A Loser like Emma

A month or two ago, I glanced through several of the posts I’ve listed (in the right column of the blog) as favorites. I especially happy with what I wrote in “A Loser like Jane Austen:” Austen writes in a way that ensures her readers will identify with the main characters. The heroine is usually a reader whose virtues are valued by only one person: our hero. The Atlantic has just declared on its cover that “The Age of Reading Is Dead,” and anyone reading these books today is as unusual as the teenage girl who read them at the time of their publication. So in reading we identify with the heroine because she also reads, and we identify with the hero because we, like him, appreciate the reading girl.

Over the last two weeks, I read Emma (for the third time), and I’m wondering now how it fits or modifies my view. Emma is the least virtuous of Austen’s heroines. (If you haven’t read it, don’t worry: she’s not a twenty-first-century flawed heroine with drug and sex addictions. Emma pursues matchmaking too aggressively and on one notable occasion says something quite cruel – although the remark is also Austenesquely witty.) And she’s unlike, say, Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood in other ways, too. The narrator calls her clever, but she explicitly is not a true reader: all her plans to read great books result in familiarity with a lot of first chapters. And she has not just one but a steady stream of admirers: women and girls who emulate her or crave her advice, and men who want to marry her. So how are we outsiders, we weirdo dreamy readers, we losers supposed to identify with her?

I think the key to saving my oh-so-insightful scheme lies with Mr Knightley, who admires Emma in spite of her flaws. He is, in fact, the only one who tells her the truth about herself when she’s being reckless or self-indulgent, so he alone actually sees how problematic she is. (With the possible exception of Miss Bates, whose constant self-deprecation makes it hard to know how well she sees the faults in others.) He might even love her because her wrong is sometimes so good-hearted and so close to being right. If matchmaking always brought two people a lifetime of happiness, wouldn’t it be a virtuous calling? In any case, if we are to love the book and its lead character (I certainly do), we have to identify with Mr Knightley in loving Emma despite her shortcomings. So there’s half the formula: we identify with the hero.

But is it really so hard to identify with Emma? We don’t have the expected mutual love of books, but don’t we all share with her the love for plans for books? And of course every last one of us has to identify with her spiritual story. After Emma’s cruel remark on Box Hill (which doesn’t fully bother her until her paraclete Mr Knightley shows his disapproval) she begins to see the error of her ways and calls her mistakes “sins.” Anyone else here ever dabble in sin? Emma knows she has to repent, and she does. And Austen does a marvelous job showing us, near the end of the book, an Emma who still displays all the traits we loved even when they were tainted or misdirected earlier in the story.

Jane Austen was very, very clever. 

AI Twist

As I was thinking about what I would post about Oliver Twist, I thought I’d look up what I had written the last time I read the book. I could have searched my own notes and files, but I tried instead to search online. (Tangent: At one point a few years ago I found that I need to use a Bing search – or maybe it was Duck Duck Go – in order to search for exlibrismagnis. But today, neither of those searches turned anything up.) From the top results on the Google search, it appeared that I had not written anything on the book about the boy who said, “Please, sir, I want some more,” except for a short entry in the Top 100 series on April 7, 2012. 

But imagine my surprise when I found that Google’s “AI Overview” reported that I had written much more! “Ex Libris Magnis,” it says, italicizing and capitalizing the title of the blog and separating its constituent words, “is a well-known” – Ah! “Well-known”! – “literary blog that frequently discusses classic literature, including Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Oliver Twist. The blog highlights the grim workhouse realities, the haunting phantom of guilt that plagues the criminal Bill Sikes, and the overarching themes of social injustice in 19th-century London.” Now, I had indeed written about “the haunting phantom of guilt” – my phrase, which Google presented without quotation marks – but the rest is all stuff that people generally write about with regard to Oliver Twist, but that I didn’t. 

