Book Awards -- 2011

Halfway through! I finished the fifth year of The Plan just a couple of weeks ago with Dickens’s Pictures of Italy. This weekend I start year 6, and the weekend after that I take the Kindle to Italy. In the meantime, I’m happy to announce my book awards for the year. I blogged earlier in the year about the recipients of all awards except the last.

Still Too Good to Compare with Anyone Else
Charles Dickens. This year I read the Great Man’s masterpiece among masterpieces, the book about the boy Dickens called his favorite of all the children that lived in his mind. Much of David Copperfield, in fact, is about people that live in the mind: both fictional people and the imperfect shadows we create of people we know. I always wondered before why David begins his first-person account with local women prophesying at his birth that he would grow up to see ghosts. Now I understand that the prediction came true.

Best New Read: Fiction
George Orwell, Animal Farm. Partway through the book I realized that trying to figure out the allegory was a pointless distraction. Stalin’s Soviet Union provides just one example of the contemptible but all too common human dynamic demonstrated in this fairy tale. The leaders’ insistence that the common folk use particular language, the changing rules, and the loose interpretation of the rules by those who are more equal than others all sound very familiar. I once received an email stating that in my publications and correspondence I must always refer to the University of Oklahoma with a capital T in the word “the.”

Best New Read: History
Durant, The Age of Faith, chaps. 27-36. Last year I read the section on the political history of the Middle Ages in Europe. This year I read Durant’s account of the Church and the arts. My spirit soared with the Gothic cathedrals and was humbled with Dominic and Francis. And Durant got the part dealing with music right, including all the technical descriptions – a rare accomplishment for a nonexpert!

Best New Read: Religion
My first inclination says to go with the Church History of Eusebius, especially on this feast day of the Holy Innocents in commemoration of Herod’s slaughter of Jewish babies, but instead I’ll take the opportunity to celebrate George Morrison’s Christ in Shakespeare. According to Morrison, the Bard testified to Christ not so much by putting sermons in the mouths of the Christian characters as by faithfully depicting the physical, spiritual, and moral world that Christ created. I’ll never read Shakespeare the same way again.

Most Confusing Philosophy
As much as I want to say Hegel, especially after reading William James call him a lunatic, I have to give the award to Oswald Spengler, who expected others to judge ideas, people, and institutions by the colors they invoked in Spengler’s mind.

Most Encouraging Philosophy
Aquinas, Part I-II, QQ. 59-63. I’ll attempt a summary of this section on virtues – gulp! The moral virtues arise in us first as aptitudes and are developed usually by habitual action but sometimes by miraculous gift. They don’t eliminate the passions, as the Stoics incorrectly taught. The ends of moral actions must be in accord with reason, and reason orders and directs the passions; therefore, some moral actions are strengthened by rationally ordered passion. God surpasses human reason, so He gives us the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) to direct us to Himself. My summary of the summary: God works in us to will and to do his good pleasure.

Biggest Disappointment on the List
Since Spengler already got an award, I’ll give this one to Richard Blackmore’s Lorna Doone.  The “hero” gets a lot of guns so he can kill all his enemies and get the pretty girl. Seriously?

Most Disappointing Sequel
Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book. I liked the wildly inventive first book in the Thursday Next series (which got a positive award from me last year), and this one provided lots of new clever ideas, like the secret library of all possible plots, but the story brought in too many elements and meandered. I couldn’t help wondering if the sidetracks were there to give a second meaning to the title, as if Fforde were saying that the plot of his book suffered from the literary espionage that he writes about in his fantasy world. But I never could fully buy into that theory, especially when this supposed celebration of books dethroned classic after classic by calling them all boring.

Best Reread
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. As much as Jasper Fforde seems to hate the classics, Lewis loves them. His story of the way God used good friends and good books to reveal Himself inspires me on every page, and I was pleasantly amazed at the number of Lewis’s favorites I had read in the twenty years since I last enjoyed Surprised by Joy.

