Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

2022 in books

I read a lot of good books in 2022, and I had a hard time narrowing them down in the “best of” categories I typically use for these posts, and once I had done that I still had a lot to say about them. So let me end these introductory remarks here and get you straight into the best fiction, non-fiction, kids’ books, and rereads of my year.

Favorite fiction of the year

This was a fiction-heavy year of reading thanks in no small part to two wonderful series recommended by friends, about which more below. I present the overall favorites in no particular order:

Wait for a Corpse, by Max Murray—A really charming and witty mystery from the early 1950s in which the mystery is not who killed the narrator’s awful Uncle Titus but who is going to. A genuinely romantic will-they-won’t-they love story, a variety of humorous and farcical plot complications, and a dash of small-town political shenanigans round out this fun story. Long out of print and probably hard to find, but worth seeking out.

John Macnab and Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—This year I declared my birth month John Buchan June and read and wrote about as many of his novels as I could. I squeezed eight in, and these two were my favorite new reads. One a high-spirited outdoor heist caper set in the Scottish highlands, the other a moody and contemplative outdoor odyssey through the furthest reaches of the Canadian Rockies, both are excellent, gripping, absorbing reads, albeit in dramatically different ways. You can read my full John Buchan June reviews of John Macnab and Sick Heart River here and here.

Fatherland, by Robert Harris—A Kripo detective in Berlin investigates the murder of an obscure Nazi Party functionary as the city prepares to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday—in 1964. I’m not usually one for alternate history, but Fatherland approaches a fantasy world in which the Nazis won World War II through a brilliantly structured mystery-thriller, giving the reader two levels of investigation and discovery that interlock with and complement each other. It’s vividly imagined, plausibly detailed, and briskly written. “I couldn’t put it down” is a hoary cliché, but in this case, for me, it was true.

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—A strongly written and hard-hitting novel about two soldiers—one experienced, one green—in the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—The story of a buffalo hunt in a remote pass of the Rockies, Butcher’s Crossing balances a gritty, sweaty, bloody plot with intense character drama, pitting the naïve and sentimental New England boy Will Andrews against the Captain Ahab-like Miller, the guide and trigger-man leading the expedition. Beautifully written and gripping. I blogged about Williams’s use of the senses in Butcher’s Crossing here.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey—A severely injured police inspector tries to solve a 450-year old mystery from his hospital bed. It’s better than it sounds—astonishingly good, in fact. Full review from last month here.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—The work of Agatha Christie is a weird lacuna in my reading, and until this year the only one of her novels I’d ever read was Murder on the Orient Express way back in high school. I fixed that this fall with one of her other most famous books, And Then There Were None. This review will be short: it’s regarded as a masterpiece for a reason.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe—Poe’s only novel, Arthur Gordon Pym purports to be the journal/memoirs of a New England youth who stowed away on a ship and got considerably more than he bargained for, including mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, ghost ships, and a final voyage into terra incognita, violent encounters with undiscovered peoples, and… something far worse. Poe combines Moby-Dick-style kitchen sink realism, a Robinson Crusoe-style spirit of adventure, and plenty of his own trademark feel for the uncanny and terrifying for an engaging and uniquely thrilling tale. I had only ever heard bad or dismissive comments about Pym up until this time and was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy—Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road sixteen years ago starts as a sort of New Orleans No Country for Old Men in which Bobby Western, the brilliant son of a Manhattan Project physicist who is now a salvage diver, starts his own investigation into the mysterious crash of a private jet in the Mississippi River only for terrible unseen forces to array themselves against him. This storyline is interspersed with that of Bobby’s sister, a child prodigy afflicted with intrusive schizophrenic hallucinations, whom we know from the opening pages eventually hangs herself. But neither storyline goes anywhere, exactly. Long, talky, meandering (none of which are intended as criticisms), The Passenger is as vividly written as any of McCarthy’s other work but clearly has much more going on in it thematically than the straightforward plot elements, and I knew even while reading it that it would stick with me and reward me more later through simply letting it sit in the back of my mind for a while, and that has proven to be the case. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying read. So, caveat lector. The companion volume focusing primarily on Bobby’s sister and her institutionalization, Stella Maris, is already out but I haven’t gotten to it yet. We’ll see how this informs and recasts the events of The Passenger in the new year.

Witch Wood, by John Buchan—I read this just a week or so ago, so you can expect a full, thorough treatment this coming John Buchan June, but for the time being let me recommend it as a strongly written, engaging, atmospheric, suspenseful, and genuinely spooky historical novel in which a young minister discovers the existence of a devil-worshiping cult in his seemingly upright Scottish parish. A favorite of CS Lewis, who wrote of it, “for Witch Wood specially I am always grateful; all that devilment sprouting up out of a beginning like Galt’s Annals of the Parish. That's the way to do it.”

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—This was a reread, but it was a special reread for me. This was the first novel by McCarthy that I read as a callow college student more than fifteen years ago, and I was unprepared for it. (I’ve described starting McCarthy’s corpus with Blood Meridian as “jumping into the deep end first.”) But it stuck with me, haunting me, and steadily grew in my regard, and within a year or two I had read almost everything else McCarthy had written up to that point. This year it was finally time to revisit Blood Meridian, and with the intervening years and maturity and experience it was like reading a different novel, or the fulfilment of the novel I struggled with one summer in college—gripping, bleak, and overwhelmingly powerful. So I’m including this reread among my favorite fiction reads of the year, and giving it a stronger recommendation than ever.

Discoveries of the year

Let me here thank my friends Dave Newell and JP Burten (whose novels Red Lory and Liberator y’all should check out) for introducing me to the following two series, of which I read too many volumes to include in the usual “favorites” format above but which I have to acknowledge as highlights of the year:

The Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments, by Alexander McCall Smith—An absolute hoot, these short stories and novellas follow the marvelous philologist Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an aristocratic German scholar of the Romance languages and proud author of the seminal 1200-page study Portuguese Irregular Verbs. Von Igelfeld is a brilliant creation, simultaneously pompous and polite, rigid and kindhearted, humorless and eager to please, tone-deaf to social niceties but ostentatiously courtly, jealous of his own honor and childishly naïve. (He does not understand, for instance, why so many other prominent professors have such attractive graduate assistants, or why so many students are so obliging about coed room assignments on what is supposed to be a scholarly reading retreat in the Alps.) This is a charming combination of foibles that consistently lands him in uncomfortable situations ranging from awkward silences to high farce, situations from which he is either too proud or too oblivious to extricate himself. Pure, unalloyed fun.

• Volumes read: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

• Volumes remaining: Your Inner Hedgehog

The Slough House series, by Mick Herron—An excellent series of spy thrillers featuring the outcasts, losers, and screwups of MI5 who, rather than being fired and creating public embarrassment, are shunted into dead-end jobs at a site called Slough House under the management of the slovenly former “joe” or field operative Jackson Lamb. Each volume is intricately plotted, engagingly and suspensefully written, and—what sets it most apart from the novels the series is most often compared to—funny. I’ve enjoyed these so much that I’ve forced myself to space them out so that I can squeeze in other reading.

• Volumes read: Slow Horses, Dead Lions, Real Tigers, Spook Street, London Rules, Joe Country

• Volumes remaining: Slough House, Bad Actors, and Standing by the Wall

Best of the year:

My favorite fiction read of the year is, for the first time in one of these lists, a reread. I had thought that rereading The Road in 2019 was my favorite that year, but it turns out I had misremembered. The novel is James Dickey’s Deliverance.

Deliverance is notorious in my hometown because John Boorman’s film adaptation was shot there and the movie hangs brooding over us like a specter. Plenty of cultures have to live with unflattering stereotypes, but toothless hillbilly sodomites has to be among the worst. Certainly, the “paddle faster, I hear banjos” bumper stickers got old pretty quick.

But as I discovered when I finally read it during grad school, Deliverance the novel is something else entirely—an involving, horrifying, thrilling, deeply and disturbingly beautiful novel with a rich narrative voice and strong, poetic writing.

If you’re familiar with the movie you already know most of the story; the film adapts the novel quite faithfully. But by the nature of its medium, the film has to deal in visuals, actions, and sounds—externals, surfaces. Dickey’s novel is internal, with deep, swift, very cold currents flowing beneath the surface. Its characters, chief among them narrator Ed Gentry, are all psychologically rich, and the seemingly simple actions of the plot—the drive north, the canoe trip, the horrible encounter with the moonshiners, the flight downriver, ambush, killing, and the final lie meant to flood and hide the events of the canoe trip forever—are complicated and intensified by the characterization and by Ed’s transformation from soft suburbanite to killer, a transformation we witness.

