Book Awards – 2024

One year ago, I said that I was especially looking forward to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a biography of Gen. Longstreet, Charles Williams's Many Dimensions (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's Third Reich, and, of course, Dickens (Great Expectations and Pickwick Papers this year). Most of these books campaigned hard in the last three or four weeks for Academy votes, and some of them will find that their efforts have been rewarded. The red carpet is out. The electricity is in the air. Welcome to the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2024!

Author of the Reread Book that Most Contradicted My Memory: Charles Dickens
The Inimitable always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. The melancholy Great Expectations is always a beautiful chiaroscuro painting, a hearty feast with bitter herbs, and a best friend with special needs all rolled up into one. I know I’ll enjoy greatness every time I pick it up to reread it, and it never disappoints. Pickwick Papers, on the other hand, I had remembered as a good but relatively shallow book with a string of forgettably silly episodes. But once Sam Weller, heir to Sancho Panza and harbinger of Samwise Gamgee, comes on the scene, the book gains direction and develops a good pour of stout underneath the head of foam.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories
I was worried back in January that I would forget about Herodotus by the time the Book Awards came around and that he would lose to a historian whose book was both written and read more recently. But then I remembered that I can grant one award for the best new read and one for the best reread. Congrats, Herodotus!

Best New Read in History: James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations
It just now occurred to me that I read both a book called Great Expectations and book called Grand Expectations in the same year. It seems crazy that I could have been so unobservant, but it’s true. And so now my head is swimming with the idea that the two books tell the same story. Dickens tells the story of Pip, who wants to live out the British Dream of becoming a gentleman, and then gets disappointed. Patterson tells the story of the people who survived the Depression and beat two aggressive totalitarian empires, people who wanted to live the American Dream of making a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining, more exciting world for their children through free choice, ingenuity, and hard work, only to be disappointed by Vietnam, lying leaders, a Generation Gap, and stagflation. Patterson’s book did indeed win a Pulitzer Prize and is, I think, the second best volume of the very good Oxford History of the United States.

Best New Read in Fiction: Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
The pre-Watergate American child in me read Mysterious Island and marveled at this motley group of shipwreck survivors learning to get along and striving to build a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining world for themselves through ingenuity and hard work. I had no idea when I scheduled this book that it would be the sequel to last year’s Children of Captain Grant, and I had no idea when I had read half the book that it would prove to be also a sequel to one of Verne’s greatest books. The experience took me right back to the time when reading was the most joyful: summer days when I had nothing to do but sit alone in a cool basement (maybe with a 1970s-formula, real-sugar Pepsi in a chilled glass bottle!) reading a great book for hours on end.

Most Disappointing Read: E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Lewis liked Eddison, and Tolkien said this book influenced him. But Eddison was a man who thought three men named Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco could be brothers. What kind of language, what kind of culture, what kind of father could conceivably give siblings such incongruent names? They live in a world where everyone constantly clashes and wars as much as those names, and they like it that way. Thoroughly unpleasant.

Best Poetry: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, first third
Granted, I read very little poetry this year. But, although I liked Auden’s poetry, it was very hard for me to understand, so I have to go with book that could also win an award for best epic. At some point I need to give Shakespeare this award.

Best New Read in Drama: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Family, ghosts, and a woman whose painful memories keep her from playing the piano she loves. All three strike chords (pun very much intended) with me. I just found out last week that Denzel Washington’s son has made a movie of this play!

Best Biography: Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet
Varon revealed a man almost entirely different from what I assumed he was and explained a lot about the way we commemorate and teach about the Civil War.

Best New Read in Religion: A Four-Way Tie
It was way too hard to decide between Augustine’s On the Trinity, Abelard’s Yes and No, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, so I’m just going to put in the extra expense and get statuettes made for each of them.

