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!