Best Recommended Offroading
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games. I could be picky and ask who Katniss is talking to in her first-person, present-tense narrative. Sometimes it seems like I’ve been given access to her stream of consciousness, but at other times she explains details of her culture as if talking to an outsider. But in spite of this problem (which may be resolved by one of the later volumes, for all I know), this book had me enthralled  beginning to end. It clearly belongs to the era of reality television and cameras in the sky, yet it shows Aristotelian unity in its almost relentless pursuit of a single story.

Well, there’s my last retrospective on 2011. Next time, a preview of 2012.

Recent Disappointments

In each of the first five years of my ten-year plan, I've scheduled what seem like the tougher things mostly in the first half or two-thirds of the year, leaving stuff I know I love for the end of the year. I do this partly for the sake of delayed gratification and partly because my fall semester is much busier than my spring or summer. But this annual plan runs the risk of putting me in a Slough of Despond if I end up with too many books I don't enjoy in the first six or seven months.

And that's just what happened this last week. My interest in Lorna Doone waned as I read more of it (or never fully waxed, perhaps), and Spengler's Decline of the West has not captured my sympathy at all. By the end of Lorna Doone, it seems that the virtues Blackmore rewards are physical strength, rage, beauty, money, and ownership of weaponry. I had hoped that John Ridd's humility, wisdom, or love of Shakespeare might play a part in the climax, but that hope was disappointed. In the end, John kills all his enemies, making sure to get a valuable necklace from one first, and then lives happily ever after with his beautiful wife.

I thought of the Slough of Despond a minute ago because a slough plays a part at the end of Lorna Doone. John drops his gun and wrestles with his last enemy, literally tearing his muscles off his bones, until they find themselves in a bog. John jumps out in time and then watches his nemesis sink "joint by joint" without a thought of helping him. I just saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 a couple of days ago and watched Harry risk his life to save the life of his supposedly mortal foe, Draco Malfoy, and I was reminded that acts such as these are what make me root for Harry. But by the end of Lorna Doone, I no longer had any reason to root for the character I had spent three weeks with. Mark Twain said that, while in a good book the reader wants to see the good characters rewarded and the bad characters punished, he wanted to see all the characters of The Last of the Mohicans drowned together. And I must confess that I thought of Mark Twain while I watched John Ridd standing by that bog letting the other man drown alone.

Spengler actually seems a little crazy so far. He calls the West a "Faustian" culture, but only explains that term on page 97. By that expression he means a culture that has adopted empty space as its chief symbol. He finds empty space in gothic cathedrals, Bach's counterpoint, Rembrandt's colors, Descartes's geometry, Newton's physics, and Kant's philosophy. Nevermind the common understanding that the spaces of gothic cathedrals were filled with light, that Kant denied the concept of empty space, or that the system of abstract spatial coordinates that Descartes and Newton and other in the seventeenth century used seemed like innovations at the time; Spengler says our declined culture is all about empty space.

I was willing to go along with his idea and his manic, ill-organized presentation of it to see if it helps make any sense of history even if not totally accurate. But I read something Friday that pulled the rug out from under my generous intentions. In the service of some argument I didn't quite follow about vision and extension and fear of death (or something), Spengler said that form in western music was based entirely on variation and that expansions and contractions of time had absolutely no place in music. Here Spengler has stumbled onto a subject I know a little bit about, and I can say that he's quite simply wrong. The Bach whose music he says represents empty space often manipulates a motive or even an entire theme in such a way that it takes twice as long to unfold. This kind of temporal expansion (and correlate methods of contraction) pop up all throughout the "Faustian" period of music history: in the twelfth-century compositions of Notre Dame, in the fifteenth-century proportional motets of Ockhegem, and in the nineteenth-century hemiolas of Brahms and Chaikovski, to name just three other examples. Theme-and-variation form, on the other hand, never played the prominent role he claimed for it in the Classical period of Haydn and Mozart, not to mention the rest of the Faustian Era.

The bright side of my situation carries both short-term relief and long-term hope. For the present, I'm finished with Blackmore, and I can kick my reading speed of Spengler into a higher gear. I'd rather skip some of the words all the way through the rest of the book than give up and skip all the words of the second half. And then after I finish Decline of the West, I have nothing left to read this year but books I know I love -- Plutarch, Durant, Boswell, Catton, Lewis, and others among my favorites -- and then I end the year with the Great Man himself.