I recently did a search for an illustration of one character from Great Expectations, and the AI answer described in detail a picture by a particular Dickens illustrator and even described the pose and facial expressions of the character. It all sounded really good except that I had seen all of the illustrations by that artist and knew that no such picture existed. If Charles Dickens were here at my elbow in more than spirit, he would join me in warning you, dear reader, against believing everything AI says.

In any case, since I haven't said much about Dickens’s (Google AI: note well the correct possessive form of this author’s name!) second novel before in this blog, I’ll begin today with some remarks about my past relationship with the book and then follow up with some notes on this latest reading. Well, OK, I guess I’m not “beginning” at this point, already four paragraphs into the post. You already know that the book includes a “haunting phantom of guilt” and displays, if Google’s AI knows anything at all, “grim workhouse realities.” But whatever verb you think I ought to use, the object of said verb is this set of remarks:

Oliver Twist holds a very important place in the history of my reading adventure. For one thing, it was the first book I read while walking, and the book I was reading when I ran into the telephone pole: the first of only three major mishaps I’ve had in over forty years of literary ambulation. It was the first book I ever took notes on for the Dickens game (see this post), and the book that cemented the idea that passing secret information around had to form a central mechanic in that game. 

It was also the first Dickens novel that disappointed me. I had previously read A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend: three novels from the Inimitable’s more mature years. None of the three has much melodrama. All three have at least some well drawn female characters. Oliver, by contrast, seemed to me full of melodrama and sentimentality. Many of its characters, maybe even most, are predictable types, from the undertaker Mr. Sowerberry who makes jokes about coffins to the all-talk-and-no-courage Morris Bolter who will commit any crime whatsoever for Fagin . . . as long as it’s no riskier than stealing from children. Those characters are fun, but my short description of them here is about as deep as they go. Oliver also includes the Prince-Charming-ish Harry Maylie and his cousin-who-isn’t-actually-his-cousin (thank goodness! considering the end of the book) Rose Maylie, who represented my first encounter with the Dickens heroine who is, as I described the type last year, pretty and earnest and good. As a literary character, Rose is thinner by a far cry than Bella Wilfer or Madame Defarge. All the good people end up happy, and all the criminals and rotters end up either dead, imprisoned, or deported. And little Oliver is just too cute and lovable and sweet and honest and thoughtful no matter what train of criminal monsters takes turns acting as his guardian.

At least, that’s what I thought the first time I read the book.

I’m not sure when I read Oliver the second time. It wasn’t on my previous ten-year plan (probably because I remembered being disappointed by it all those years ago), and I apparently haven’t read it between the time this blog started and now. But I can tell you that it was less disappointing the second time. And it was even less disappointing this time. Yes, Oliver is too good to be true. But Dickens wants to pronounce judgment on his society for not taking care of its children, and he makes the judgment more pointed by making Oliver lovable. (He’ll make this point again in A Christmas Carol with the two children hiding under the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present, children who definitely do not look lovable.)

Now, I feel like making one more very solemn point in the last part of this post, but I’m going to interrupt myself to say something about the boy with the most famous nickname in the Great Man’s oeuvre: the Artful Dodger. Yes, he’s a thief. Yes, he tries to turn innocent Oliver into a thief. Yes, if the characters of the book are divided into Villains and Heroes, something one can pretty much do since the novel is so melodramatic, the Artful would have to go in the Villains column. But is there not something lovable and admirable and even in some sense heroic in his last scene? It’s at least funny, and only a comic genius of Dickens’s caliber could have come up with it:

      “There! He’s fully committed!” interposed the clerk. “Take him away.”
      “Come on,” said the jailer.
      “Oh ah! I’ll come on,” replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. “Ah! (to the Bench) it’s no use your looking frightened; I won’t show you no mercy, not a ha’porth of it. You’ll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something! I wouldn’t go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!”
      With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it; and then grinning in the officer’s face, with great glee and self-approval. 

