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.