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, and who probably won a Pulitzer Prize. 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 another 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 a 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 a 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!

Yes and No

Among the special treats on this year’s reading list is a book I had looked forward to for decades: Peter Abelard’s Yes and No. Most people who read Abelard want to read his correspondence with Heloise. I was much more interested in the work that laid the foundation for the University of Paris. Abelard taught his lessons in odd corners of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and scores of students came and – bless them! – voluntarily paid Abelard for his services. And from these meetings arose the concept of Education in France.

What I thought I understood about the book was this: That Abelard wished to explore certain questions of Christian doctrine in search of authoritative answers. That he had compiled great numbers of quotations from the Bible as well as from Fathers and Doctors of the Church that purported to answers these questions. (Or rather that he had challenged his students to find all these passages.) That the authorities cited routinely differed in their answers, so that each question could, with support, be answered both “yes” and “no.” And that Abelard got in trouble for leaving his students in a muddle about essential tenets of the Christian faith and for never saying, “But of course the real answer to question X is this.” Now having read the book, I have to say my preconceptions were slightly wrong.

First of all, the only thing Abelard actually wrote in the volume is an introduction in which he provides several reasons for seemingly contradictory language in the Church's authoritative writings: ambiguity of words, false writings with a saint's name attached, corruption in text, statements later retracted by the writer, misunderstanding on the part of later readers of when an authority is quoting or speaking in the voice of a heretic, taking opinion for fact, and everyday use of speech that departs from literal truth (e.g., “this cup is empty”). We should not accuse the saints of lying, he says, but only Scripture can be said not to depart from truth. Even the saints themselves (especially Augustine) tell readers not to follow the statements they make in which they have erred. So Abelard prefaces the long litanies of conflicting quotations with a statement that none of the problems the reader is about to face mean that the Christian faith is a sham or that the Bible is not true or that the saints all just made things up.

Secondly, the core doctrines of the Christian faith are never questioned. None of the 158 questions touch, for instance, anything in the Nicene Creed. Abelard never sows doubt about the existence of God, his role as Creator, his existence in three persons, the divinity of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, the virgin birth, the actual death and resurrection of the Lord, or the efficacy of that death and resurrection toward salvation. Many of the early questions have to do with understanding the Trinity and the inadequacy of language to describe the Three-in-One. Is God triple, he asks? Well, as the title says, yes and no. Other early questions regard God’s foreknowledge, exactly how Christ took on humanity, etc. Starting somewhere around 40% of the way in, the questions begin to concern such questions as when the angels were created, whether Mary doubted Gabriel, the order of post-Resurrection appearances, which apostles had wives, which evangelist corresponds with which animal face on the cherubim, whether one baptismal immersion is enough, if James the Just was the son of Joseph, whether intinction is a suitable form for receiving communion, when and if one can remarry, whether Cain is damned, which sin is the second most serious, etc. I must admit that he does address whether baptism is necessary for salvation, whether infants have sin, whether works justify, the true presence of Christ on the altar, and whether grace comes before our good will or not, but I think most Christian students will have to admit that the answer to each of these questions is complex and cannot be summed up in a single word: yes or no.

Now I’m not a twelfth-century Parisian, so I don’t know how it came across at the time, and I wasn’t in Notre Dame to hear Abelard’s oral presentation of his lessons, so I don’t know what subtle nuances of meaning he may have supplied. But reading through Yes and No, I didn't get the impression that Abelard was thumbing his nose at doctrine or denying the truth of Christianity. However, the overall effect of the relentless verbal tennis does make it seem as if he thought the Church placed too much stock in authority, especially in proof texts taken out of context. Question: Did (and does) the Church depend too much on proof texts taken out of context? The answer is not “yes and no.”

Challenges in the Third Decade

Several days ago, I posted an introduction to my third ten-year plan. In that post, I concentrated on the fun side of my tentative list; a lot of mystery, science fiction, and adventure yarns. A big part of that fun side of the plan involves returning to books and authors I enjoyed when I was much younger. Of course I assume that these books will look different to me now than they did when I was sixteen, and hope they’ll be different in a good way; I’m not going Back to the Future, I guess, but Forward to the Past. But I haven’t decided only to recapture an enhanced version of my adolescence; I also put some hard reading on my list, with mystery and adventure not in the books themselves but in my approach to them.