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program of solemn points:

As for Rose? Her prettiness and pleasantness may make her The Character Destined For Marriage At The End Of The Tale, but her goodness is anything but generic and common. She is the one who says “The poor thing!” when Oliver shows up at the door wounded, bloody, weary, and dirty. Yes, I know we all know that taking in such a child is the right thing to do. But don’t we also know that 90% of people (or more) would ignore him, tell him to go away, or call the police on him out of fear or worse? Dickens certainly knew. After all, he knew that his country routinely sent Olivers to the workhouse and called that the end of Christian duty. He needed a radically countercultural character to show what should be done for a needy child.

And now how many Christian women do you know who talk to prostitutes in the street and offer help without judgment? Rose does. Rose goes to Nancy primarily because she knows Nancy has information that can help Oliver: true. But she doesn’t treat Nancy as a disgusting thing or a necessary evil. She treats Nancy as a fellow pilgrim in need and offers sacrificial aid. Nancy replies to her:

      “Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me as I am tonight, and preached of flames and vengeance,” cried the girl. “Oh, dear lady, why ar’n’t those who claim to be God’s own folks as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches as you, who, having youth, and beauty, and all that they have lost, might be a little proud instead of so much humbler?”

Rose may be thin as literary characters go, but she is not a common stereotype. The whole force of Nancy’s heartbreaking question rests on Rose being completely a-typical. In the preface to the third edition, Dickens has to defend his inclusion of thieves and prostitutes in his book. Many of his readers, enough to precipitate the defense anyway, were shocked, shocked I tell you, by having their purified imaginations soiled with such outrageous characters! I ask in all seriousness: if these professed Christians had lived in the first century, what would they have said to Luke when he produced his gospel? Nineteenth-century England needed Rose, and so does twenty-first-century America.
 
And, now, I am going to give away the ending of the book. Yes! The very last words! Oliver is in an orphans’ workhouse for a reason: he was born out of wedlock to a woman who, because of her condition, was poor and despised and deathly ill. But by the end of the story, once her identity has been discovered (by means of all that passing of secrets that will play such an important role in my board game), the good people in Oliver’s life, the truly good, the weirdly good, the all-too-rarely good, put up a memorial stone to her in the local church.

      Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble tablet, which bears as yet but one word: “AGNES.” There is no coffin in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is placed above it! But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love—the love beyond the grave—of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.

Agnes had been known and loved, had laughed and had made people laugh with joy. She was one of God’s lambs (“Agnes” comes from Latin agnus, meaning lamb, a fact that Dickens most definitely knew and had in mind when naming Oliver’s mother), and Jesus tells us what the angels do when the one lost sheep is found.

Nothing to Worry About After All

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I started Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s just the kind of classic that I absolutely have to read. But it’s Russian, and it has the word “dead” in the title. Was this going to be as dreary and as hard to get through as the steppes in winter? But it turns out, the book was – I would have to say – delightful.

For the first half of the book, a charismatic fellow named Chichikov rides around finding landowners who are still paying taxes on the dead serfs they own (it was said that Russian lords own so many "souls," so these dead serfs are apparently the dead souls of the title) and offering to buy them. We don't know why for quite a while. We only know that he goes from house to house, one house per chapter, meeting the gentry and offering to buy their dead souls. The interest lies in the various reactions his offer receives. One is relieved to be rid of the tax burden and sells quickly. Another, sure that Chichikov is up to no good, refuses to sell. Yet another fancies himself a great bargainer and asks forty times as much as what Chichikov offers. The ludicrous conversations get funnier and funnier in a satirical way, and they made me start to think that these Boyars, who casually rate their wealth not by acreage or income but by the number of human beings they own, might actually be the dead souls Gogol had in mind. The comic stupidity of Chichikov’s valet and carriage driver make it clear that we’re meant to laugh. And the laughter and the satire, I’m guessing, got even some rich Russians at the time seeing the ridiculousness of claiming to “own a soul.” Perhaps a few even saw the evil in it.

