Book Awards – 2022

The votes have been tabulated (not difficult since I’m the only voting member). A protective barrier has been placed around the presenters’ podium to prevent any unscripted slapping. It looks like we’re ready for the presentation of this year’s Book Awards.

Author of the Most Books Named Little Dorrit: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. My third reading of Little Dorrit magnified its great qualities in my mind and at least found some explanation for a couple of the weaknesses. One theme I thought about this year but didn’t blog about earlier is condescension. Miss Wade resents all kindnesses done to her because they seem like condescension. But Dickens shows the right thinking in other relationships. First, not all kindness is condescension, as Arthur Clennam demonstrates in his kindness to Daniel Doyce. Second, condescension isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Amy rightly “condescends” to poor, witless Maggie: as an orphan with stunted mental growth, Maggie needs someone to talk with her and deal with her at a level she can understand. And are we to be offended that our Lord emptied Himself and became flesh, “abhorring not the virgin’s womb” and humbling Himself by a birth in a stable?

Best New Read in History: Stephen R. Brown, Merchant Kings
Some volumes of the Oxford History of the United States are among the best history books I’ve ever read. But this year’s dreadful The Republic for Which It Stands is not among that august group. Often this award goes to Will and Ariel Durant, whose massive, multi-volume history of western civilization I’ve enjoyed reading for decades. But this year’s pages on the Enlightenment left me wishing for darkness. So with the usual suspects out of contention, this year the award goes to an author whose obscure name I had to look up again just now, and to a book lacking the verbal polish of anything by, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin. But from Merchant Kings I finally got a good, brutally honest exposition of the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company (as well as four other exploratory and exploitative companies from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries) and a clear idea for the first time of the strange and dangerous relationship of each with its mother country. I learned a lot from all the histories I read this year, even the ones that didn’t make me smile, but I learned the most from this slender volume.

Best New Read in Fiction: Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
I don’t remember where I got the tip to read this book. I don’t remember ever seeing this author’s name outside my own reading plan. (Have you ever heard of her?) I understand why the book has been forgotten by society: it’s a twentieth-century book about a devout believer, but it isn’t written in the style of the Christian romances that filled the bookshelves of the late twentieth-century Christian bookstores. So it’s designed to appeal to a small slice of the reading public. Well, I for one am in that slice. It turns out that a twentieth-century Christian doesn’t need to have a crisis of faith in order to have a compelling story. What to do with church bazaars and annoying neighbors can be surprisingly dramatic. And I defy you to predict the charming ending!

Most Disappointing Read: Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization
I’ve already complained about them enough this year, even in today’s post. But this dubious honor is awarded each year, so duty demands that I mention them one last time. Let’s hope I have better things to say about the Durants next year.

Comeback Player of the Year: Alexandre Dumas
In The Man in the Iron Mask, the Musketeers came back again in all their glory . . . only to die. Well, most of them, anyway. I couldn’t be happier about being so sad.

Best New Read in Poetry:
This award was not given this year because of the excessive appearance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works of dead girls hanging their ghostly hair from heaven and brushing men’s cheeks.

Best New Read in Religion: Augustine, Homilies on I John
Augustine works through grammatical points (“I am writing to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven,” means that his readers are little children because they are forgiven), important implications of single words (“We have an advocate” shows that the Apostle also had need of Jesus’ advocacy), and apparent contradictions (Do Christians commit sin or not? I’ll let you read the homilies to find Augustine’s solution for yourself). Augustine was such a good pastor, he continues to feed sheep.

Best New Read in Biography: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life
It was very difficult for me to decide which was the best written of the biographies I read this year. In the end I gave the award to the biography which most changed my view of the subject. I ended up admiring John Kennedy more than I had, which was no mean feat considering that Dallek also made the President’s flaws look even more despicable than I had imagined!

Best Subject of a Biography: Ron Chernow, Grant
I might actually have learned more from this book than I did from An Unfinished Life since Grant’s considerable accomplishments as President have been underplayed for at least a century. But I have to say that it didn’t so much change my view of this hero as much as it strengthened my view that Grant has been and is still the most underrated of American Presidents. Thank goodness the Dunning School and the Lost Cause are losing their grip on historiography.

Best Reread: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Maybe this is just a given.

Best Book in a Category By Itself: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Capote said that this wasn’t just a new book but a new kind of book: journalistic history written as a novel. His approach gave literary life to the victims of this senseless crime and provided insight to the aberrant minds of the killers. I couldn’t help wondering if his work at all inspired John Douglas when he started the real life BAU in the FBI.

Best Offroading: Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place
I had meant to read this book ever since it was recommended to me fifty years ago. I don’t know what I would have thought then. I’m sorry to say I’m afraid the strict doctrinal bounds of my youth would have led me to disapprove of Corrie Ten Boom’s Christianity. Now I can only see that her faithful love of Jesus led her to sacrifice to unimaginable lengths in an attempt to save Jews from the Nazis. As far as the doctrine goes, the book actually challenged me to reconsider whether I weren’t more right at 16 about some things, especially about how God might lead someone to action. But then, I’ve never been put in a situation where lying to authorities would save a life, or a situation in which I had to judge whether the officers of an invading force had any authority. No book this year made me think and rethink more than this one.