Deliverance is a brilliant novel, an intricately crafted prose poem, a haunting evocation of real environments, a thrilling tale of survival, and a weighty morality play concerning sin, guilt, and the thin layer of civilization far too many trust to keep them from the darkness in their own hearts.

Rereading Deliverance after well over a decade of reflecting on it made this the best fictional read of my year. Though it is not for the faint of heart, I strongly recommend it.

After finishing it this summer, I blogged here about John Gardner’s principle of using vivid, concrete detail to create a “fictive dream” in the mind of the reader and used Deliverance as a major example, comparing it to several other favorites from the spring and summer—Blood Meridian, John Macnab, and Sick Heart River. You can read that post here.

Favorite non-fiction of the year

While fiction threatened to take over my reading this year, I plugged away at a number of good works of history, biography, literary study, and cultural commentary. In the best of these those categories overlapped generously. The following handful of favorites are presented, like the fiction, in no particular order:

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by CR Wiley—An insightful and warmly-written literary, philosophical, and theological look at the meaning and significance one of the most perplexing characters in all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Full review from earlier this year here.

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, by Katja Hoyer—A very good short history of the German Empire (1871-1918) with attention to its origins in post-Napoleonic nationalist movements, political intrigue, and military victory; its politics, finances, and imperial ambitions; its culture and key personalities; and, inevitably, its downfall in the catastrophe of the First World War. Well-structured and balanced and highly readable, this is the best book of its kind that I’ve come across.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City, by Scott Peeples—An engaging and insightful short study of the life of Edgar Allan Poe and the chaotic, striving, rumbustious landscape of antebellum America through the prism of the cities where Poe lived most of his life. Full review from October here.

Poe: A Life Cut Short, by Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, by Paul Collins—Two elegantly written short biographies of Poe that complement each other nicely. Collins’s biography gives extraordinarily good coverage to Poe’s work for such a concise book, and Ackroyd’s gives greater depth to Poe’s tragic personal life. I’d readily recommend either of these to someone looking for an introduction to Poe that cuts through the manifold myths (insanity, drug abuse, etc etc) and fairly represents the man’s life and work. Short Goodreads reviews here and here.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, by CS Lewis—I have tried and failed many times to love Paradise Lost, so I’ll let CS Lewis love it for me. This is an outstanding introduction not only to Milton’s great epic, but to the origins and history of epic poetry generally and to Milton’s place in the story of this genre. Being a fan of epic from Homer to Dante, I most savored the earlier chapters that explain its history and contextualize Milton’s work, but the entire short Preface is an excellent piece of scholarship and worthwhile whether you love Milton or not. (Side note: While I have a very old paperback copy of this book from Oxford UP, I read the nice recent hardback reprint from HarperOne. My only criticism is some slipshod typography, which turned the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ) in Old English quotations into Œs and Ps.)

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray—A bracing look at the climate of skepticism and outright hostility to Western civilization and the past, with many thoroughly documented examples and a strongly argued case for preserving, maintaining, and celebrating our inheritance. Would pair well with a read of Murray’s longer, more detailed, but more general The Madness of Crowds, one of my favorites of 2020.

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—Both a summary and extension of the key themes and arguments of Trueman’s longer and more scholarly The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—which is high on my to-read list for this year—Strange New World is an excellent guide for general readers to how we got to where we are today, a world in which the transcendent is regarded as an oppressive myth and personal identity and sexuality are market commodities subject to infinitely recursive individual self-revision. A demonstration that ideas have consequences.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin—A trenchant reappraisal of World War II with Stalin and the USSR as its central focus. McMeekin reminds the reader that Stalin was as much an aggressor as Hitler—indeed, the two allied to invade and divide Poland, a fact that was memory-holed during the war and has only seldom returned to public consciousness since—and demonstrates that even when Stalin could justifiably claim to be a victim following Nazi betrayal in the summer of 1941, he was a master manipulator who brazenly played the Allies to get what he wanted. And he got everything he wanted. Most damning are the book’s long middle chapters recounting in punishing detail the Lend-Lease bounty continuously heaped upon Stalin, entirely on Stalin’s terms, with Stalin offering almost nothing in return but contempt and ever larger demands, all while dealing high-handedly with Allied leaders and waging war with the same brutality he had brought to the invasions of Poland and Finland. FDR turned a blind eye and forced all around him—from anticommunist members of his administration who found themselves ousted all the way to Churchill himself—to do the same. Stalin’s War both reinforced some conclusions I had already intuited from years of studying and, especially, teaching the war, and placed Stalin at the center of a truly global picture of the conflict and how its results guaranteed decades of Cold War and continued bloodshed. A worthwhile corrective to rosy pictures of World War II—its aims, and prosecution, and its results.

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann—Sharply observed, unflinching, disturbing, and utterly exhilarating, this is one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Like Blood Meridian, this is a reread of an old favorite that has exercised a profound influence on me, but the rereading experience was so gripping, so bracing, that it deserved to be among my other top non-fiction reads of the year. At the beginning of December I typed up some thoughts, observations, and reflections inspired by this second reading, which you can find here.

Best of the year:

If I cheated a bit by naming a reread as my favorite fiction of the year, I’ll do same here by picking two titles to share a best-of distinction for non-fiction. In this case, both books are fascinating, readable, deeply-researched works of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon history and literature.

The great Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey’s Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is a short monograph that makes a strong case on a contentious topic.

Less than a century ago, Beowulf was wrongly looked at as a difficult, fatally flawed historical source for the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, a frustrating farrago of myth and vague allusion to things 19th-century scientific historians wanted straight data about. This viewpoint changed with Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which argued that Beowulf is first and foremost a work of great poetic genius and unsurpassed thematic power, and that the historical elements are there to ground a fantastical story in what, for its original audience, felt like a real world.

Now, Shippey argues, the pendulum has swung too far the other way, with Beowulf viewed only as a poem or myth and neglected as a historical source. Marshaling an impressive array of literary, linguistic, and especially archaeological support from sites like Lejre in Denmark, Shippey argues that Beowulf is not only a great poem but also a broadly accurate and trustworthy window into the region, period, and culture in which it is set—the tribal Germanic peoples of early 6th-century Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings is an indispensable read for anyone interested in Beowulf or this time period, and a boon to anyone who, like me, intuited Beowulf’s importance and authenticity as a representation of this world but lacked the archaeological clout to make such a strong case for it.

Just as readable and well-researched but probably of greater general interest is Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. In this book Parker, a medievalist who maintained the the excellent Clerk of Oxford blog and has an extraordinary talent for making foreign minds understandable, tackles the nature of time itself—how Anglo-Saxon people thought about and reckoned it, and how they marked and celebrated the passage of it, season by season, year by year.

Parker draws from a huge array of Anglo-Saxon literature—part of the book’s purpose, she writes, is to introduce this literature and encourage people to seek out more of it—to describe first how the heathen Anglo-Saxon peoples’ understanding of time, years, and seasons changed with their conversion to Christianity, and then how they lived their lives within this new understanding. She gives good attention to everything from the number and names of the seasons (originally, it seems, only two: winter and sumor, with spring and fall by many other names imported from the Continent along with Christianity), the months, the work and pastimes of people from all walks of life at different times of year, and, perhaps most importantly, the intricate liturgical calendar and its many, many feasts, rites, and holidays. What emerges through this carefully arranged study is a holistic picture of a lost people and its lost way of life.

Appropriately for a culture whose poetry is so thoroughly tinged with elegy and ubi sunt reflection, I ended this book both delighted and saddened: delighted at the richness of this harmonious yearly cycle and the vividness with which Parker narrated and explained it, and saddened at what has been lost since that time. Winter, and specifically the early days of the twelve days of Christmas, unsurprisingly proved the perfect time to read Parker’s book.

I give my highest and strongest recommendations to both Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings and Winters in the World for anyone interested specifically in the Early Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon England or for anyone willing to venture out and explore times, places, and minds alien to our own. You’ll find both books richly rewarding.

Rereads

In addition to a lot of good reading this year, I did a lot of good rereading. Rather than pick and choose and then burden y’all with more one-paragraph summaries, I’ve simply listed all of them as usual. But by virtue of my having taken the time to revisit these this year, please understand all of them to rank somewhere between good and excellent. Audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks*

• Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism*

• After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

• Socrates: A Man for Our Times, by Paul Johnson*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman*

• The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan

• Greenmantle, by John Buchan

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

• Beowulf, Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff

• Life of King Alfred, by Asser, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge

• Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. Michael Hofmann

• The Third Man, by Graham Greene

Kids’ books

All of the books listed below were read-aloud favorites for myself and our kids this year. I had a hard time narrowing this selection down, but these are certainly the favorites, and I’d recommend any of them without hesitation.