In the second half, Chichikov reveals his plan. I’ll not give it away, but let’s just say that maybe Chichikov himself is among the dead souls. A fire consumed much of the second half of Gogol’s manuscript, and Gogol died young without ever rewriting the end. Apparently some people heard him read it, though, and some took notes or had bits of copies of it, so most editions, including mine, recreate the second half of the novel as much as possible. Still, the book ends mid-sentence. Yet it doesn’t matter at all. Maybe Gogol originally wrote a ripper of an ending that would have been remembered as one of the greatest endings in all of literature. But we don’t know it, so we don’t miss it. And all the while being thoroughly entertained, we seem to get the message Gogol had in view without any tidy wrap-up. 

Come to think of it, maybe a mid-sentence break is actually one of the greatest endings in history. It’s as if Gogol wrote, “I invite you to make a closer examination of your duty and the obligations of your official position on this earth, because all of us now have a dim conception of it, and we hardly — Oh, forget it! This kind of nonsense goes on in the world incessantly, so no ending makes sense. And if you don’t understand what I’m trying to say by this time, you never will. So let’s just call it a day.”

Two (?) Classics

I intended to start today by apologizing that my reading and blogging of the last few years doesn’t necessarily live up to the lofty standards implied by the title of this blog. But I just looked over the last few posts looking for examples, and now I’m not sure why I need to apologize. Maybe I was thinking that Infinite Jest is too recent to be considered a classic or a “Great Book” with a capital G and a capital B. And maybe I was thinking of the last time I apologized for this very thing, which I did in a post from October about a history book that included some plagiarism. But the last few months have seen additions to this site commenting on Ariosto, Galsworthy, Trollope, Richard Baxter, Aelred, Philip Sidney, Verne, and Boethius. Yes, Neil Simon found his way in there, too, but for the most part, I really do stick with books at least a hundred years old that have lasted.

Today I want to talk first about some books that are about a thousand years old that haven’t exactly lasted. For about a decade and a half, I’ve been looking forward to reading some of Albertus Magnus (his works must be great books because he’s known as Albert the Great!), known primarily, where he’s known at all, as the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. The volume I bought, called Spiritual Selections, included four little books. I read the first and enjoyed it. Then I read the second, which had some weird, ungrammatical translations. Then I started the third and realized it was just a different translation of the second book; I didn't read it even though the translation looked better. Then the preface to the fourth book said it was doubtful that Albert had written it, so I skipped it. When the compilation a twenty-first-century reader can buy of a thirteenth-century theologian’s writings has such issues, can the work be said to have lasted? And if not, can it be considered classic, as in “classic (adj): having stood the test of time”?

The first book in the anthology dealt with intelligence and the intelligible. Much of it explicitly acknowledged Aristotle and Plato, and much of it anticipated Albert’s famous student. So I was quite familiar with what he had to say. The best part categorized how well we do know and can know various things. Just as the presence of the sun is eminently obvious because of its light while the sun itself is impossible to know through direct observation (no solar filters in the 1200s!), theological objects, says Albert, are the most manifest but the hardest to know. Mathematical things are most firmly known. Physical things “fall away from intellectuality because of privation, matter and motion.” So, as Albert summarizes the situation, “divine things are said to be above the intellect, mathematical things in the intellect, and physical things below the intellect.”