Best Offroading: Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters
The road to China’s inclusion in the modern world was paved with questions about its language. How can the Chinese language be typed? In what order should the Chinese characters be arranged so Chinese titles can be found in card catalog? What numbers will represent the Chinese characters in digital communication, and which version of the characters will be represented? Every chapter presents a new conundrum that made me say, “Oh, yeah! How do they do that?” Honorable mention goes to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” It’s a short story; maybe I’ll give it a micro statuette.

Best Reread: Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
I already gave Orlando Furioso an award, so I’m going with Many Dimensions here, a good supernatural thriller with a good message. God’s power is not a commodity to be distributed, sold, patented, used, and consumed. We are not the consumers in this relationship, God is, for He is the Consuming Fire. Now that I think of it, I’m going to give this book an award for Religion as well. So many extra statuettes!

Janus, for whom January is named, had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. At least that’s what I’ve been told, and it’s been my understanding that the respectable fellow’s unusual anatomy lies behind our habit of both contemplating the old and anticipating the new at the turn of the year. (I highly suspect that the cause and effect are reversed – that our friend took on the extra visage after he learned of our quite natural custom.) What 2025 reading am I most anticipating? Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées stand out upon a quick glance at my list for the next twelve months. Will any of these win awards? It all depends on how the Academy that lives in my head votes!

I hope that your New Year’s Day is filled with happy memories of books read this year and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 45 squared. See you then!

Year-End Round-Up

My blogging hasn’t kept up with my reading this last month, so I’ll need to cover three books in one post. In July, I said I was hopeful that I would have happy things to say about Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, Williams’s Many Dimensions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. I did indeed enjoy all five of those books immensely, but I’ve only blogged about three so far. So I’ll say something about the other two and toss in some comments about William James for free.

I’m so glad I finally read Julian of Norwich: the Revelations are so very happy! God is our friend, she learned in her visions, and cannot be angry with those He has redeemed. In a beautifully quaint phrase, she says that God displays towards us “abundant largesse . . . through his marvellous courtesy.” We worry about sin more than God does, she says; He knows it had to happen, and He dealt with it. Repent, move on, and rejoice! “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” If you get an edition like mine, you will see that two versions of the book have survived: a short version and a long version. It’s mildly interesting to think about which might have come first and why Julian (or someone else) thought there should be a second version. But just go ahead and read the “long” version: it’s only about 150 pages long.

The last time I read Charles Williams's Many Dimensions, eleven years ago, I wrote in my personal notes only these thirteen characters: “pp. 118, 128.” I just checked my copy of the book to see what happens on those pages, and I have to say I don’t have any idea why I recommended page 118 to myself. But 128 does get at the heart of the matter. In this marvelous book of, well, um . . . , marvels, the Stone from the crown of Solomon finds its way to England. The Stone, marked with the Tetragrammaton, has some of the properties of God and, in fact, seems to be an inlapition (to coin a term parallel to “incarnation” while using the Latin for “stone” in place of the word for “flesh”) of the Divinity, showing clear manifestations of the powers of teleportation, telepathy, self-multiplication, and healing. Some people don’t believe what they see; others, following the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ time, believe what’s happening but think it can only cause trouble if word gets out; and yet others see the Stone and its powers as mere commodities to be sold or phenomena to be studied for personal enrichment. Alone in all of England, Lord Arglay and Chloe Burnett see the Stone as a divine object expecting fealty and sacrifice, and on p. 128, they decide to “choose to believe.” And by that bit of insightful phraseology, Williams indicates that the type of belief the Stone demands is more than mere acknowledgment of the truth; after all, the demons believe yet tremble. Belief in the Stone requires a personal choice and commitment.

