recommendation from one of my heroes, I just had to read something by Baxter. At some point I discovered the title Practical Works. But at some later point (I don’t remember when or where), I must have learned that Practical Works is quite long (I’m looking at an offer right now on logos.com for an edition in 23 volumes), and I must have found a further recommendation or some intriguing information about an excerpt because my Plan then says, “Just read chapter 3.” 

At the beginning of this year, I gave myself a week for this chapter, called ““General Grand Directions for Walking with God,” thinking that I’d get ahead five or six days. Little did I know that the single chapter was as long as a book: about 300 pages! I had a schedule to keep and not much wiggle room this close to the end of the year, so I confess I had to skim the chapter. Fortunately, Baxter wrote this chapter in something like outline form, making it very easy to skim while making sure that I missed none of the key points.

The chapter contains seventeen “Grand Directions,” each of which has a number of sub-directions and other lists of subordinate points. Some tell the reader to “strive” or to “labour” to do some given thing, but most came in a form directing the reader to consider or understand or study some aspect of God’s character or of his relationship with us. Really following these directions instead of just reading (or skimming!) them properly needs some quiet and some time for meditation. For these times, there should be a zeroth direction: Strive to set aside adequate time for meditating on these directions. 

Consider some examples:

• Grand Direction IV: “Let it be your chiefest study to attain to a true, orderly, and practical knowledge of God, in his several attributes and relations; and to find a due impression from each of them upon your hearts, and a distinct, effectual improvement of them in your lives.”  

• Grand Direction V: “Remember that God is your Lord, or Owner: and see that you make an absolute resignation of yourselves, and all that you have, to him as his own.”

• Grand Direction VII: “Continue as the covenanted scholars of Christ, the Prophet and Teacher of his church, to learn of him, by his Spirit, word, and ministers, the farther knowledge of God.”

• Grand Direction X: “Your lives must be laid out in doing God service, and doing all the good you can, . . . remembering that you are engaged to God, as servants to their Lord and master.”

• Grand Direction XI: “Let it be most deeply engraven in thy heart, that God is infinitely good, and amiable.”  I especially like this sub-direction: “The great means of promoting love to God is duly to behold him in his appearances to man, in the ways of Nature, Grace, and Glory.”

• Grand Direction XII: “Trust God . . . ; and quiet thy mind in his love and faithfulness, whatever shall appear unto thee, or befall thee in the world.”

• Grand Direction XIII: “Diligently labor that God and Holiness may be thy chief delight.”

And the most poetically phrased of the Grand Directions:

• Grand Direction XVI: “Let you life on earth be a conversation in heaven, by the constant work of faith and love: even such a faith as maketh things future as now present, and the unseen world as if it were continually open to your sight.”

It’s too bad I had to skim the chapter; as Dr. Johnson said, it was all good. Reading it straight through over several days wouldn’t have been right, either, though. I think the chapter should be read one direction per day for as long as that takes. There. There’s my direction for you.

Trollope Comes Through Again

Last year, I wrote here that I couldn’t figure out which was the central plot of Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, and that the title didn’t point the way since the Senator’s story was at most the C plot. This year, I read Trollope’s Mr Scarborough’s Family, and, although a large number of subplots weave their way through the fabric of the book, the story of the manipulative Mr Scarborough and his will and his two problematic sons is clearly at the center. It isn’t the last story touched upon, though. Trollope knew his main audience consisted of housewives and teenage girls, and he put in a love story, as well. According to his usual plan, he announces in the first few chapters who “is to be our hero” and who “is to be our heroine.” So we know right up front who is going to get married at the end of the book, and yet it’s still a fun ride getting the lovebirds to their nuptial bliss.