Nothing New to Say

That title certainly won't excite anyone about reading today's post. I wish I had a more enticing hook, but it's time for an update on Lorna Doone, and I simply haven't found much new to report. In my third week now of reading the book, I continue to alternate between enjoyable passages of poetic descriptions or interesting observations on the one hand, and opaque or confusing narrative on the other.

I'm getting used to the dialect by this point; it still comes up regularly, if not quite so often as it did in the first chapters. A recent sample: "Whoy, dudn't ee knaw, Maister Jan," said Bill Dadds, looking at me queerly, "as Jan Vry wur gane avore braxvass." Of thirteen words in Bill's sentence, only one is spelled in the familiar way, and it's one that we would not use in contemporary construction. As I understand it, the original rendition represents local pronunciation and wording of this sentence: "Why, didn't you know, Master John, that John Fry was gone before breakfast?" Curiously, in one long story told by the John Fry just referenced, Blackmore has John Fry speak in unbroken dialect except where he quotes a man from London. So can John Fry imitate a London accent (supposedly represented by standard spelling), or did Blackmore just not think this scene through carefully enough?

The antiquated -- or at least unfamiliar -- rural vocabulary also continues. In the last several days I've come across besom, gamboge, hoggets, antre, sheppey, withy, linhay, and armiger. I actually knew besom (the only one Blogspot's spellchecker seems to know, as well), but it still seems to fit this category since it refers to a broom made of bundled sticks.

But many times I have trouble following a passage even when no unusual words or special spelling are involved. Blackmore has his first-person narrator, John Ridd, say something like "I can't remember if I've mentioned before that . . ." so often that I begin to wonder if Blackmore himself simply forgets to supply necessary details. In one conversation, government officer Jeremy Stickles says, "Not one word to your mother about this unlucky matter," to which John Ridd replies, "Do you suppose I can sleep . . . and all the time have it on my mind, that not an acre of all the land, nor even our old sheep-dog, belongs to us, of right at all!" I've gone back over the conversation three times now, and I can find no indication from Stickles about any end of the Ridds' rights to their property. The only "unlucky matter" referred to before this is the theft of a valuable necklace. Is there a line of dialog missing? This forgetfulness (whether it belongs to the narrator or to the author) is especially ironic since John often claims to remember details of events vividly even when he doesn't understand their significance until, perhaps, years later.

The examples go on and on. John hears that two militia forces have attacked the villainous Doones as planned, yet he concludes (apparently correctly) that they have attacked each other. A carriage is waylaid by highwaymen apparently in the middle of the woods only to be destroyed by a wave of the ocean -- and then later the carriage is said to have been on a mountain pass! I've been confused about the plot or character's motivations so often, I've started reading a different way. Instead of trying to figure things out or follow threads, I just let the events and dialog come as they may. I try to treat anything that doesn't make sense simply as a pleasant surprise. I don't know if the disconnect lies in Blackmore, his characters, or me, but it lies somewhere, so now every time it appears, I just wave at it and move on.

And Blackmore rewards my persistence. I enjoyed this observation by John about some overlooked colors of autumn:

On either bank, the blades of grass, making their last autumn growth, pricked their spears and crisped their tuftings with the pearly purity. The tenderness of their green appeared under the glaucous mantle; while that grey suffusion, which is the blush of green life, spread its damask chastity. Even then my soul was lifted,  worried though my mind was: who can see such large kind doings, and not be ashamed of human grief?

 So Lorna Doone certainly hasn't become one of my favorite books or even one that I would recommend to anyone, but it has provided pleasant (if sometimes mystifying) entertainment on my daily walks for the past two weeks.

New Wor(l)ds

A week ago, all I knew about Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone was that the book shares a name with a cookie and that Deep Purple's guitar player shared a name with the author. As it turns out, I didn't even know the book's general date, since I put it under "18th-century novels" in my overall plan and, as I learned on the first page of the book, it was published in 1869.