Having enjoyed small pieces of James’s Principles of Psychology over the course of fifteen years or so, I knew I had to read The Varieties of Religious Experience. I didn’t know what I was in for, but I was certain it would be interesting. The first interesting surprise was to find out that the book wasn’t 140 pages long, as my planning notes said, but about 530, so I had to read a bit faster than I thought I would in order to finish before the holidays. I can’t begin to do justice to 530 fascinating pages in a one-paragraph review, but I’ll say a word about one cautionary point. James says to his audience (the book consists of transcripts of lectures he gave at the University of Edinburgh) at the outset that studying religious experiences from a psychologist’s point of view can never prove, nor does he wish to suggest, that God is not involved in the experience, just as no amount of textual criticism can ever prove that God didn’t superintend the composition of the Bible. One of his conclusions is that visions, callings, divine assurance, etc. come from the subconscious part of the mind (he prefers other terms such as the “fringe” or the “extraliminal”), but again he assures his audience that he doesn’t mean to say that locating the immediate source of the experiences in one part of the mind precludes a prior, divine source working on the subconscious. Someday I’m going to have to do some experimentation with reading “subconscious” anytime I see the human spirit mentioned in the Bible and thinking “spirit” everywhere I see the subconscious (or “fringe”) mentioned in psychological writing.

That does it for the regular posts this year. I’ll be back in a few days with the yearly awards ceremony, and then it’s on to 2025, when, among other reading adventures, I’ll explore some more Thomas Hardy and the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, finish up The Forsyte Saga, and revisit two novels by the Great Man himself, one near the top in my ranking and one very near the bottom in everybody’s ranking. Stay tuned to find out which two books I mean and what I think about everything else!

I hope your Merry Christmas brings you some new books!

Not So Grimm

One of the great things about having a long-term reading list, perhaps the best thing, is that you know you'll eventually get to those books you’ve been meaning to read for years. I had wanted to read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales (in translation, not original-original) for at least fifty years. Well, they got on my reading list, and this month I finally got to them.

My family had a volume of them when I was growing up. I don’t know what happened to that copy, and I don’t know why I didn’t read them as a teenager. But remembering having that book (it had dark green covers and a black spine) makes me pretty sure it was my dad who told me that I should read them “someday” (maybe that’s why I put it off) and that they were much darker than the versions most people know from kids’ books and Disney movies.

I have to say that they weren’t as dark as I had been led to believe. Yes, Cinderella’s sisters cut off parts of their feet in order to make them fit into the slippers, and, yes, Little Red Cap gets eaten by the wolf. But other tales weren’t any worse than that, and I’m sure I had a children’s version at one time that had both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother being eaten by the wolf (swallowed whole, thankfully!) and rescued by a woodsman with an axe. (I’m almost certain that that’s where I got the notion, still held proudly today, that in the olden days there were men named “woodsmen” who roamed the forests carrying axes and searching for people to help.) And, really, no tale in the book of original versions is any worse than the American kid’s standard version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the parents decide it’s better to lead their children to the forest where they will starve or be eaten by wild animals than it would be to share the family’s scant supplies of food with them.

Tests are common in these stories, usually in the form of peculiar tasks required for breaking spells. Think the princess who has to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name. Most of the time, though, the person being tested doesn’t know about it: the prince, for instance, who kisses the “sleeping beauty” to wake her and her family from a hundred-year sleep. Is this a fairy-tale world, or is it just a slightly magical version of our world, where small actions can cause great effects? (See my post on the Mabinogion from last December.)

There are some morals, too; people don’t always just stumble unwittingly into their fortunes according to arbitrary rules. Many of the tales show two proud and selfish brothers (or sisters) receiving punishment or missing opportunities while the third, humble, generous brother gets the treasure or the girl or both. The moral here is obvious: be humble and generous! Several tell about foolish people who see things in a ridiculous way but get rewarded anyway. This time the moral is, Don’t count out the person who sees things contrary to conventional wisdom. God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Sorry I waited so long, Dad. But you were right: I loved them.

My Life Makes Sense Now!

Reading the mutli-volume, multi-author Oxford History of the United States has been quite an adventure. I’ve read seven of the volumes now, and overall I’m quite happy I put this project on my reading schedule. The quality has gone up and down (although it’s been mostly quite high), and the prices have gone up and down (altough they have tended to be low lately). But even with the vicissitudes, as a whole, it’s been a very satisfying and instructive experience.