Before the age of the psychological novel and stream-of-consciousness narration, Trollope loves to give his readers insight into his characters’ thinking. Augustus Scarborough (son number 2) hardly does anything in the book without two or three secret motives. I have to admit to you, I often find myself saying, with regard to certain people who continue to cause me grief every few months, “Why did they do this? I have know idea what’s going on in their heads! I guess I’m glad I don’t understand how they think.” But somehow Trollope does understand (at least as far as I know) how young girls in love think, how lawyers think, how ashamed gambling addicts think. And he has to use an omniscient narrator to get into their minds, because almost no character in a Trollope book just says straight out what he or she is thinking. It’s even more seldom that a character says what he’s feeling. Even when they don’t have hidden agendas, these characters have to deal with Victorian standards of proper speech. Poor Mr Prosper once actually blurts out exactly what he thinks in a moment of frustration, in front of his vicar no less, and then spends a long time apologizing for the breach. And it’s all fascinating to me, this translation of thought to the language of acceptable intercourse. Of course, some personages of low character show their baseness precisely by expressing their thoughts directly, but in a Trollope novel, these people are usually mere plot devices and not characters with story arcs.

As far as characters with story arcs go, Mr Scarborough’s Family has quite a list of good ones. Mr Scarborough senior, who believes he knows morality better than the established law, goes to great, deceptive lengths to work around the law and do exactly what he sees to be right, even if he has to lie to and about his sons. Mountjoy Scarborough, son number 1, has a gambling problem but tries to kick it and believes he will have the strength to do it if he can only get Florence to marry him. Alas! Mountjoy is not Trollope’s designated hero, and Florence is the designated heroine, so we’re left at the end of the book not knowing if Mountjoy will find any actually available remedy for his problem, but we hope that he will. Harry Annesley is the designated hero. He and Florence aren’t very developed even by the usual standards of Trollope’s love-interest characters – until the last chapter, when we find that their married life is full of playful wit and good-natured acceptance of less than perfection. I wish Trollope had shared more of this humorous side of these two characters earlier. The public unjustly vilifies Harry for an action he commits right at the beginning of the book (we learn about his secret motives for not talking to defend himself), and his uncle, Mr Prosper, who has told Harry for years that he will inherit the Buston estate, decides he can’t possibly leave an estate to a man with a bad reputation and determines to disinherit him by finally marrying at 50 and having a son. His impractical plan (what woman of child-bearing age is he going to find?), his thoughts about how to choose a woman, the winner in Mr Prosper’s process (the delightfully named Matilda Thoroughbung), and their marriage negotiations are all amazing and hilarious. Then there’s Mr Prosper’s valet, who runs the house and Mr Prosper. And there’s Mr Grey, the lawyer, and his unmarried daughter, who doesn’t want to get married because she would miss her late-night discussions with her father about the law. I could go on. OK, OK, one more detail! Mr Prosper says he can’t possibly travel from Buston to Cheltanham. The trains don’t connect the two places directly, so he’ll have to go to London and and travel from one station to another, and, he asks, “What will I do in London for an hour and a quarter?” That’s the kind of detail that makes you love a man in a book that you might only get annoyed with in real life. But Trollope and authors like him teach us that we should love the real person and all his annoying foibles with all the forgiveness and even enjoyment that we afford the fictional character. 

I could also go on about the way Trollope compares views of marriage (as he kept in mind those teenage girls reading the book, marriage for love wins out, of course), distinguishes between legality and morality, explores many kinds of reactions by several characters when they find that they can’t force others to think and act the way they want, defends women’s social agency, and sympathizes with young and old, rich and poor, gentry and commoner. But I’ll just end by sharing one fun detail. As a clerk in the Royal Post Office, Trollope invented the public mailbox on the street. Even if you’ve never read one of his books or even heard of him, you’ve used Anthony Trollope’s gift to civilization many times. Many people write back and forth to each other in this book, and Trollope makes sure to mention on one occasion that the epistler deposited her message in the “letter pillar.”

Anthony Trollope wrote a lot of novels, so there’s a lot to get through. But I’m going to put this one on my list of books to reread someday.

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.