But I had even more to learn as I kept turning the pages (or, actually, pressing the Kindle button). In starting Lorna Doone, I entered a strange new world: the Exmoor region in Devon and Somerset of southwest England, where I've never been and know very little about. As with Henry Esmond, coincidentally, this nineteenth-century book sets its tale in the seventeenth century, which adds to the alien atmosphere of the book: when first-person narrator John Ridd tells of the arrest of Lord William Russell and Mr. Algernon Sidney, he assumes I know who they are, but I don't. Then there's the antiquated vocabulary of English farming and trade: chapman, wether, peat rick, and so on. (My spell checker puts a wavy line underneath "wether" and "chapman," so it doesn't know these words either.) And he often uses outmoded meanings of familiar words: "factor" as a trader in goods, for instance, and "tell" to mean "count." (The last example survives in our culture with the bank teller.) And on top of it all, some of the characters speak in a local dialect whose accent (also unknown to me before this) Blackmore indicates by respelling almost every word. A sample:

"Plaise ye, worshipful masters," he said, being feared of the gateway, "carn 'e tull whur our Jan Ridd be?"

"Hyur a be, ees fai, Jan Ridd," answered a sharp little chap, making game of John Fry's language.

"Zhow un up, then," says John Fry poking his whip through the bars at us; "Zhow un up, and putt un aowt."

This mysterious world of Lorna Doone is full of all kinds of danger. I've seen floods and rapids threaten or even take life several times already in the first quarter of the book. Highwaymen plague the crude roads, but John Ridd and his family consider them gentlemen in comparison to the Doone family, who rob and kill neighbors sometimes randomly for sport. The people of Exmoor apparently just grow up learning to accept the danger and deal with it. John says at one point that he is "feared of being afraid; a fear which a wise man has long cast by, having learned of the manifold dangers which ever and ever encompass us." And the danger may not be all material: an uncanny moan floats through the woods every few months or so. "It mattered not whether you stood on the moor, or crouched behind rocks away from it, or down among reedy places; all as one the sound would come, now from the heart of the earth beneath, now overhead bearing down on you. And then there was rushing of something by, and melancholy laughter, and the hair of a man would stand on end before he could reason properly."

Poor Lorna grows up in this perilous world among a family of heartless marauders. She acknowledges the evil of her clan's ways, but she believes herself doomed never to escape. "Is it any wonder," she says to John, "that I cannot sink with these, that I cannot so forget my soul, as to live the life of brutes, and die the death more horrible because it dreams of waking? There is none to lead me forward, there is none to teach me right; young as I am, I live beneath a curse that lasts for ever." (Her last words reminded me of A Tale of Two Cities and Charles Darnay's disgust with the aristocratic heritage that has, he says, left him "bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it." I wonder if John Ridd will have to make a Sydney Carton-esque sacrifice in order to free Lorna.)

Lorna says she takes some comfort from little, everyday "signs" of goodness. "Whether from the rustling wind," she says, "or sound of distant music, or the singing of a bird, like the sun on snow it strikes me with a pain of pleasure." Much of the theme of the book, in fact, seems to revolve around observation of the poetry in things. Like Duke Senior in the comedy by John's favorite poet, John might say he and Lorna find "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," although they may have trouble finding "good in everything." John says "God can never charge him" for being a poet, but within a couple of pages of taht denial, he notices remnant patches of snow left on the hills "like a lady's gloves forgotten." He claims that in remembering a scene, he notices details that made no impression at the time, so perhaps we're to take it that John simply has a natural poetic gift without realizing it -- or at least without the cultural freedom to admit it.

John's first-person narrative wanders aimlessly through this dangerous, mysterious world. Characters come and go quickly, and he cannot report even the briefest event without tangents upon tangents about the situation, the way he felt, and other similar events. Explanations for these side-excursions always come later rather than sooner. Sometimes he tells the reader that explanations will come later, as when he says one man came "a foot below the Doone stature (which I shall describe hereafter)." Why didn't he just say then that the Doone's were normally quite tall? Overall, the unfamiliar details and the tangled presentation of context makes for difficult reading.

But don't I read a novel partly to learn about a world I'm not familiar with? Maybe a lack of narrative organization is just part of John's character. When he starts to tell Lorna's background, in fact, he admits that writing gets him confused and decides to let her tell her story in her own words. Then, he says, "If ye find it weariness, seek in yourselves the weariness." John Ridd really is wiser than he lets on or admits to himself; he knows that slow reading might be due to the book and might be due to the reader. I'm enjoying the parts I understand of Lorna Doone and even some of what I don't understand, so I'll credit my weariness to the reader and keep going.