The most frustrating problem with the adventure is the lag in publication. When I started this Third Decade list, Bruce Schulman’s contribution, covering the years 1896-1929, was scheduled to come out, I believe, in 2016. Great! I wanted to read the volumes in historical order, and Schulman’s would be out by the time I made it that far. But over the years, I’ve seen the expected date of that volume move back and back. Last year, the year I had originally scheduled Schulman, I had to jump ahead and read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear, about the Depression and World War II. By that time, Schulman’s book was scheduled to come out in September of 2024. Soon, I was seeing an ISBN number for it and a page length, and Amazon from Canada and the UK were taking pre-orders. So I thought my reordering would only last one year: just wait until September this year, I thought, and fill in the gap. Alas, September came and went this year, and still no Schulman. I wrote to Oxford Press and got an answer from some nice agent of that company saying that the book would come out in September of 2025. We’ll see.

In any case, I had to change gears again and read one more volume “out of order” (this kind of thing is really only a problem because of my mild-grade OCD). So a few weeks ago I bought the next book in the series, James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations.

I’ve said before that I must have something in common with the Pulitzer committees, because my favorites had all won the prize for history: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (2008), James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1989), and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear (2000). The ones I would put in the second tier were finalists, and the one I really didn’t like is not mentioned on any Pulitzer page. That streak of harmonized opinion broke this year. I had only one complaint about Freedom from Fear: that, since its years witnessed two greatest-in-all-history events that demanded all the attention, Kennedy had no time to dwell on sports, clothing, movies, literature, leisure, etc. Well, today I just finished reading Grand Expectations, and I declare it even better than Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear partly because it did cover lots of cultural details in addition to the traditional historical subjects of politics, war, and economics – even though there was naturally plenty to report in all three of those areas in the years 1946-1974. But sadly, it did not receive a Pulitzer Prize and wasn’t, as far as I can see, even a finalist. Obviously, the committee didn’t know what it was doing in 1996. Poor Patterson had to settle for the slightly less prestigious Bancroft Prize instead. (I think he’s probably pretty happy with that honor!)

I should not neglect to say that the book was well researched, that the prose was polished, that it made both factual observations and subjective interpretations, and that it gave proper attention to the widely varying contemporary views and opinions on McCarthy, Korea, Vietnam, the Great Society, Nixon, and other controversial people, movements, and events. But the thing that made this book stand out to me is that it’s the first history book I’ve ever read in which I appear: the baby boom gets a long section and many mentions throughout the chapters. And many events I remember from when I was a kid – two Kennedy assassinations, the space race, color television, hippies, bombing in Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, Watergate, and more – finally made sense. OK, wrong phrase. Most of those events will never make sense! But I understood them in historical context for the first time, which is to say that I understand much of my childhood and youth in historical context now.

So maybe I have a bias that the Pulitzer committee doesn’t share. But this book was terrific! I hope I actually get to read Schulman’s book next year. (Boy, all those delays don’t give me much hope of it’s being any good.) But if not, I’m happy to say that the next volume in the series, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore, was also written by James T. Patterson. So whether my date with Restless Giant happens in 2025 or 2026, I know I’m in for some more good, eye-opening history.

A Post in which Barnes & Noble, Target, and Kicking All Make an Appearance

I’ve written several times now about Anthony Trollope. I don’t want to pass him by on the blog this year, but I don’t know what to add about him in general. He is, as far as I know, the best Victorian novelist that readers don’t read these days. (I base my notion that readers don’t read him on the very unscientific observation that he generally doesn’t join Dickens and Eliot and Stevenson and Thackeray on the table of cheap editions at Barnes & Noble. Also, I’m 99% sure he never made it into Classic Illustrated comic books. This is the kind of high-level literary criticism you get here, folks.) And I love his habit of talking to the reader in the narration about his craft, the reader’s expectations, and the obligation he senses to develop the plot satisfactorily; it’s as if he occasionally dismantles all the housing of the puppet theater and shows himself holding the sticks that animate his characters.