• Caedmon’s Song, by Ruth Ashby, illustrated by Bill Slavin. A beautifully illustrated children’s version of an important Anglo-Saxon story related by Bede. Short Goodreads review here.

• Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—An old favorite of mine that proved an excellent introduction to these stories for my seven- and five-year old.

• Alexander the Great and The Fury of the Vikings, by Dominic Sandbrook—Two volumes from Sandbrook’s Adventures in Time series that I read out loud to my kids this fall and winter. Perfect for our seven-year old, who thrilled to Alexander’s campaigns and the various Viking Age figures (e.g. Ragnar Loðbrok, Alfred the Great, Leif Eiriksson, and Harald Hardrada), and though our five-year had a somewhat harder time tracking with the stories he still enjoyed them. I strongly recommend both and look forward to other entries in the series.

• Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—A fun, light, nimbly paced adventure with a clever mouse-level perspective on Sherlock Holmes and just enough of the trappings of Conan Doyle’s stories to hook new fans.

• Read-n-Grow Picture Bible, by Libby Weed, illustrated by Jim Padgett—A childhood favorite, a surprisingly thorough and serious illustrated Bible, read to my kids over several months. Short Goodreads review here.

• A Boy Called Dickens, by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by John Hendrix—A delightful and beautifully illustrated short retelling of Charles Dickens’s childhood and the influence growing up among the workhouses and debtors’ prisons of industrial London had on his imagination.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson*—A hilarious and genuinely moving Christmas tale that combines farce, nostalgia, and remarkable depth, especially on one of my favorite themes: the foolish things of the world confounding the wise. My whole family enjoyed this greatly on our car trip to Georgia for Christmas.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with me, and I hope you’ve found something enticing to seek out and read during the new year. Thanks for reading, and all the best in 2023!

Summer reading 2022

Well, that went by fast. The summer of 2022 is gone and I’m well into my fall semester now, so the time has arrived much more quickly than anticipated to recap the best of my summer reading. I read a lot of good stuff this summer and hope y’all can find something here to enjoy for yourselves.

As always, for the purposes of this blog “summer” constitutes the time between some point in May between the end of my spring semester and the beginning of my college’s summer session and Labor Day, an arbitrary but convenient cutoff point.

Favorite non-fiction

This was a fiction-heavy summer for reasons I’ll discuss below, so the pickings in history and other non-fiction reading are pretty slim. But I did have favorites and, in no particular order, these were the five best non-fiction reads of my summer:

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—The discipline of history began 2400 years ago with one Greek’s inquiries, an examination of the past best summarized by the question “How did we get here?” This is the most fundamental and profitable question a historian can ask, especially in times of upheaval—whether militarily, as in the days of Herodotus, or on the scale of an entire civilization’s understanding of reality, as today. Strange New World is Carl Trueman’s short approach to answering this question for we 21st-century folk, when 300 years of skepticism, hostility to tradition, a hermeneutic of suspicion, individualism, and relativism are bearing their most poisonous fruit. Light and well-paced, this is an excellent popular introduction to some important intellectual history and I look forward to reading Trueman’s longer, more scholarly treatment of the same subject, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this fall.

The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M Baxter—I read this on the strength of Baxter’s excellent previous book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. His new book examines how particular medieval authors—Boethius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many others—shaped Lewis’s thinking on a variety of topics. A good short guide not only to Lewis’s worldview but to a variety of important medieval writers.

The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, by Max Adams—Caveat lector: the emphasis here is much more on the “times” than the “life.” Covering the century or so around the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, Adams’s history focuses on Northumbria, a kingdom often overlooked in the rush to study Mercia or especially Wessex, and makes a strong case for the importance and uniqueness of the Northumbrian achievement. But as the author is an archaeologist, the human narrative is sometimes hard to track (it’s borderline “pots not people,” the besetting sin of archaeological writing), the archaeological material is thoroughly but sometimes laboriously presented, and Adams is unduly skeptical of much of the written evidence. My views on such skepticism are well known. Nevertheless, this was an interesting and deeply researched read and I found it well worth my while.

A Brief History of Germany, by Jeremy Black—A handy short history focusing primarily on “Germany” since the late Middle Ages and especially the 19th century, when Napoleon demolished the Holy Roman Empire and the nation-state we think of when we hear the word Germany was formed through revolution, nationalist upheaval, and war. The publisher advertises this book as “indispensable for travellers” but you’d better be a traveler who remembers some of your college Western Civ, as Black assumes a certain level of familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader. Nevertheless, this is a solid, well-organized overview covering a lot in a little space, with especially good chapters on the World Wars, interwar politics, and postwar divided Germany, plus plenty of room left over for some fun and informative sidebars on all kinds of cultural topics.

General Lee, by Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley—A short, engaging biography of Lee, primarily focusing on Lee’s campaigns from 1862-5. Wolseley was a British soldier with vast experience across the British Empire and met Lee while in Virginia as an observer in late 1862. His personal anecdotes of Lee as well as his outsider’s insights into the peculiarities of the American military situation—not only in the material, strategic, and logistical domains but in broader political and social conditions—are especially interesting and make this very old book a worthwhile short read even today.

Honorable mentions:

The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, trans. Yair Mintzker—A good concise history of the latter half of the Empire’s existence primarily focused on its continuously mutating political and religious institutions and the way they adapted to numerous changes and pressures, both internal and external. Dry but well-structured, informative, and insightful.

Being Wagner, by Simon Callow—This was my first historical/biographical reading this summer and I greatly enjoyed it. Callow’s writing is elegant and witty and I came away with a solid grasp of Wagner’s terrible personality—which Callow represents honestly and without excuses—and the broad outline of his life story. However, in reading about the book afterward and trying to run down more information on a few interesting side topics myself, I found that the book has some problems with accuracy and interpretation. I don’t think these problems are severe enough to ruin the book, but if you decide to check it out—whether as a fan of art, music, German history, 19th century Europe, or just good writing—be aware.

Favorite fiction

I read a lot of fiction this summer, but most of it was for a special project—about which more below—and even though those were some of the best books I’ve read in a while, I’m excluding them from consideration here. That narrows the field considerably. So here, in no particular order, are my five other favorite fiction reads of this summer:

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—There are a few ways one can approach a war novel. One is to minutely and exactingly create an entire unit and study the whole through a few focal characters, as in The Naked and the Dead or Matterhorn. The other is to focus narrowly on a few key characters and study their interactions and the effects of the war upon them, as in All Quiet on the Western Front. This novel takes the latter approach and does it brilliantly, presenting the stories of two soldiers, the veteran Sergeant Burch and the raw Private Shane, and one local Afghan kid, Sadboy, over the course of a year’s deployment in the most remote mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan. The result is a taut, economically written, but absorbing character study that proves powerfully moving.

McPadden is a veteran of the US Army Rangers and this novel won the ALA’s WY Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction in 2019. Deservedly so.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—I somehow made it to the age of 38 having only ever read one Agatha Christie mystery, Murder on the Orient Express. After watching Kenneth Branagh’s blah adaptation of Death on the Nile, I decided it was time to read more of Christie herself. I started here, and was not disappointed. Intricately plotted but briskly paced, I read this in a day—a rewarding read.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron—The fourth entry in Herron’s Slough House novels, Spook Street is perhaps the best of them yet. Like the previous volumes, it has a meticulously plotted story that unfolds in complicated layers over the course of a day or two. Like the others, it takes Slough House’s familiar cast of characters and puts them through challenging arcs as they variously cope with grief, addiction, failure, lack of recognition, or Slough House chief Jackson Lamb’s flatulence. But Spook Street also has some major twists and revelations that complicate not only this novel’s plot, but the stories and backgrounds of major characters as well. All four of the novels I’ve read have been good or great so far, but this one is worth beginning the whole series just to get to.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—A brilliant slow-burn survivalist tale set in western Kansas and the Rockies about a decade after the Civil War. Will Andrews, a Bostonian reared on the high-minded nature- and self-worship of Emerson and Thoreau, heads west to find himself and falls in with a team of buffalo hunters whose expedition into a remote mountain valley he agrees to fund—if they let him tag along. Part Moby-Dick, part Deliverance, but with all the best traits of the Western, Butcher’s Crossing is engagingly written from the first page and slowly draws the reader into a hypnotic and absorbing quest for more, with a story and conclusion that feels both inevitable and surprising. I’ve been meaning to read this since I read Williams’s Augustus six years ago and am glad I finally got around to it. A genuine classic.

Last month I blogged about Williams’s use of sensory detail to create a “vivid and continuous fictive dream” in the mind of the reader. You can read that here.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith—The first in McCall Smith’s series of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld “entertainments,” this is a collection of short stories that form a loose biography of the good professor’s life before the Institute of Romance Philology. Light, humorous, with lots of good cultural and academic gags and some well-crafted cringe comedy, but often with a touch of heart, too.