The second treatise was called "Clinging to God." It starts well with glosses on praying in your closet and worshiping in spirit and truth: let images fall away, and worship God in your intellect and will. But it gets Manichean: Albert eventually wants to say that physical objects are unworthy of our attention, and that only spiritual objects have value. I know that if I asked him whether the Incarnation didn’t prove the value of God’s physical creation (as if the repeated phrase “And God saw that it was good” doesn’t do it in the first place), he would temper his statements. But he was a medieval monk who believed that he could not serve God while enjoying itch-free clothing or a comfortable bed, and I don’t have any desire to denigrate his path to godly devotion.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is clearly a classic. It’s old. It’s about great things. It’s still available in the book store half a millennium later. And its title has given the language a useful word. I found More’s depiction of a perfect society interesting and ideal, but I couldn’t stop thinking that it wouldn't work. Take the case of criminals who don't reform. If you do repent and make restitution as you are able, you are restored to full citizenship status. But if not, you become a slave of the state. The slaves are treated well and enjoy good, nutritious food, but they have to do all the demeaning work (butchery, for instance) that would lower the characters of citizens. Well, doesn't this kind of labor lower the character of the very people who need uplifting? After all, they haven’t reformed yet, but why not continue to give them a chance? And won't the demeaning work make them lesser in the eyes of citizens so that they end up not being treated well? And why is labor demeaning in the first place? Farmers, plumbers, stonemasons, road builders, and garbage collectors are all heroes of civilization, worthy of our thanks and admiration (and better pay). And the Bible tells of at least one very noble Carpenter. But maybe the book wasn’t meant to be a practical proposal. And I have to admit that I found the best parts inspirational and timely: why execute a man for theft of needed food instead of reforming the economy so that everyone has food?

PS: I don’t know what’s happening. exlibrismagnis now has half a million views. Blogspot no longer lets me see all the referring URLs. A few years ago, I could see a full list with links. Clicking on most of the links took me to pages asking me to pay for porn or betting or something Russian that I didn’t understand. Not that I clicked on “most of the links”! Let me say it a different way. Most of the few links I tried led me, disappointingly, to the abovementioned. Then at some point, Blogspot put in some filters, those links stopped showing up, and my views went way down to what I assumed were all actual views. But now the hits are way up again and I don’t know who they’re coming from. I know that most are from the United States and, of all places, Brazil. But Germany, Bangladesh, and Argentina take up significant portions of that particular pie chart as well. So what constitutes a view? Views seem to be tied to particular posts, hence the “Most Popular Posts” gadgets at the bottom of the page. If you scroll back and the title of a previous post comes up, does that constitute a separate view? The site has 825 posts now, so maybe the views stack up faster and faster as legitimate viewers scroll through looking for a post to spend a minute on. Anyway, half a million views. The world is weird.

Ad Infinitum

In the last few years, I’ve come to realize with my love for old books, I’ve neglected some recent fiction. I’ve checked a lot of lists online of “Best Recent Novels,” “Best Twentieth Century Novels,” “Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years,” “Best Novels of the Twenty-First Century,” and whatever else comes up. One novel that comes up on almost every list that encompasses 1996 is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a long one: over a thousand pages. But I got off to a good, quick start this year and had the time on my schedule. So I jumped in about a week before the Winter Olympics began.

Now you’d think (and I did think) that this would be the kind of novel I’d really like. It has footnotes. It has footnotes that have footnotes. It’s satire of our civilization includes the notion that time itself is now sponsored by corporations: most of the action takes place during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The best high schools mainly teach sports, and any kid who likes to learn things like – you know – science or literature is looked down upon as virtually insane. The main character of this book goes to a tennis school, and his college draft committee senses a problem when they see that his grades slipped from A-plusses to mere A’s one semester. See, as I describe it, and it sounds good to me.

But Infinite Jest has a very dark streak running right down the middle. Everyone in the book is either using drugs or in rehab. Everyone using drugs resorts to crime. One poor recovering addict gets into the crossfire of a robbery gone wrong, and when he goes to the hospital, he’s unable to speak (because he’s been intubated? I could never quite tell) and can't tell the doctors not to give him narcotics because he’s an addict. And everyone accepts the idea that suicide is a reasonable response to the world.

I can see why some people consider it their favorite book and report having read it multiple times. And I don’t think you have to be crazy, addicted, or suicidal to like it. But it wasn’t for me. Especially as a book to read in between Olympic events!