Looking Forward

Each December as a part of my annual routine, I review the closing year by rereading my notes from the past twelve months, and I start to look over the next year's book list with anticipation.  This year I think back over the fun and learning and even the disappointments of 2010 with great satisfaction and no regrets, and 2011 promises to be another pleasurable, fulfilling year.

Each year begins with Greek classics, and 2011 begins with a return to some favorites.  The three plays by Aristophanes are among his most accessible for the reader of 2500 years later.  Many college students of today read Lysistrata and discover great troves of humor.  I can't help but think that the name of Thesmophoriazusae is all that keeps its sneaking and crossdressing and silliness from entertaining today's youth.  And The Odyssey tells one of the world's greatest stories.  I talk about it at least once every year to my music classes as an iconic model of a plot that works well in music also: the journey is full of adventure, and more dangerous surprises await even after we get home.  Beethoven and Homer are not all that different.

The philosophical selections always require a lot of pondering and note-taking, but I love getting stumped on some given day's six-page assignment, pondering and wondering during the rest of the day, having a moment of clarification the next morning, and then reviewing the notes of the last few days to see how much clearer the whole thing seems – including passages that I was too clueless about even to be stumped on.  Sometimes the moment of clarification comes, not just a day, but years later.  Reading Aristotle's Topics for the first time made much in his other works clearer.  (It will probably have this effect again this year.)  Reading Aquinas often makes Aristotle clearer and vice versa.  And Kant is nearly indecipherable on first reading, so I know rereading a crucial part of his most important treatise will light a lot of bulbs.

I don't know if I'm going to enjoy Hegel or not; I'm hoping to understand him at least.  Having read his Philosophy of History, I recognize some of the ideas when his name comes up in other (usually academic) reading.  But I don't get it – and not just because it's not the kind of philosophy I'm not going to agree with.  Plato talks of a world soul, and I get it.  Spinoza talks of the universe as a unity, and I get it.  Darwin talks about all life forms evolving through undirected variation, and I get it.  I don't believe any of these ideas, but their authors make the ideas clear enough that I know what it is I don't believe and can see why others do believe it.  But Hegel talks about a single universal consciousness that evolves, and I don't get it, perhaps because he seems to write in terms that made sense only to him, not to me.  I'm hoping that both the variety of selections and the editor's notes in the anthology I chose will help.

Most of the fiction and history for the year is fated to give me great pleasure and understanding.  David Copperfield is one of the world's very greatest novels, and my second favorite book by my favorite author.  If there were fewer books in the world, I could read David Copperfield once every year for the rest of my life and not get tired of it.  O'Brian, Plutarch, Thackeray, Durant, Williams, Catton, Trollope, and Waugh have all entertained me greatly in the past, and I'm sure the books of theirs that I've picked for 2011 will please.

Then there's Richard Blackmore's Lorna Doone.  Both names are rather famous today: the first as the name of a member of the rock band Deep Purple, and the second as a cookie.  Neither is a household name in reference to literature, though, so I don't have high expectations in this quarter.

The most wondrously glowing item on the reading list for 2011 is the beginning of Orlando Furioso.  Twenty years ago or so, I was reading something or other by C. S. Lewis, and he mentioned Orlando Furioso as an example or analogy that he assumed was familiar to every reader.  My heart ached as I read the passage, and I had my last really angry regret about my weak, space-age education.  Just after thinking, "Why weren't my schools better?!" I thought, "You can read all the classics you want to.  Just start reading."  Soon afterwards, I began my search for the right set of books and the right reading plan.  I settled on the Britannica set and its ten-year reading plan, and I loved the experience so much I drew up my own second ten-year plan, some of the fruits of which you are enjoying (or at least experiencing) now.  But as much as I felt I was finally getting the education in classical lierature I had always wanted, it occurred to me that I had not read the book that started it all.  This year, I go back to the beginning and start Orlando Furioso.

It will be a great year of great literature and the first full year with my blog.  Happy New Year, and thanks for sharing part of the experience with me.