John Buchan June

This was my special project, an intensive thirty days meant to do a few things for me: first, reclaim my birth month from tedious activism; second, give me a huge booster shot of good classic fiction in genres I love; and third, force me into a discipline to write about all of what I read before the month was out, with no room for slacking. It was a great success for me, being both good practice and a daily pleasure, and I hope y’all enjoyed reading along.

Here are the eight novels I read by John Buchan (the first technically being a spring read), with a link to the reviews I wrote for each.

• A Lost Lady of Old Years (1899)

• Prester John (1910)

• The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)

• John Macnab (1925)

• Greenmantle (1916)

• The Power-House (1913)

• Midwinter (1923)

• Sick Heart River (1941)

Among these eight my favorite reread was Greenmantle, only barely edging out the first Richard Hannay adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and I have to admit a tie for my favorite new read between two Sir Edward Leithen novels: the thrilling John Macnab and the reflective and moving Sick Heart River.

I greatly enjoyed this inaugural John Buchan June and am already planning ahead for next year. In the meantime, y’all should certainly check out some of his work if you haven’t before.

Children’s books

I read a lot of books with my kids, but these three were fresh new standouts among this summer’s bedtime stories:

Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—I stumbled across a nice hardback copy of this little children’s novel at Bin Time and picked it up. It was a fun, short, easy bedtime read for my two older kids, who greatly enjoyed it and Basil’s investigation of the central mystery (while also noting how different it was from Disney’s very loose adaptation The Great Mouse Detective). The Sherlock Holmes-related stuff was fun for adults and could prove an effective gateway to Conan Doyle for kids. We’ll certainly be seeking out others in the series.

James Oglethorpe: Not for Self, But for Others, by Torrey Maloof—A kids’ picture book about one of my heroes, the founder of my home state? I bought this on impulse when I ran across it on Amazon and wasn’t disappointed. This is a good child-friendly introduction to the life of an overlooked hero in American history and the story of the founding of the last of the thirteen colonies.

(And let me note in passing that one of the many pleasures of John Buchan June was Oglethorpe’s appearance in a small but important role in the novel Midwinter.)

Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—I first read this children’s adaptation of some Norse myths and legends for my own enjoyment several years ago. This summer I reread it aloud for my seven- and five-year olds’ bedtime. Green very effectively melds the sprawling but fragmentary stuff of Norse poetry into a loose but coherent narrative that incorporates a lot of the best stories of the Æsir from both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson. My kids greatly enjoyed it, and I enjoyed revisiting it. If you’re looking for a briskly written introduction to Norse mythology written at a kid-friendly level that nevertheless does not soft-peddle the Norse gods and is deeply rooted in the original sources, forget Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and read this instead.

Rereads

What I revisited this summer (excluding a few from John Buchan June), all part of my ongoing project of making myself return to good books I’ve enjoyed before:

• How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

• Deliverance, by James Dickey

• Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

• Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

Looking ahead

I’m three weeks into my fall semester and a week into my fall reading, and all is going well on both fronts. I’ve already finished a couple of interesting books and look forward to more. I hope y’all enjoyed some good books this summer and that this list has given you a few options for the fall and winter ahead. Thanks for reading!

2021 in books

If I complained a lot about what 2021 was like for movies in my last post, here’s some good news—it was a great year for reading. I ultimately got through 118 books, including many good rereads, children’s books, and an awesome selection of fiction, history, and other non-fiction. Believe me—as long as this post is, it was hard to narrow my selections down.

You can look at everything I read this year on Goodreads here.

Top ten fiction

In no particular order, my ten favorite fiction reads of the year—with the two top reads spotlighted at the end—plus five honorable mentions:

Beast, by Paul Kingsnorth—A man alone on a wild English moor grapples with terrible injuries, the hostile environment, unseen forces beyond his control, and his fascination with a great beast living somewhere on the moor with him. One of those novels it’s impossible to summarize, a hallucinatory masterpiece of tone and atmosphere that is as immediately engrossing as a dream and that steadily builds in intensity. Beast is the second book of a loose trilogy by Kingsnorth, the first being one of my favorite books of the last decade, a novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest and written in an alien and poetic hybrid of Old and Modern English, The Wake.

Through the Wheat, by Thomas Boyd—A forceful, harrowing story of the Marines in World War I, based on the author’s experiences on the Western Front during the summer of 1918. Almost, but not quite, an American All Quiet on the Western Front.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet—Both a novelistic account of the career and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most cutthroat and callous Nazis in the Third Reich, as well as an account of the young’s authors attempt to write this novelistic account, HHhH is, the author, mid-book, “an infranovel.” Hard to explain, but outstanding through and through. Full blog review here.

V2, by Robert Harris—A straightforward and engaging World War II thriller. The novel begins with Dr Rudi Graf, a German rocket engineer and longtime associate of Dr Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi ballistic missile program, at work in Belgium preparing a launch aimed at London. On the receiving end is the unwitting Kay Caton-Walsh, an aerial photography analyst with British intelligence. Following this first in a series of continuously escalating strikes, Graf and Kay will be drawn nearer and nearer as Graf works to keep up with Hitler’s government’s demands and Kay works to bring down the Nazi missile program. I read this as a diversion, but it proved by turns ironic and poignant, especially in its final surprising revelation.

Forever and a Day, by Anthony Horowitz—A James Bond continuation novel, this time a prequel to the events of Fleming’s first story, Casino Royale. Horowitz presents a newly-minted 007 investigating the murder of the previous agent with that number, and Bond’s on-the-job learning—his feeling out of the dangerous world of espionage, assassination, and organized crime—provides part of the charm. A fun ride, with some striking secondary characters and an embittered villain with a genuinely interesting plot and motivation.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner—The life of Jacob, brilliantly retold in a style that takes this familiar story and makes it strange and new again. The evocation of alien worlds has been one of Buechner’s strengths—as in his two novels based on the lives of medieval saints, Godric and Brendan, which are two of my all-time favorites—and here he mines the oddities of the biblical story and the grotesqueries and darkness of the Patriarchs’ historical context to highlight just what is so special about Abraham—already present only as a memory—Isaac, and Jacob. Especially good is his dramatization of Jacob’s betrayal of Esau, whom Buechner breathes life and sympathy into. Beautifully written and very moving. You can read an extract I shared upon the birth of a friend’s baby here.

The Outlaws, by Ernst von Salomon—A whirlwind of a novel, an only lightly fictionalized version of events the author lived through. Ernst von Salomon was a Prussian military cadet at the time of the armistice in 1918, and soon found himself fighting Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries as a member of one of the Freikorps, German paramilitary units, before getting involved in political assassination. He ended up in prison as an accomplice in the assassination of Weimar Germany’s foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. If you want a sense of just how bad things can get politically, just how fractured and chaotic one society can become, just how much upheaval can break out, and just how far patriotic young men will go to make things right—and if you want an unusual but gripping real life story—read The Outlaws. I haven’t stopped recommending it since I first read it.

Missionaries, by Phil Klay—Missionaries introduces four major characters—an American reporter, an American ex-Special Forces medic turned military adviser, a Colombian army colonel, and a young Colombian man caught up in the brutal world of the rural paramilitaries—and interweaves their life stories, past and present, as all four are drawn into the American-assisted drug wars in the jungles of Colombia. A sprawling, complex, reflective novel rich in characters with harrowing pasts, an intricately crafted plot, and, as the title implies, quite a lot of theological overtones, Missionaries defies easy summary, but it’s a rewarding and powerfully moving look at just what modern warfare means for the least of these.

Honorable mentions:

• Brother Wolf, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson—Another engrossing gothic horror story from the author of A Bloody Habit, this one about a prominent academic skeptic’s daughter, an eccentric English Dominican priest, and a Franciscan monk who is also a werewolf.

• The Dig, by John Preston—A fictionalized retelling of the discovery and excavation of Sutton Hoo that, like its subject, has much more buried beneath its surface than you might immediately detect. Hope to reread this one soon.

• 52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard—Pornographers and other lowlifes attempt to blackmail a prosperous Detroit businessman. Everyone gets more than they bargained for. One of my favorites of Leonard’s crime novels so far. Another of my quarantine reads from back in the spring.

• The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout—The grim but moving story of John Books, an aging, cancer-stricken gunfighter attempting to prepare himself—by settling accounts, turning away gawkers, and reckoning with his sins—for his rapidly approaching death.

• In the Valley, by Ron Rash—An excellent set of short stories from a favorite writer. Includes a novella continuing parts of the story of his novel Serena.