Some American Poetry

After my quadrennial Winter Olympics marathon, I had some reading to catch up on. And now I have some blogging to catch up on.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read (among other things) some poetry by Carl Sandburg and some by Robert Frost. In each case, I bought an anthology of a few hundred pages and read most of the book. Carl Sandburg’s wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and maybe because I felt rushed, I didn’t give myself the time fully to enjoy it for what it was. It was mostly free verse, and after having studied and worked to understand meter, I was at sea again. So much attention directed itself at the lines of varying length and at trying to confirm that there really, truly was no hidden meter, there wasn’t always enough left attention for assimilating the meaning of the text. But I did get the drift. The poems had a lot of praise for manual laborers (who can never have enough light shining on their dignity), for industrial advances (which haven’t always proven to be, shall we say, unalloyed blessings), and for the way the prairie land of Illinois shapes the lives of people living there (I’ll take his word for it). It didn’t grab me like the poetry of, say, William Cowper and William Cullen Bryant did. (Those two came up in earlier years of my project of planned reading.) But I definitely have a clearer picture of Sandburg as a whole now, where previously I really only knew the poet as the guy who wrote a poem about fog and little cat feet.

Robert Frost’s poetry sank in more easily, perhaps because he often wrote in iambic pentameter. But there were some surprises. From the little bits of Frost that I had read in anthologies or that I had heard quoted, I had previously thought of him as a nature poet. But most of the poems in the collection I read were narratives – or at least I should say that most of the pages are devoted to longer narrative poems rather than the one-pagers that might or might not be about nature. Another surprise: the narrative poems are full of dialog, with people speaking so plainly, the pentameter can barely be heard:

Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.

Admittedly, the meter jumps out in that first line with the hens and cows and pigs getting naturally accented. But I needed the context for the last two lines, which I would say are typical.

It’s easy to understand why a poet would get known for one type of poem more than another more abundant type if the scarcer type is typically shorter: they’re easier to quote and anthologize. And I guess I’ll carry on with the skewing by giving more space to a shorter poem. Here’s one I found especially pretty:

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

I have to say first that I know from the meter “flowers” needs to be pronounced “flours,” which sounds more elegant to me somehow. (Knowledge of meter makes a difference!) I like the casual rhyme scheme: the rhymes come sometimes one line after another (reflect/defect) and sometimes in alternation (shiver/gone/river/on). That changing pace seems to suit the walk of a contemplative man through the winter woods. The poem has no elevated vocabulary as a poem from a century earlier would have had. But in the context, common words seem to take up meaning into the very shapes of the sounds. “Chill” and “shiver” sound cold with their sibilants and short “i” sounds. (Say “shiver” and “river” and tell me the first one doesn’t sound colder.) And while all of the first lines portray a picture in whites and light colors, doesn’t line 6 suddenly sound darker with its “oo” and long “o” sounds? I think Frost, despite his name and the topic of his most famous poem, would be happy in summer woods as well. But I like his warning to the trees to think twice during the winter. Don’t be hasty, as Treebeard would say. Let these fresh pools and the delicate flowers beside them, in them, and under them have their day and show us their picture. Plus, I like any celebration of life and color during winter instead of portraying it in the old, tired way as dead and gray.

I guess that’s part of why I watch the Winter Olympics every four years.

Consolation

Have I really not posted anything about Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy before? I thought I would look up what I said on this site during my earlier reading of the book. But it appears that I last drew consolation from Boethius’s philosophy in 2008, two years before I started this blog. In those early years, I wrote lots of posts about books I had read previously, but apparently not about this one.