But I’ve said all that before. So I guess I’ll just respond to some details of the plot of He Knew He Was Right, a plan that decidedly does not meet my obligation to develop this post satisfactorily for you, since you almost certainly don’t know the plot of He Knew He Was Right and don’t know what to think about my response to it.

The book actually has about three plots. Concerning sublot no. 1, I can only say here that Dorothy Stanbury and her aunt are everything the Victorian housewife in me needs. Aunt Stanbury (I confess I can’t remember her first name!) is funny when she’s prickly, and charming when she’s in better humor, and Dolly is that most difficult of Victorian literary achievements: a good girl with actual depth.

And about subplot no. 2, I can only say that Nora Rowley is everything the Victorian feminist in me needs. She’s willing to be married, she’s willing not to be married, and she’s willing to live on her own no matter what people think of it.

This is a long novel, and I found myself picking it up sometimes during the month it took me to finish it and forgetting whether I was reading about Dorothy or Nora. Both are younger sisters who turn down their first proposals, so they were easy to confuse. I decided I needed to use a trick that has helped sometimes before: I picked out two young women I saw in passing one day (one in Target and one on the sidewalk), each having a distinctive face, and I made them the “actresses” for the characters in my head. Is that weird? In any case, it worked.

The main plot, the one indicated by the title, involves Nora’s older sister, Emily, who marries Louis Trevelyan and then gets several visits from an old family friend, Colonel Osborne. And we must say here that Colonel Osborne enjoys the dangerous excitement of getting slightly too familiar with married women, knowing he can (usually) get away with it because of his advanced age. But in spite of Osborne’s gray hair, Louis becomes literally mad with jealousy and tells Emily that she must not see the Colonel again. Emily refuses to obey what she believes to be an inappropriate command. (I think the Victorian housewives that bought and devoured Trollope’s books must have enjoyed staging a minor vicarious rebellion through Emily.) Louis begins to believe his wife to have been unfaithful in the unspeakable way – unspeakable for a Victorian, that is – and sends his wife out of the house. Trust me, one reason I enjoyed the subplots so much is that they provided much needed relief from the thoroughly unlikeable Louis. For a whole month I kept yelling at him in my mind: “Why don’t you quit accusing and exiling your wife and start kicking Colonel Osborne? Problem solved.”

This high-level literary critic gives He Knew He Was Right a big thumbs up. But don’t start here if you, like the editors of Classics Illustrated, haven’t read any Anthony Trollope. I recommend beginning with The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.

Conversations with an Old Friend

I don’t think I’ve ever explained in these posts the significance of C. S. Lewis to me. I first encountered Lewis in a comic-book version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that appeared serially in a Sunday School magazine I once subscribed to. I was about twelve years old, and I wasn’t sure I liked the book. I was, however, sure that the title was the worst I’d ever heard!

My deeper contact with the professor occurred when I went to college and saw all the pastel-colored paperbacks from Macmillan on the bookshelves of all my Christian friends. The uniformity of the set appealed to me as much as anything else, and under the confidence that I could in fact judge a book (or set of books) by its cover, I bought a copy of the set for myself: The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man, and others.

Now to take a step back, while many young products of Christian homes turn sixteen and discover that they don’t believe anymore, I turned sixteen and discovered that my pastor didn’t believe anything. Churches were then divided for me into Those With Pastors Who Believe and Those With Pastors Who Don’t. Somewhat naturally thinking, “What’s the point?” about the second category, I looked for a church from the first to attend. Here were unwavering believers, and I felt more comfortable in that way. But they were also a bit . . . underinfluenced by education. It was a routine occurrence, for instance, for someone reading the Bible aloud to stumble over names and (the inevitable sequel to the tongue twisting) for everyone to join the reader in laughing the problem away breezily.