Favorites of the year:

Breakout at Stalingrad, by Heinrich Gerlach

This is one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. Gerlach wrote Breakout at Stalingrad during his captivity in Russia following his capture at Stalingrad, where he served as a junior officer in the German army. His role as an intelligence officer gave him a horribly clear vantage point for the collapse and demolition of his army, and the novel is a grim, unromanticized evocation of that long, arduous, bloody siege that only builds in tension as it goes on. No character is safe regardless of rank or role in the army.

As I noted in my full length review, Breakout at Stalingrad stands out because of its well-rendered and diverse cast of characters, the dense and all-pervading irony of its events, and its authentic, vivid, tactile details. The frigid weather, the terror of the mostly unseen enemy, the diminishing and finally nonexistent rations, the desperate struggle to find food or medicine or even the minimum ammunition necessary to fight off the Russians, the dwindling of the men—both statistically, in overall numbers, and physically and mentally, as individuals—all are brilliantly conveyed in what is ultimately a study not just of defeat, but destruction.

I was so impressed and moved by Breakout at Stalingrad that I wrote a longer, more detailed review of it back in the spring, which you can read here.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB

The best surprise of the year, The Eighth Arrow came my way at a really good time—during my two-week quarantine with coronavirus. I sat down with it and, for three days, barely moved or looked up from the book. It’s excellent.

The Eighth Arrow continues the story of Odysseus in the afterlife, the hell of Dante’s Commedia specifically. Trapped with his old friend Diomedes in one of the bolgia of the circle of the frauds, the novel begins when Odysseus is stirred from centuries of torment and reverie by the passage of Dante and Virgil above. Odysseus cries out for a chance at deliverance and finds himself and Diomedes, by the grace of “the Parthenos,” temporarily released from their places in hell. This begins a downward journey paralleling that of Dante in many ways, but uniquely Odyssean. The Eighth Arrow takes the best of Homer and Dante and fuses them in a genuinely surprising and engaging way, resulting in a theologically rich fantasy novel that is also immediately involving and vividly written, with comedy, horror, action, and deeply moving pathos skillfully interwoven throughout. I enjoyed it from beginning to end and couldn’t get enough of it.

You can read more about The Eighth Arrow in my post about my quarantine reading, which you can read here.

Top twelve non-fiction

In no particular order, but with my top choice saved for last, my twelve favorite non-fiction reads of the year, plus another ten honorable mentions. Believe me, it was hard to narrow it down even to twenty-two this year.

Saint Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman—A concise, engagingly-written account of what we know about the patron saint of Ireland. Freeman gives good attention to the historical context in which Patrick lived and ministered, giving the reader a vivid picture of a remote and ill-attested age of migration, invasion, piracy, warfare, and tribal politics, as well as the many dangers Patrick faced at every stage of his life in this world. I added this biography to my annually posted St Patrick’s Day reading recommendations, which you can view here. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat, by William R Short and Reynir A Óskarson—Speaking of the early medieval period, warfare, and piracy, here’s one of the best books I read this fall. Men of Terror is an attempt both to recover the Viking “mindset,” to understand the Vikings from the inside (about which more below), and to scientifically test the tools and methods of Viking warfare as described in the extant literary sources. It was an excellent read and will prove an excellent reference in years to come. I recommend it to anyone interested in Viking culture or the nitty-gritty of Viking combat specifically. Full blog review here.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, by Andrew Roberts—A mammoth new biography of genuinely good and honorable man who has been maligned, insulted, and vilified for two hundred years. Roberts, through exhaustive research and a well-written, extremely detailed political and personal narrative, presents a compelling case for George as one of the best and most important of Britain’s modern kings. Especially good are Roberts’s chapter-length examination of the Declaration of Independence—which Roberts demonstrates is a tissue of political spin, post facto justifications, and outright lies—and his coverage of George’s personal life. George was a deeply Christian family man who was faithful to his wife at a time when that was by no means normal for monarchs, and though virtually all of his children proved disappointments and morally compromised failures, his devotion to them never flagged. Roberts also examines George’s literary, artistic, and scientific interests, which were wide-ranging and achieved a high level of expertise for an amateur; real experts who conversed with him always found him well-informed on their subjects. And through all the extremely detailed political history, in which George routinely suffered slanders and misrepresentations from ungracious ideological enemies, Roberts never loses sight of George as a man, making his final decline into blindness, deafness, and incurable mental illness profoundly moving. This is a model of good research and writing and a much-needed corrective to a lot of cherished myths.

Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre—A well-researched and brilliantly written narrative of one of the oddest and most consequential counterintelligence operations of World War II. Wishing to distract the Germans and convince them to redirect vital men and materiel from Sicily, the target of the Allies’ largest operation to date in the summer of 1943, British intelligence agents developed a plan to craft a fake identity for the corpse of a homeless man, plant papers that would reveal—without being too obvious about it—the true target of the next Allied invasion as Greece, and plant the body off the coast of Spain to look like a courier killed in a plane crash. Macintyre tells this story wonderfully well, narrating not just the development, execution, and outcome of the plan but giving insight into the many eccentric personalities involved.

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40, by William R Trotter—An excellent narrative account of the Winter War, in which the Soviet Union waged an unprovoked war of aggression against its smaller, hopelessly outnumbered neighbor Finland—and were stopped cold. Well-researched and written, with good attention to all levels of the conflict from international politicking and diplomacy to the grunt’s-eye view in the trenches of the Karelian Isthmus or the endless forests of central Finland. If you’re looking to learn about this storied war—and there are few more remarkable or dramatic—this is the book I’d recommend starting with.

Robert E Lee: A Life, by Allen Guelzo—A sweeping, deeply researched, well-written, and critical but not unsympathetic biography that nevertheless explicitly refuses to understand its subject on his own terms. Guelzo is an outstanding scholar and has done mountains of research, presenting us an encyclopedic account of Lee’s life, but he repeatedly, and quite consciously, lets his own nationalist biases skew his presentation of Lee’s story. Nevertheless, this is a mostly fair and evenhanded biography that conclusively does away with a lot of the nasty propaganda versions of Lee that have been given wide circulation lately, and, despite some of the book’s shortcomings, we are deeply indebted to Guelzo for that. Much, much more detailed blog review here.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, by Tom Shippey—An excellent examination of the Vikings by a preeminent literary scholar. Shippey attempts to understand the Vikings from the inside, on their own terms, and marshals a vast array of evidence to give us a glimpse of their wry, toughminded, and supremely alien worldview. Chief among his evidence is literature—poetry, runic inscription, saga, and the accounts of the Vikings’ neighbors, enemies, and victims—but he also brings in archaeological and material evidence. Comprehensive, exhaustively researched, and well-written, this is one of the best books on the subject I’ve read.

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, by Peter Cozzens—A deeply researched and well-written narrative history of the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Highly recommended.

The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell—A briskly written short history of one aspect of American warfare before and during World War II that ventures down lots of fascinating and revealing rabbit trails. Not scholarly, but ideal for introducing some big ideas—especially with regard to culture, just war, and the ethical use of technology—to newcomers. I’ve already recommended it to my students. Full blog review here.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, by John Tresch—An excellent new biography of Poe that examines his intense lifelong interest in science and his attempts to synthesize the scientific and the artistic. A readable, wonderfully well-researched and surprising portrait not only of Poe but of his world—the striving, optimistic, skeptical, credulous, and thoroughly science-obsessed antebellum United States.

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, by Mitchell Zuckoff—An extensively-researched and well-structured, engaging, and readable account of September 11, 2001. Zuckoff presents the intertwined stories of hundreds of people, not all of whom lived to see the end of that day. An extraordinary, profoundly moving account, and a fitting memorial to the victims.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, by Marc Morris—Very good history of Anglo-Saxon England from the immediately post-Roman migration period to the Norman Conquest. Well-researched, well-organized, and engagingly written narrative history with lots of good case studies and individual portraits of key figures.

• Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe—Two non-fiction satires of left-wing activism. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Wolfe at his best. More detailed Goodreads review here.

• Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, by Earl Hess—An excellent, impartial reexamination of a man who was ornery and difficult enough before becoming one of the most widely reviled and scapegoated men in American history.

• Never Greater Slaughter, by Michael Livingston—An outstanding examination and reconstruction of the Battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937 between the army of King Æthelstan of England and a coalition of Scots and Ireland-based Vikings, that gives good attention to the overall historical context on both sides. Livingston also presents a convincing argument that the battlefield, subject of long-running dispute, can be precisely located.

• The Ship of Fate: The Story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, by Roger Moorhouse—Short, powerful history of the deadliest maritime sinking in history, which killed 9,000 people—mostly women and children fleeing the Red Army. That’s six times the death toll of the Titanic. Longer Goodreads review here.

• America’s War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich—A grim record of forty years of incoherent, directionless military involvement in regions and among cultures that American leadership could not be bothered to understand.

• Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro—Bilbro’s observations about the news and how it shapes—and warps—our minds and souls harmonize quite a lot with the worries I’ve been sharing about our news diet on here for several years. Unlike me, Bilbro offers some potential solutions, or at least some ways forward.

• The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat—An insightful critique of the way America, whether in politics, education, literature, movies, or otherwise, seems to be circling the drain. Emphasis on circling. This one has stuck with me since I read it, comprising a sort of background noise as I react to and interpret trends in American politics and culture.

• Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman—Solid critique of technocratic optimism from the early 1990s. Postman was a prophet.

• The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” is Not Enough, by Michael Warren Davis—A bracing, tongue-in-cheek polemic against virtually every aspect of our sterile, materialistic, rootless, godless, gutless modern world. Davis overstates his case for maximum effect and offers up some strange opinions with stunning assertiveness (A Canticle for Leibowitz is “garbage?” really?), but I got the sense throughout that he’s a guy I, as a fellow reactionary, would enjoy arguing with.

Favorite of the year:

Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, by Jonathan Clements

My interest in Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim began when I learned as a kid that—like George III as well—we have the same birthday. That’s not much, but it piqued my interest. Over the years since I’ve learned much more about him, albeit primarily in his role as wartime leader in the three wars Finland fought between 1939 and 1945—two against Russia, one against Germany. Throughout, his stalwart leadership and tenacity impressed me, and I wanted to learn more about him as a man.

Jonathan Clements’s biography fit that role perfectly, and, despite my preexisting interest in the subject, still managed to surprise me. A Swedish-speaking Finn born at a time when his homeland was part of the Russian Empire, Mannerheim flunked out of his first military academy; became a cavalry officer; served in the personal honor guard of Tsar Nicholas II, whom he knew personally; fought the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in World War I; narrowly escaped capture and execution by the Bolsheviks when they rose in St Petersburg in 1917; and then helped lead the White (anti-Bolshevik) forces to victory in a newly independent Finland. And all of this was before his most storied roles—coming out of retirement to repel the vastly numerically superior Russians in the Winter War; trying to take back lost territory in the Continuation War; and, as President of Finland, ejecting the Germans from his country in the Lapland War.

Oh—and he also spent several years on a long-term spying mission in western China, during which time he met the Dalai Lama.

This is a dramatic and fascinating life. I read this biography in just four days back in February, and it’s stuck with me. Well-researched, well-written, lavishly illustrated, with surprises and interesting asides in every chapter, this is an admirable biography of one of the most interesting figures of early 20th century history and an engaging introduction to some of the rich and fascinating complexity of that time.

Rereads

I’ve been working to revisit books I’ve already read more often, and I think this year I set some kind of record. Many of these were either audiobooks for my daily commute (marked with an asterisk, because I still don’t feel like audiobooks entirely count) or bedtime reading for either the kids or my wife and I. I’ve hyperlinked any titles that I recorded detailed notes for on Goodreads, especially the Fleming Bond books.

• The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh

• Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming*

• For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming*

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope*

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Thunderball, by Ian Fleming*

• The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming*

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Ian Fleming*

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis

• You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming*

• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

• The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming*

• Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming*

• Grendel, by John Gardner*

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton*

• Orthodoxy, by GK Chesterton*

• In Grandma’s Attic, by Arleta Richardson

• Killing Rommel, by Steven Pressfield*

• The Everlasting Man, by GK Chesterton*

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

Additionally, my rereading (via audiobook) of the last several of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels enabled me, at long last, to write a piece on Fleming’s craftsmanship for University Bookman. The essay began life when the late editor of the Bookman, Gerald Russello, asked for a pitch on the subject. It took a few years, but I completed it late this summer, sent it to him, and he accepted it shortly before passing away. I’m deeply grateful for the chance to write and publish that piece and especially grateful to Mr Russello for requesting my very first piece of professionally published writing, a review of a book by Adrian Goldsworthy, many years ago. You can read my essay on Fleming at University Bookman here.

I also wrote a lengthy appreciation of Eaters of the Dead on the blog back in September. You can read that here.

Ancient, medieval, and other classics

• The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, trans. JAK Thomson

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Brian Stone

• The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen, trans. Gillian Clarke

• Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek and Hrólf Kraki and His Champions, trans. Jackson Crawford

• The Executioner, by Joseph de Maistre (excerpts from The St Petersburg Dialogues), trans. Richard A Lebrun

• Politics, by Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker

Kids’ books

My five favorite books for children or young readers. I read all but the last to our kids as bedtime stories this year, and all were worthwhile.

• Black Ships Before Troy, by Rosemary Sutcliff, illustrated by Alan Lee—An exceptional adaptation of the better part of the Iliad as well as many other Trojan War legends, neither softened nor watered down. Both my kids and I enjoyed it immensely. Full review from earlier this year here.

• Bambi, by Felix Salten, trans. Whittaker Chambers—Episodic but poignant and thematically rich, this was certainly one of the most unusual reads of the year. I’m actually not sure whether to classify this as a children’s book or something else, as it presents a frank, unromanticized picture of forest life, red in tooth and claw, and the animal characters are only minimally anthropomorphized. It’s much more like Watership Down than its 1942 Disney adaptation. Don’t get me wrong—I think this unvarnished realism is a strength, but it may make Bambi a better read for slightly older kids.

• The Kitchen Knight: A Tale of King Arthur, by Margaret Hodges, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman—A straightforward adaptation of the story of Sir Gareth of Orkney, a lesser-known side story from Malory, that preserves both the oddity and romance of real medieval Arthurian literature. The illustrations, by the same artist who collaborated with Hodges on their award-winning Saint George and the Dragon, are magnificent. The kids enjoyed it a great deal.

• James Herriot’s Treasury for Children, by James Herriot, illustrated by Ruth Brown and Peter Barrett—A collection of several short veterinary stories adapted as picture books. Wonderfully charming stories and pictures. This was perhaps the favorite among my kids this year.

• Beowulf: Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff—A gift from my wife, who clearly gets me. Like Sutcliff’s adaptation of Homer above, her Beowulf doesn’t soften, bowdlerize, deconstruct, or otherwise modernize the heroes or events of the original. It’s an excellent, readable adaptation. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a kids’ Beowulf. Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve stuck with me this long, thanks for reading! I had a great year, bookwise, and hope y’all will find something worth your while in the months ahead. All the best in 2022, and thanks again for reading.

Spring reading 2021

These seasonal reading lists kind of fell by the wayside last year, another victim of COVID, the shutdowns, and systemic whatever. I’m resurrecting them, both for my own sake and for y’all’s. I’ve had an unusually good spring of reading—43 books by my admittedly arbitrary cutoff date for the season—and I hope this recap of my favorites (and a few I did not like) will give y’all at least a few ideas if you’re looking for something good to read.

Before I start listing things, for the purposes of this reading list, “spring” will be defined as the period from New Year’s Day to the middle of my college’s break between the spring and summer semesters, May 8.

Non-fiction

Here, in no particular order, are my favorite non-fiction reads of the spring, with a few near-favorites that I’d still recommend highly:

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, by Peter Cozzens—A massive, exhaustively researched, and dramatically written account of the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Cozzens gives extensive coverage both to the high-level planning and maneuvering of the commanders on both sides, an important part of his narrative as Chickamauga was a terribly confusing battle, as well as the experiences of the soldiers themselves, many of whom lived through hair-raising and horrific firefights. Read this ahead of my family’s visit to the battlefield at the beginning of March. Really excellent.

Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, by Jonathan Clements—A well-written and lively biography of Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim: soldier, cavalryman, world traveler, secret agent, personal acquaintance of Tsar Nicholas II and Hitler, commander in chief of the Finnish military, president of Finland, and stalwart and implacable defender of his country. A Finn of Swedish ancestry who served in the Russian military, went to war against the Japanese, spied on the Chinese, narrowly avoided murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks, and fought both against and with the Germans in multiple wars, Mannerheim is an excellent life to study if you’d like to see some of the manifold complexities of the twentieth century. Clements does an excellent job of keeping this complicated story understandable and well-paced. It’s also lavishly illustrated with high-quality photographs. Highly recommended.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman—Another good cultural critique from Postman, building on his more famous Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this book Postman further develops his argument that our prioritization of technology and innovation has gotten the cart before the horse, meaning that we now let the technology dictate our needs rather than simply using it. This fact was clear in the early 1990s, when Postman published this book, and should be indisputable now. Deftly written and argued, thought-provoking, and bracingly frank.

George III: Majesty and Madness, by Jeremy Black—A very good short biography of a king mostly (mis)remembered in America as an insane tyrant. Black does an especially good job illuminating George’s complicated but upright personal character and the influence that it had on his approach to policy and the tone of his rule. Blog review forthcoming.