A year ago today, I wrote that I was looking forward to Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Augustine’s homilies on I John, and even Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. None of these disappointed, and two even won awards. What am I especially eager to read in 2023? Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. I’m also hoping for a better experience from the Durants and from the Oxford History of the U. S. as I read David M. Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear. (Kennedy’s book won a Pulitzer, so I think my hopes will be fulfilled.) May your New Year also be filled with anticipation for an abundance of good books!

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol – 2022

Several months ago I read all of Chesterton’s columns for the Illustrated London News from 1926. When I posted about that reading at the time, I mentioned that I would come back to it in December, since the series ended with a wonderful piece about old Christmas carols. In this last, beautiful column, Chesterton ascribes three special virtues to old Christmas carols: (1) anachronism, which shows that the events of Christmas and its celebration are continuously present in a spiritual sense throughout history, (2) incongruity, which makes little logical sense but great poetic sense, and (3) lustiness such that people sometimes shout “Ut hoy!” in celebration of Christ’s birth.

Now, I have to think that Chesterton knew many more truly old carols than I do. I don’t know the one, for instance, that contains shouts of “Ut hoy!” But I do know a couple of carols about holly that seem to fit GKC’s description perfectly.

The first carol I’m trolling today is “The Holly Bears a Berry.”

1. Now the holly bears a berry as white as the milk,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who was wrapped up in silk:

Chorus: And Mary she bore Jesus our Saviour for to be,
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly.
Holly! Holly!
And the first tree that's in the greenwood, it was the holly!

2. Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died on the cross:

Chorus

3. Now the holly bears a berry as black as the coal,
And Mary she bore Jesus, who died for us all:

Chorus

4. Now the holly bears a berry, as blood is it red,
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead:

Chorus

Anachronism? Not exactly. But I think the mix of tenses in every verse accomplishes the same thing. The holly bears a berry in the present tense now, and Mary bore Jesus in the past tense in, perhaps, 4 B.C. But maybe there is some anachronism in the assignment of the colors. I had to look up the white berry: the berries on my holly bushes are never white. But according to the internet, which might actually be right in this case, a Christian legend says that the berries were white until the time of the crucifixion. I wasn’t familiar with this legend until this morning, but it sounds a lot like the legends printed on cedar signs I used to study in roadside Stuckey’s restaurants. (Talk about anachronism and incongruity!) According to this very important and informative bit of childhood reading, both the dogwood flower and the burro mystically acquired their cross-shaped markings during the original Holy Week. If we accept the legend, this carol sings of the holly as bearing, in the present tense, berries it hasn’t born in two thousand years.

I honestly don’t know that I understood why I have always loved the verses of this carol so much until Chesterton pointed out the vitality of incongruity in this literature. Some songwriter not as wise as the anonymous farmers of Cornwall who shaped this poem over generations – some silly songwriter like me, for instance – would have tried to get the bloody red in the same verse as the cross and the living green in the verse with the Resurrection. How much better the carol is the way it stands! Death in life, life in death.

Lustiness? What could be more “lusty” than stopping the lilting beat in the middle of each stanza to exclaim the word “holly” twice? Have you ever shouted that word before? The next time you find yourself walking through the woods wondering why life isn’t making any sense, I hope you come across a holly bush and get a chance to start the habit.

The other carol today is clearly related to the first. Maybe a fellow in Gloucestershire visited Cornwall, heard “The Holly Bears a Berry,” and tried to bring it home, but forgot parts or tried to improve it. Maybe the geographical journey went the other way. Maybe both carols stand as descendants of some forgotten Ur-carol that connected the holly and the birth of Jesus. However it was, here are the lyrics, as currently known, of “The Holly and the Ivy”:

1. The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Chorus: Oh! The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!

2. The holly bears a blossom,
As white as the lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour.

Chorus

3. The holly bears a berry,
As red as any blood,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to do us sinners good.

Chorus   

4. The holly bears a prickle,
As sharp as any thorn,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

Chorus

I want to go through Chesterton’s three qualities in reverse order this time. I hate “contemporary” “worship” “songs” that forget sentence structure and just start stringing spiritual sounding phrases together without any verbs. I like verbs. But I love this verbless chorus with all my heart and have since I first sang it in the third-grade Christmas concert at Maude V. Roark Elementary School in Arlington, TX. (Arlington consisted of a couple of neighborhoods of houses, the Hollandale Circle apartments – where my family lived –, Roark school, a Walmart, and Six Flags. That’s all my eight-year-old mind took in, but I honestly don’t think there was much more. I just looked up the school: it closed last year and was demolished! May the echoes of “The Holly and the Ivy” reverberate around the area forever!)

Anyway, back to the chorus of this carol. I don’t care about verbs here. I just want to sing lustilly about four beautiful things! In fact, as I sing this song, I start to wonder if these aren’t my four favorite things in the universe! The running of the deer! Why haven’t I thought to celebrate that before! Oh, glorious!

Now what the deer and the organ have to do with each other or what either has to do with a holly’s berries or blossoms, I don’t know. But the poem works its aesthetic magic as we sing it, and it is clear to our minds that all these things, incongruous at first glance, form one perfect unity of ideas to which nothing could be added, from which nothing could be taken. I used to think there was a slight imperfection in this otherwise integral organism with the mention of the organ, which didn’t exist when Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ. But Chesterton has taught me that the anachronism is part of the point: our means of celebrating and singing dwell in mystical unity with the songs of the angels and the shepherds on the Holy Night.

You know what this world needs? People need to stop “trolling” each other on social media and start trolling ancient yuletide carols!