Everyone but me that is. I couldn’t figure out how people of The Book could laugh about illiteracy. But I remembered that God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and I went on, genuinely admiring their childlike faith while silently ruing their contempt for the medium through which God chose to speak to us.

But to be fair, they couldn’t figure me out, either. They were constantly telling me to get out of my head, quoting Colossians 2:8 at me, and telling me I was too educated and too knowledgeable to lead worship music.

But then I went away to college and met those new friends. These were smart people. They loved and respected education. They had interesting books on their bookshelves. Heck! They had bookshelves! And they loved C. S. Lewis. So I started reading him. And I loved him! I didn’t always agree with his theology, especially when it countered the tenets my friends at the home church drew out of the two dozen verses they knew well, but I admired him because he was intelligent.

After just three semesters I left that university (it’s an ugly story that has to do with a girl – ekkh!) and came back home. And then there I was back at the old church, with the old friends – and my new books. When I asked questions trying to deepen some common facile understanding, my friends continued to look at me as if I were from Mars and kept telling me that things were simpler than I was trying to make them and that I would be Free Indeed if I would only quit thinking. So I learned to stay quiet (well, less vocal), and at times I felt that Lewis was my only friend.

C. S. Lewis was my only friend.

There. I could have said that up front and gone on to talking about recent reading. But I needed to tell that story so that it would make some sense when I said that I’ve had good, edifying conversations with my friend over the decades. I read one of his books, think about things he says, live a Christian life, raise questions, grow in knowledge, and then come back to the same book ten or twenty years later, when I’ve forgotten the details of what he said to me in the first place. And then I find that Lewis responds to some of my new ideas. It’s a slow conversation but a good one.

No doctrine caused me more trouble in the 1970s than prayer. I’ve gone into enough detail for one post, so I’ll just say that (1) I had bad teaching in the 70s that nevertheless seemed unanswerable at the time, (2) I disagreed then with much of what Lewis had to say about prayer, especially in Letters to Malcolm (at last! the real subject of today’s post!), (3) after decades of wrestling, I came up with a better view of prayer (aided by, of all things, a football analogy?!), and (4) Letters to Malcolm made much, much more sense when I reread it last week.

Topics in this fascinating book include reasons for and against prayers written by others, places to pray (a train is good because it has just the right amount of distraction), problems with saying that our prayer changes God’s mind, how big or small an issue should be in order to be brought to God, “festoonings” of the Lord’s Prayer (is this why I did my own back in the 90s?), people thinking wrongly that it is automatically more spiritual to have transactions “opened with prayer,” determinism, the impossibility of knowing if an occurrence is an answer to my prayer or was just going to happen anyway, the good of anxieties as sharing in the sufferings of Christ (“We are Christians, not Stoics”), demythologization simply being a matter of a new mythology, the difficulty of dropping people from prayer lists as we age (that one sure strikes closer to home now more than it did fifty years ago!), holy places as reminders that every place is holy, and more.

Eventually he starts talking about the problems of prayer for people “in our condition,” i.e. intellectuals who can never take things simply. I don’t know if I thought of myself as one of the people in Lewis’s “condition” when I first read it. I may have thought his intellectual status was a quantum leap above mine with a gap between us as wide and unbridgeable as the river between the rich man and Lazarus. Now, while humbly admitting Lewis’s superiority over me in many facets of the intellectual life, I’m comfortable putting myself in the category of people “in our condition.” I mean, if Malcolm with all of his problems can be part of the in crowd, so can I! (Although I don’t believe there ever was a Malcolm corresponding with Lewis about prayer or any other topic.)

I will talk like a fool, though, and say that, for what I believe was the first time, I knew more than Lewis for one brief, shining moment. He says at one point, “We must aim at what St. Augustine (is it?) called ‘ordinate loves.’ ” Yes! I say to my old friend. Of course it’s Augustine!