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!