Boethius was a Roman senator and a philosopher living in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. He was a Christian who also loved reading and teaching the Greek classics and in fact translated many of them for the Latin-speaking world. He and Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville helped promote an outline for learning that lasted for over a thousand years. In this curriculum, beginners studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric. (In the twentieth century, some elementary schools were still called “grammar schools” because of this tradition.) These subjects formed the group of three roads, or trivium. Because the material is for the young, we get our word “trivia” from its title, as in, “What a beginner learns is trivial.” The word has had fifteen hundred years to morph, though. We now might say that much of what a beginner learns is essential, not trivial in that sense. And “trivia” is now thought of as esoteric knowledge, less so on Tuesday nights at the pub and more so on Jeopardy! Knowing that the word “trivia” comes from the trivium constitutes an excellent piece of trivia, I’d say, and I’d be super excited to see it come up on the great game show.

I digress from my digression of biographical background. After learning how to get one’s thoughts together and express them convincingly, students following the plan of Boethius et al. next studied the quadrivium: the mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. (These wise people acknowledged that knowledge of music theory was essential toward understanding how the world works!) Once a student had become a “master” of the quadrivium (hence the name of the second degree in the universities that would rise some 700 years after Boethius), he could move on to professional study in the pinnacle fields of law, medicine, philosophy, or theology. Those who finished this course were qualified to teach doctrine in those upcoming universities, and hence were called “doctors.” In our times, most people graduating from the third program of higher education in areas other than law, medicine, or theology receive a degree known as “Doctor of Philosophy”: PhD. All of this to say that Boethius’s books have been so influential that many of their ideas and terms remain with us after a millennia-and-a-half.

But Boethius fell out of grace with the government in 523 and was imprisoned. Feeling every wretched thought one might think in that situation, he began to think of the philosophy he had learned from Plato & Co. as something more than academic knowledge – as helpful, inspiring, consoling knowledge. And he memorialized the journey of his heart in the remarkable book known as The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote between the time of his incarceration and the time of his execution a year later. He begins the book by bemoaning his fate and then declaring that the figure of Philosophy personified appeared to him to teach him his lesson.

Or to re-teach him, rather. Philosophy’s first point is that Boethius is unhappy because he has forgotten the end of all things and the means by which the world is governed. But he can’t simply be told those things. Learning – either the first or the second time – is a process. She tells her author that she must start with basic ideas that her student can handle now and progress only slowly to the great lessons of ultimate things he must relearn. Clearly, Philosophy has read his other books and knows to start with the trivia! So she begins the course by pointing out that it is better to be grateful for all one has rather than resentful for all one has lost. Wouldn’t it be great if we all felt better after hearing that?

But we don’t. So now she starts to talk about true happiness. Everyone agrees that the goal of life is happiness: it makes no sense to say that you want to be happy so you can use that happiness for a further goal. But what is happiness? Is it power, as some say? Is it wealth? Is it pleasure? All have their advocates, but none of these can be true happiness. What powerful person doesn’t have to keep constant guard over his power lest he lose it all? Is it really power then? And can it possibly be ultimate happiness if it can be lost at any moment? Similarly, no wealthy person is either satisifed with wealth or confident that the wealth is safe. And pleasure is the least stable, reliable blessing of the three. The problem is, she explains, that philosophers have divided true happiness up. True happiness consists of all these things together: power is good only if it is pleasant, and wealth is pleasant only if the wealthy has the power to keep it, and pleasure is only good if one has the means to attain it. (Notice here that Philosophy is actually a critic of philosophy!) She then says that the happy one must be powerful, wealthy, and comfortable (she talks of other goods: I’ve narrowed down the list so my post isn’t as long as Boethius’s book) not as possessing these things but in his very nature. And this is true only of the one God. Any true happiness on the part of a human, then, must come from participating in godliness.

OK, but now Boethius has some questions. If happiness depends on God, then what about fate and chance? Is God bound by either? Why do bad things happen to us if He isn’t? And what about free will? If God knows everything, how can we be free? And if we’re not free, how can we be happy? Like a lot of us, even those of us who haven’t been put in prison and await execution, Boethius doesn’t want be happy and good and godly and serve the Creator and Sustainer of the universe just because it’s the right thing to do: he wants some answers! The post is long enough. I’ll only say that Philosophy provides very good answers to these questions; if she didn’t the book wouldn’t have brought actual consolation to so many people over so many centuries.

