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!