The Revolt of the Masses, by Jose Ortega y Gasset—An incisive and scathing critique of the era of mass culture—its origins, tendencies, prejudices, and its probable destiny—from the years just before Europe and the West blew itself apart. I blogged briefly about some of Ortega’s insights earlier this year.

The White Sniper, by Tapio Saarelainen—A very short biography of Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, who during the Winter War of 1939-40 killed an estimated 500 Russians. Saarelainen, who got to know Häyhä in his old age and is himself a Finnish army sniper, supplements Häyhä’s story with appendices on sharpshooting, the locations of Häyhä’s deeds, and the rifles and ammunition used. This last may be a deeper dive than most general readers want, but Saarelainen’s portrait of Häyhä—a quiet, modest farmer, hunting guide, and dog breeder who proved skilled and tenacious under unimaginably bad conditions, who suffered mightily but uncomplainingly from his severe wounding late in the war, and who made no fuss about his heroic exploits in later life—is inspiring and worth your while.

Runners up:

• The Politics of James Bond, by Jeremy Black—A wide-ranging and masterly examination of how real-life politics—especially the global politics of the early Cold War era, in which Britain seemed to play an increasingly marginal role—shaped the fictional James Bond both in book form and onscreen. This book only covers up to the release of The World is Not Enough in 1999. Black has recently published an updated edition which I hope to read soon.

• Ship of Fate: The Story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, by Roger Moorhouse—A short, briskly written, well-researched history from beginning to end of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi cruise liner whose sinking in 1945 was the deadliest in history. A horrific tragedy carefully and vividly presented. More detailed Goodreads review here.

• CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, by Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J Watson—A very good scholarly look at Lewis’s political thinking and how natural law philosophy informed it. My friend Coyle of City of Man Podcast interviewed the authors a few years ago, which you can listen to here and here.

• St Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman—An excellent short biography, especially helpful in describing the world in which Patrick lived and worked. Read more in my St Patrick’s Day reading recommendations here.

Fiction

Here, in no particular order, are several of my favorite fictional reads of the spring, plus a few near-favorites. Several of these I have already written about in my reflections on my COVID quarantine reading. I’ve linked to that post in the relevant places below.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner—An earthy and poetic retelling of the biblical story of Jacob. Buechner succeeds in making this familiar story alien and fresh again. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Read more about it here.

Breakout at Stalingrad, by Heinrich Gerlach—A sweeping story of one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of World War II told through the lives of a handful of characters who begin on the periphery of the battle and are pulled—or, in many cases, pushed—deeper and deeper into the German collapse. Thrilling, disturbing, and very moving. I wrote a full review of this novel here.

Through the Wheat, by Thomas Boyd—Based on the author’s experiences as a Marine on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918, Through the Wheat is an engrossing, frenetic read and really draws you into the exhaustion and delirium of war—not only in combat, which is harrowing enough, but in the hard work and tedium of the before and after, too. As brutal, realistic, and direct as All Quiet on the Western Front, though perhaps—perhaps—not quite as bleak. Critically acclaimed upon its publication in the 1920s, Through the Wheat has been forgotten by the broader public but remained a classic among military men. It deserves to be better remembered.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet—Both the story of Czech resistance fighters plotting to assassinate one of the most evil men in the Third Reich and the story of the author’s struggle to tell the story. Brilliantly done. I wrote a full review of this novel here.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB—Odysseus and Diomedes, finding themselves temporarily freed from their place in hell, must find a way out. Forces Odysseus can’t even begin to understand work on him throughout his journey, and he finds himself slowly changed. A thrilling, moving, mythic, funny, and theologically rich riff on Homer by way of Dante. This has been my biggest surprise of the year. Read more about it here.

The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout—A short and strongly written novel about a gunfighter’s confrontation with mortality. The frontier has closed, the age of the Wild West is passing, and JB Books learns that the pain he has been in for weeks is advanced prostate cancer. He settles down in an El Paso boarding house to await the end, mulling what he has to show for his life, whether he knows anyone at all who doesn’t want to use him for their own ends, and whether he can make something of himself yet. Poignant and unsparing, one of the best Westerns I’ve read.

Runners up:

• The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo—Read to my kids. A fun fantasy adventure that isn’t afraid to let in some real darkness, the better to show how brightly hope and grace shine. Inspired this blog post about writing dialect in fiction.

• A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield—A Greek mercenary formerly of the Roman legions is recruited to track down a messenger carrying a seditious letter written by one Paul the Apostle. Read more about it here.

• Glitz, by Elmore Leonard—A wounded cop on medical leave falls hopelessly in love with a doomed hooker and finds himself stalked by a vengeful ex-con he once arrested. The book got off to a confusing start but the story came together very quickly after the first few chapters. Worth sticking with.

• 52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard—A Detroit businessman crosses swords with murderous extortioners. One of the most involving and fast-paced of Leonard’s crime novels that I’ve read. Read more about it here.

• The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald—My first time ever reading this classic. It’s great. Read more about it here.

Rereads

Here are a few books I revisited this spring, most of which I listened to as audiobooks on my commute. These are marked with asterisks.

• The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh

• Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming*

• For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming*

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope*

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Thunderball, by Ian Fleming*

I’ve been listening back through the original James Bond series for about a year and a half now thanks to some excellent audiobook performances on Audible. Goldfinger is read by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville; the short story collection For Your Eyes Only, one of my favorites in the series, by Samuel West; and Thunderball by Jason Isaacs of The Patriot, the Harry Potter series, and many other movies. I’ve been keeping fairly detailed notes on these as I finish them; you can read these short reviews on Goodreads via the hyperlinks above.

Three to avoid

Most of what I got to read this spring was good, but, alas, not all of it. There were a number of good-not-great or mediocre books in there, but the following three actively annoyed me:

• Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners, by Dane Ortlund—An overlong, plodding, extremely repetitive meditation on two or three New Testament references to Jesus’s heart. Explicitly modeled on Puritan navelgazing. Recommended for Calvinists who are easily impressed by parallel sentence structure and clumsy metaphors. Goodreads review here.

• Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi, by Rob MacGregor—That the adventure in this novel is somehow both dull and too complicated is bad enough, but the character referred to throughout as “Indiana Jones” does not feel like any plausible younger version of the man we know from the movies. There are several more books in this series but I doubt I will move on to any of them, which is a shame.

• Later, by Stephen King—One of my quarantine reads. A briskly written supernatural adventure that unfortunately falls back into too many of King’s well-worn ruts. Nevertheless reasonably enjoyable until the ending, which is utter crud. More in my blog post about quarantine reading.

Of these three, only the last may be worth your while as pure entertainment. But I would recommend avoiding all of them.

Special mention—a worthy picture book

I want to give specific attention to Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, a picture book illustrated by Alan Lee that tells the story of the Trojan War, specifically focusing on the events in Homer’s Iliad. I read it to my kids at bedtime over several weeks—it was wonderful. Full review here.

Currently reading

I’ve got several books I’ve been plugging away at for the last several weeks that I didn’t finish in time to count as “spring reads,” but which I nevertheless want to acknowledge. These include:

• Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45, by Prit Buttar—A massive history of one of the grimmest and most unremittingly brutal phases of World War II. Research for a project I’ve been mulling over for four years now.

• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson—The follow-up to Peterson’s first book, which I read a couple years ago.

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh—One of the first novels by Waugh that I read, this is a blistering and hilarious satire of the news media. Currently reading it to my wife before bed every night.

• Politics, by Aristotle—Reading for the forthcoming season of Core Curriculum.

• The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs—An excellent historical and historiographical study of Hitler and aspects of the study of Hitler’s life. I’ve blogged about this book before here.

These have all been good so far, especially the two historical works by Buttar and Lukacs, and I’d recommend any of them.

Coming up this summer

After a trying and difficult spring I’m hoping for a somewhat more sedate and relaxed summer. We’ll see about that. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to some more good reading, particularly the first in a popular fantasy series that I’ve finally been persuaded to try. We’ll see about that, too.

Thanks for reading! Hope y’all have a great summer and have found something here to enjoy.

Black Ships Before Troy

Odysseus leads a peacemaking delegation to Achilles in Black SHips Before Troy, illustrated by Alan Lee

One night last week I closed our copy of Black Ships Before Troy and set it aside. It was bedtime, and I had just read to my six-year-old daughter and four-year old son about the long-fated duel of Achilles and Hector, of Hector’s death, his father King Priam’s pitiful trip into the night to beg for his son’s body, of the weeping of Troy’s women as they washed and dressed the body for the pyre, and the funeral rites performed for the dead prince.

We sat quietly for a moment. At last my daughter, who had watched me intently throughout this chapter, said, “I’ve never seen a daddy cry before.” And then, “That was weird.”