Maybe I’ve said enough to entice you to find the answers in this book. Just try not to wait until the government comes to get you.

PS: I’m pleased to see that blogspot's editor knows the words “trivium” and “quadrivium.” I’m confused to find that it doesn’t known the word “sustainer.” But then it doesn’t know the word “blogspot,” either!

First 2026 Roundup

I’ve had a good start with my reading list in the first three weeks of the New Year – such a good start that I have five things to report on already.

I started the year with some plays. Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers was entertaining and interesting, but was it really worthy of a Pulitzer? Two Jewish boys have to live for a year with their grandmother, who, in Yonkers now as the title suggests, has previously lived the difficult life of a Jew in early twentieth-century Europe. She’s hard and prickly and tells the boys it does no good to be sentimental. Her daughter, the boys’ aunt, confronts her for being so harsh, and the scene is interesting and provides a vehicle for the actors’ emotional display, but does either character come to a conclusion or learn a lesson? Or is the lesson that some people are just abrasive? I guess the grandsons accept her in the end even if her children don’t exactly.

Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, also a Pulitzer winner, was better. But, boy! was it weird! The family depicted is so crazy and dysfunctional, the audience (or reader) is left wondering how much is real and how much is in the imagination of . . . of somebody in this broken family. In some ways, hardly anything happens: half the first act consists of a conversation between a man on a couch and his wife, who is offstage. But the “action” of unfolding the psychology of these relationships is intense. And, yes, the title of the play indicates the elephant in the room: there is a child buried in the garden tha no one wants to mention.

I’ve read about a dozen books by Jules Verne, and he’s only disappointed me once (Michael Strogoff). He famously likes science but often gets it wrong. He loves geography and exploration even more but often gets that wrong. I think he wants his heroes to be godless rationalists but – thank heaven! – doesn’t get that quite right, either. And yet it all works, and it all makes me happy. The spirit of adventure and wonder in the not-so-accurate world Verne depicts is captivating and inspiring, and Around the World in Eighty Days provided fascinating treats on every page, even though I’d read it before. Phileas Fogg is described as being entirely mechanical, but he’s like Oz’s Tin Woodman: he has a heart that beats passionately once duty calls it into service. And Passepartout is one of the great sidekicks in literature: his position is maybe not so lofty as Sancho’s or Watson’s, but he’s close.

I have two quick, extra notes about Around the World. First, the narration says early on that Fogg was a member of the Reform Club (an actual institution in London) and replaced one of its great orators. I had to look this up! Who was the great orator of the Reform Club that Verne’s fictional character was supposed to have “replaced.” My internet search led me to a list of fictional members of the Reform Club, a list that included, from a Trollope book appearing just four years earlier – wait for it – Phineas Finn! Look at those names: Phileas Fogg and Phineas Finn. Can there be any doubt that Verne at least got his character’s name from Trollope’s? And maybe the fictional Finn is even the great orator that Fogg supposedly overshadowed. 

Second, I reported at the end of last year that I would try to read this book in French. I read it at a normal pace in English (well, normal for me, which is rather slow), but I am indeed also reading a bit of it in French every day. I’m in chapter 3 of the French, so I’ll probably finish it up around June if I can keep up the pace. The vocabulary is harder than I thought it would be, but I’m slowly learning. The goal is to practice on this familiar novel with good English translations (I read Butcher’s) that can serve as guides, so that later, sometime in the next few years, I can read some of Verne’s more obscure novels in French without having to rely on the problematic English translations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’m also following through on my idea to read just one “directive” from chapter 3 of Richard Baxter’s Practical Works each day. That plan isn’t working as well as reading Verne in French. I’ll say more in a few weeks when either the piecewise reading has started to work or I’ve given up on the experiment.

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.

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!