Book Awards – 2023

One year ago today, I said that I was especially looking forward to Hugo’s Nôtre-Dame de Paris (about the hunchback), poetry and essays of Matthew Arnold, and a return to Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Did these books reward or disappoint? Find out as you read the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2023!

Author of My Favorite Book: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. This year, I gave myself four Dickens assignments. The first task was the second half of Dickens’s works for the stage, including the play that served in his head as the prototype for my favorite book. They were all fine, but it was clear that these pieces were meant to be performed by the Great Man himself and his friends. I also read many of the non-Christmas short stories and have to say that Dickens was consistently best in short fiction when treating of ghosts. In my latest reading of Hard Times, I discovered that imagining the members of Monty Python playing the (morally) worst characters made this most somber of the novels much more enjoyable. Finally, I reread for perhaps the seventh time (in addition to having read some exquisite chapters more like twenty times) the book that taught me what good fiction looks like. A Tale of Two Cities always inspires me and never disappoints, no matter what cynical critics say about Charles and Lucie.

Best New Read in History: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear
First let me make honorable mention of Will and Ariel Durant, whose history of western civilization took a big turn upwards this year now that I’m away from their favorite historical incidents, about which they have praise too effusive for my taste. (By contrast, their effusive praise for Mozart this year was not and could never have been too much for my taste.) Now for the winner: I learned many things about the Depression and World War II from Kennedy, but the education all started with a good argument that Herbert Hoover was actually relatively progressive and kept the economic disaster from being, if you can imagine it, even worse. He also confirmed for me, after forty years, my mom’s assertion that people in rural Missouri (like herself) were so poor, they didn’t notice any change during the Depression.

Best New Read in Fiction: Victor Hugo, Nôtre-Dame de Paris
The year started with Verne’s wonderful Children of Captain Grant, which kept me enthralled for most of two weeks and made me think fondly of my childhood crush on Hayley Mills (who enthralled me for far more than two weeks). But Hugo’s magnificent novel in which a hunchback becomes a hero and a cathedral becomes a character made me laugh out loud with joy more than once on my morning walks and stuck in my thoughts all the way to December. (Note from Jan. 1, 2024: Rereading this paragraph in the morning, I realize that my reference to Hayley Mills was far too opaque. Miss Mills starred in, among other movies, Disney’s In Search of the Castaways, which was based on The Children of Captain Grant.)

Most Disappointing Read: Matthew Arnold, Poetry
I found Arnold’s language beautiful and his encouragement to live our best, cultured lives uplifting until it became clear that he wanted to educate the masses and give them a chance to live their best lives only because he saw others’ ignorance merely as an annoying impediment to his personal comfort.

Best Poetry: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, books V and VI
I got a little uncomfortable at times with the allegorical hints that people in the working classes shouldn’t get ideas of moving up, but I may have read implications that weren’t really lying between Spenser's lines. Otherwise, the knights demonstrating through their magical adventures the virtues of Justice and Courtesy were encouraging, and the constantly lilting meter made the lessons eminently palatable.

Best New Read in Drama: Molière, Festin de pierre
I knew the basic story of the Stone Guest from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Molière’s original is hilarious and morally instructive all at the same time.

Best New Read in Religion: Leo the Great, Christmas Sermons
Leo strongly urges that Christmas is not a celebration of the sun and tells worshipers not to turn and bow to the sun as they come into church. ( I guess that was still a problem in the fifth century!) And yet, while he tells people not to worship creation, he doesn’t tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God’s works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” May we all so do.

Best Offroading: William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, chapters 6-14
Book that Caused Me to Shake My Head the Most Often: same as above
OK, I’m cheating with this award. Shirer’s “first draft of history” wasn’t on this year’s reading list, but it is on next year’s. It’s so long, though, I knew that I had to get a running start, so I read five chapters last year, nine chapters this year. These horrible events happened in the civilized world in my parents’ lifetimes. Chilling, Just chilling. Politics should be discussed face-to-face, not in a blog about literature, so I won’t say too much, only that more than once I read about a horrid scheme of Himmler’s right around the time I read of a similar policy being enacted this year in a certain southeastern state. Oh, OK, I’ll go ahead and get controversial and say that I highly disapprove of inciting violence in an attempt to take national power and then lying about it. You know: the way Hitler did.

Best Reread: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
As I said last year when Pride and Prejudice won this award, maybe this is just a given.

Let's see. What 2024 reading am I most anticipating? Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms' 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). To find out how these hopes pan out, stay tuned. 

May your New Year be filled with an abundance of good books that entertain, teach, and inspire you!