I picked up Black Ships Before Troy for three reasons: first, my lifelong love of the story of the Trojan War and my constant search for good ways to introduce my kids to these stories; second, the fact that it was written by Rosemary Sutcliff, author of much classic children’s historical literature, like her novel The Eagle of the Ninth; and third—and decisively—the illustrations by Alan Lee, one of the great illustrators of Tolkien. The book proved excellent on all three counts.

Despite its subtitle, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad tells the story of the whole Trojan War. Sutcliff gives special attention to the events of the Iliad—which takes place across only a few weeks near the end of the ten-year siege—but Sutcliff bookends the story of Achilles’s rage with chapters that explain the backstory and the war’s ultimate outcome, from Eris’s fatal wedding gift and the judgment of Paris to the construction of the Trojan Horse and the final sacking of the city. Along the way she also incorporates incidents like the arrival of Penthesilea’s Amazons, Odysseus and Ajax’s dispute over Achilles’s armor, and the story of Philoctetes. It’s very well done.

I appreciate two things especially about Sutcliffe’s treatment of the war:

First, she doesn’t oversimplify the parts based on the Iliad. Black Ships Before Troy teems with characters and the plot rises and falls with the tidelike motion of the armies in Homer’s poem, in which the heroes on both sides first drive and then are driven by the enemy. She also includes the actions of the gods—Aphrodite saving Paris’s bacon during his duel with Menelaus, Apollo striking the Achaian camp with plague, Thetis rising from the waves to comfort her sulking son—and thereby preserves a lot of the tone and integrity of Homer’s original.

Second, and relatedly, she doesn’t soften the characters or the action. Her descriptions of things like the capture and enslavement of Briseis or the sacrifice of captive Trojans on Patroclus’s funeral pyre are neither gratuitous nor apologetic; she simply presents Homer’s heroes as Homer presented them, warts and all. This gave me with lots of opportunities for conversation with my kids, especially where deceit and cruelty factored into the plot as it does in so many places. Relatedly, Sutcliff does not stint on the violence of the combat. Again, it is neither gratuitous nor euphemized, but it is clear in this story that this terrible war ends lives in terrible ways, including those of characters we love.

Hence the anecdote at the beginning of this post. Although I was ready for it, revisiting Hector’s death and reading about the grief of a father, a wife, and a whole city while flanked by my children was overwhelming. It made the most moving moments in Homer newly fresh and impressed that story that much more upon my kids.

The upshot is that Black Ships Before Troy presents, on a kid-friendly level, the same themes of heroism and excellence and the same sense of tragedy as the Iliad itself. I had some great conversations with my daughter in particular about the relative virtues of Achilles and Hector—who was more of a hero, and why, and what we thought might happen when the two of them finally met. By about the midpoint of the book she had stopped asking which side was the good guys and which the bad guys but had decided opinions about which characters were good and which bad—a sign of Homer at work.

This is a children’s version but it is not a modernization or ideological reinterpretation, thank God. This is as close as I’ve seen it get to pure Homer for kids. We loved it.

Finally, Alan Lee’s illustrations. The book is lavishly illustrated. There are pictures on almost every page, from dramatic action scenes teeming with characters—picking out who was who in the battle scenes became a fun game, a Mycenaean Where’s Waldo? for the kids—to halcyon scenes of the peaceful times before the war. A recurring statue of Aphrodite proves particularly poignant. Lee clearly worked hard to make the figures, landscapes, architecture, and equipment as authentic feeling as possible, striking a balance in style between what we’ve recovered from Trojan War-era archaeological sites and later Greek fashions. It’s beautiful, and it works magnificently. The pictures evoke a feeling both of gritty reality as well as of heightened myth. Of one scene in which Achilles, newly armed by Thetis in a panoply forged by Hephaestus himself, charges across the blood-flowing river Scamander toward the gates of Troy, my daughter said, “He looks glorious!”

The publisher recommends Black Ships Before Troy for ages 7-10 or older. That’s probably about right if the child is doing the reading, as the language is slightly elevated and consciously old-fashioned. I read it aloud to my two older kids, which gave me a chance to stop and explain new words and refresh them on who was who. My six-year-old got a lot out of it and really responded to the story. My four-year old enjoyed the pictures and the fighting and had favorite characters (Hector especially) but didn’t seem to track with the story. But that didn’t seem to bother him. Both enjoyed it, and I savored the chance to share this with them.

Black Ships Before Troy is an excellent children’s retelling of the Trojan War. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a beautifully illustrated way to introduce Homer to and enjoy one of the great legends of Western civilization with your kids.

Addendum: The illustrated edition of Black Ships Before Troy was apparently out of print for a long time before being reissued recently. This can make it difficult to find the correct edition on Amazon, where used copies are currently listed for over $300. I’ve linked to the correct hardback reissue, which is less than $20, in this review.

Finding Narnia

Young Warnie and Jack at home in Little Lea in Jessica Lanan’s beautiful, evocative artwork for Finding Narnia

Did you know that CS Lewis had a brother? If you’ve only casually read the Chronicles of Narnia, or even dipped into his other fiction or his apologetics or even his academic work, you may not have known. But pick up any biography of Lewis and the importance of his big brother, Warren “Warnie” Lewis, becomes clear immediately. Just a few weeks ago I was reading Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming CS Lewis, which examines young Jack Lewis’s relationship with Warnie in great detail, and, coincidentally, I discovered a lovely new picture book called Finding Narnia: The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother.

The book begins in Jack and Warnie’s home, Little Lea, outside Belfast. This house, which features so prominently in the adult Jack’s memoir Surprised by Joy, shelters the boys and nurtures their imaginations, providing them with books and stories and a caring family. Jack, the younger of the two, loves high adventure and the dragon-slaying heroes of Norse myth. Warnie, who we see gazing out the window at the cargo ships in the harbor, loves trains and ships and other machinery. They create their own worlds—a land of talking animals for Jack, an elaborately imagined version of colonial India complete with railroads and timetables for Warnie—and together they imagine Boxen, their own fantasy playworld that combines the best parts of both.

Darkness intrudes when their mother dies and the boys leave for school, a section of Jack and Warnie’s story that the author, Caroline McAlister, mostly elides—understandably, I think. We see Jack and Warnie separated by schooling and by war, with both serving in France during the First World War in one of the book’s most melancholy but touching illustrations, and after the war by their professions, which keep Jack in his college at Oxford and Warnie in the army, manning his typewriter in colonial outposts as far from the British Isles as China.

But even here, their love for each other and their childhood collaborations return. In another striking and evocative image, the adult Jack, now a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, his shoulders hunched against the cold and his arms loaded with papers and books, glances into the quad to see, in the snow, a faun beside a lamppost.

The brothers reunite and their work together returns. We see Jack at his desk, writing longhand, and Warnie at his, typing, hunt-and-peck, to turn his brother’s scrawls into legible typescripts. From this teamwork we see elements from the earlier parts of their lives grow and interweave—the wardrobe from their childhood attic, the children hosted at Lewis’s home during the Second World War, the rainy day in which a child must explore or grow bored—and in the book’s final pages, thanks to Warnie’s friendship and partnership, we follow Jack’s imagination through the wardrobe and into Narnia.

When I discovered Finding Narnia (at a nice new bookstore on St Simons Island), I was struck by how much it reminded me of another wonderful picture book I reviewed here when this blog was young—John Ronald’s Dragons, about the childhood and youth of JRR Tolkien. There’s a good reason for that, one I could have known if I had bothered looking at the dust jacket flaps: the books are by the same author, and the care and gentleness with which McAlister tells both stories are complemented by the pictures, which are carefully researched and beautifully imagined. Finding Narnia’s pictures are by Jessica Lanan, and they’re marvelous.

My one very minor complaint about the book is the title—Finding Narnia, as a title, is kind of generic, and easily confused with a few other books with similar titles. It doesn’t grab you or given any indication of what its story is about the way John Ronald’s Dragons does. It’s up to the subtitle—The Story of CS Lewis and His Brother—to carry that weight, and I just wish there were a more direct way to bring the focus of the story into the title (and maybe Warnie’s name, too). But, again, that’s a minor complaint, and if you’ve read this far I hope you already know what a good book this is.

Through clear, simple text and lovely pictures, Finding Narnia presents the story of Jack and Warnie as two brothers who, though quite different, with different talents and interests that led them into dramatically different careers, enjoyed a lifelong loyalty and friendship that complemented and enriched them both. In a word, Finding Narnia is about brotherhood, and this is a story I hope a lot of young brothers will enjoy and learn from.

Shooting at the Stars

Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.

Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.

Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.

from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.

The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”

But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.

A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.

Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.

Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.