The idea of a third decade started with just three categories: finishing the Summa Theologica, rereading Plato and Aristotle, and reading more drama, which I had mostly neglected in the second plan. In some ways, Thomas Aquinas is very hard reading indeed; I couldn’t make any sense of it at all the first time I tried. (I have to laugh at myself now: I was sick, and when Nancy offered to go to the library to get me something to read, I said, “Look for the Summa Theologica. I’ve heard it’s good.”) But sometime during the third or fourth Thomas assignment from the first ten-year plan, I suddenly saw the interlocking pattern, and the scholastic arguments actually started getting easy for me. Plato, by contrast, seems easy on the surface, but gets harder the more you think about him. With Aristotle, as far as I can discern, whether a book will reveal its treasures gladly all depends on what kind of student took notes at the Lyceum that day.

Well, as they say, both work and geeky reading plans expand to fill the time allotted, and my plan for a third decade grew quickly as I started working on it in earnest this summer. First, I found out that the missing run of numbers in the Aquinas volumes of the Britannica set don’t mark a gap in the structure that Aquinas never finished, as I had supposed; there’s way more Summa than I suspected, although at least it’s all readily available on the internet. I’ll plan to read most of it, but now after reading Durant’s account of medieval philosophy, I’m even more eager to read some of Thomas’s teacher, Albertus Magnus, and some of the Sic et Non of Peter Abelard. Abelard is generally known, if known at all, for his secret love for Heloise. But the story of his method of disputation interested me much, much more. Students in Paris actually pooled their money to pay Abelard to teach them; I love the idea but must realistically acknowledge that I would never have a job if higher education still worked this way. Teacher and students would meet together in an unoccupied niche of Notre Dame, and Peter would propose a theological position, say, that a human can comprehend God. “All right,” he would say, “using the scriptures, the Church Fathers, and your own reason, argue sic: that this proposition is true.” After the response had gone on for a while, he would stop the students and say, “Now, argue non: that this proposition is false,” and the students would once more jump in with their knowledge and their ideas. The Church put sanctions on Abelard for a while because he refused to end his classes by saying, “Very fine analysis, students, but we all know that the correct answer is [insert the orthodox position on subject X here].” But I’m not sure at all he wasn’t serving God by his open-ended investigations; after all, maybe the answer to the position I offered as an example is non.

Difficult in a different way perhaps are the novels of Thomas Hardy. Having read some of his poetry this year, I’m more familiar with his bleakly melancholy outlook, regretting the loss of a religion he thought untrue and longing for a spiritual realm he thought nonexistent. The two Hardy books I’ve read seem at first blush like typical Victorian pageants with happy endings, but my friend Jane Vogel convinced me that the real message of Hardy lies hidden in a complex allegory of names. I also have to admit that I’ve read what I think are considered two of his happier books, so perhaps when I get to Tess and Jude, I won’t have to look very far beneath the surface to see the darkness.

I’ve also included a reader of selections from the works of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. I don’t know that I’ll recognize the literature he analyzes or understand what he has to say about it; but I’ve heard that he devised the term “polyphonic voices” to describe the fiction of Dostoevsky – characters speaking whatever they have to say about ethics and religion with no apparent commentary or judgment from the narrator – and it intrigues me.

Rounding out this more difficult portion of the Third Decade is a book I’ve heard described as the most obscure novel ever written. The first page of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake “begins,” with no initial capitalization, “ riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,” and includes the “words” passencore, tauftauf, venissoon and the Rabelaisian  bababadal-gharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovar-rhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk. It “ends” with the deliciously enigmatic “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (I don’t know how to clarify by punctuation alone that that last “sentence” has no final period.) Whether that lilting formula fades inconclusively into the magical green glow of an Irish dusk or cycles back to the “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,” those final eleven words possess an enchanting music all their own. Say them out loud. Savor the liquid L’s. Ponder the enigma of whether some or all of the A’s could be heard as prefixes instead of as articles. I don’t know what I’m getting myself into, bur I’ve promised myself for decades that I would someday read Finnegans Wake, and now I know when: sometime around March of 2021, I’ll follow Joyce a way a lone a last a loved a long the