Coherent yet Mind-Boggling

I read the Mabinogion this month in preparation for starting Stephen Lawhead’s Arthurian books this coming year. The Mabinogion is a loose collection of fantasy and adventure stories (now defined as that set of stories translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in the nineteenth century) from twelfth-century Wales. Some of the stories mention King Arthur, whose historical inspiration may well have lived there, and a few of them make their way into Arthurian legend through adaptation by Chrétien de Troyes and other medieval French authors.

From descriptions I had read, I was expecting something haphazard and broken like lists of knights and short sketches or fragments of stories: the stuff that will be read only by diehard Arthurian connoisseurs who want to read all the background legends. I couldn’t have been more wrong. These are full-fledged stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end, full of romance, adventure, intrigue, and unexplained magic (people with no hitherto discernible supernatural traits, for instance, suddenly changing form, as if mystical metamorphosis is simply a common fact of life). Here’s a sample summary of one story, “The Lady of the Fountain”:

King Arthur takes a nap while Sir Kynon tells a story about himself: he sets out to find proof that he is the best knight. On his journey, a man at a castle tells him to look for a giant black man with one foot and one eye in the middle of his forehead. The giant, having been found, tells Kynon to look for a fountain with a bowl and a slab. He finds the fountain, fills the bowl and pours it on the slab. Thunder claps, and hailstones fall in such a violent way as to strip all the trees and kill all the animals. An earl rides out, knocks Kynon off his horse (who has been protected by his shield), scolds Kynon for killing all his livestock, and leads the horse away. Sir Owain decides to try copying this adventure. He has the same experience, complete with ELE hailstorm, but Owain kills the earl when he comes out to scold him. Riding toward the now-dead earl’s castle, he is trapped in the portcullis. A girl gives him a ring of invisibility to wear. When the guards come to raise the gate and nab their prisoner, Owain slips out unseen and makes his way to the girl’s room where he says he is in love with the lady he has just seen in the courtyard. The girl says the woman is the widow, and she then goes to tell the widow that if she knows what's good for her, she'll marry a knight from Arthur's court; of course she means Owain. Owain marries the widow and stays three years, "protecting the fountain" (but actually just extorting travelers), then asks to leave for three months in order to visit with Arthur. But Owain stays at Caerlleon (Arthur’s Welsh home) for three years, after which his wife comes and throws her wedding ring at him. Duly chastised, Owain returns to his earldom and his wife. After this he has a couple other adventures that tidy up loose ends, including convincing the black giant that he has been nothing but a tyrant terrifying travelers; the giant decides to be nice!

Now that story is tightly constructed and perfectly coherent, and yet it’s mind-boggling. In reading stories of errant knights for some sixty years now, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that in order to answer any given whim or question that pops into one’s head, one gets on a horse and travels aimlessly, certain that the answer will eventually present itself somewhere along the winding path. And I’ve grown used to the idea that a knight looking for the key place in his quest, even though it’s located in physical space in a perfectly normal way, simply cannot locate it unless he finds someone who knows someone who knows how to find the place. But what kind of magic is this that causes water poured on a slab to bring on the Hailstorm of Death? And if you have the Hailstorm of Death Slab on your land, why do you wait until some clueless knight pours water on it instead of guarding it as if your livestock had some value? Why, given that there’s a girl who gives you a magic ring and invites you to her room for safety, do you opt for the woman you glimpse for a second along the way? And, given that you have opted for the woman in the courtyard, why in the world do you tell the girl? How exactly does Owain protect the fountain? And how does he go from robber baron to moral police over other robber barons?

My first response to all these questions is simply to say, “I love it!” The combination of these surprising choices and this weird magic makes for a fantasy world that is just extremely attractive to me. I could read about this world for the rest of my life (which, of course, is exactly what I plan to do by continuing to enjoy various versions of the Matter of Britain).

But my second response is that the weirdness of the “The Lady of the Fountain” isn’t really all that weird. The Arthurian world is, mutatis mutandis, our world. (I’m so pleased with myself that I found an opportunity to use that Latin phrase!) I often find that answers remain stubbornly hidden when I sit still looking for them in my mind, and then just come to me unbidden when I’m on the move. And I usually can’t complete the most obvious task the first time without guidance from others. I haven’t seen a bowl of water cause a lethal storm, but I have known a plane ticket found in a glove box to cause a marital separation, and I’ve known two poorly chosen words in a joke to cause a separation between good friends. And who can predict when Cupid’s arrow will strike or how a rejected lover will react?

I’m so glad I was wrong about the Mabinogion!