At the end of last year, Carl Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight requested that I list the best books that I’d read throughout the preceding twelve months. I was happy to oblige.
Here’s my rambling survey of the past year’s reading:
There is no doubt that the best new book I’ve read this year is A Postcard from the Volcano by Lucy Beckett (Ignatius 2009). This wonderful novel is not merely the best new work of fiction that I’ve read in several years it is, me judice, a work that deserves a place among the classics of modern literature. I am in awe at the sheer genius of Miss Beckett. Brava! And again, brava!
Another gripping work of fiction is Piers Paul Read’s Death of a Pope (Ignatius 2009). Although not in the same league as the aforementioned Volcano, it is, to employ a time honoured and time-worn cliché, a real page turner. How refreshing it is to read a thriller with theological nous.
My exclamatory assertion that Volcano is “the best new book I’ve read this year” indicates that I’ve read some books that are even better but that are not “new”. I think, perhaps, that the accolade of “best old book” that I’ve read this year belongs to Maurice Baring’s sublime C, a novel that is as long and convoluted as its title is short and au point. The plot of C is excruciatingly slow – and I mean this as a compliment! Like a good game of chess, there’s no real action or denouement until all the pieces are in place. Then, like a coiled spring, it bursts into action, all its potential energy, stored painstakingly in the first few hundred pages, exploding with kinetic gravitas – and yes gravitas can be kinetic! Baring has to be one of the most unjustly neglected novelists of the twentieth century. All lovers of great literature should consider it a duty to pray for the resurrection of his reputation.
The best work of apologetics I’ve read this year is indubitably Richard Purtill’s superb Reason to Believe: Why Faith Makes Sense (Ignatius 2009). I can’t see how any honest intellectual could take Dawkins and his ilk seriously after reading Purtill’s philosophical defence of faith.
As a convert myself, and as my own work suggests, I am fascinated by conversion stories. This being so, two new collections of conversion stories have been most welcome additions to my library in 2009. Chosen: How Christ Sent Twenty-three Surprised Converts to Replant His Vineyard (Ignatius 2009) and Mere Christians: Inspiring Stories of Encounters with C.S. Lewis (Baker Books 2009) offer a wealth of wonderful testimonies of the workings of divine grace in Enemy territory. Heart warming and faith building fare for the hungry soul!
While we’re on the subject of converts, I must mention two excellent new books on converts, for which I have written introductions and which will be published next year. Roy Campbell Remembered: An Intimate Portrait by His Daughters (Zossima 2010) is a posthumously published memoir of the convert poet by his daughters, Tess and Anna, edited with sympathetic dexterity by South African scholar, Judith Coullie. I drew on much of the material from these memoirs for my own biography of Campbell (Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell, ISI 2005/HarperCollins 2002) but it is good to see the memoirs finally being published in their own right. The other converts book is Converts to Rome, by John Beaumont, an exhaustive compendium of English converts from the time of the Reformation, which will be published by St. Augustine’s Press in 2010.
Last year I praised a new book on C. S. Lewis and Ronald Knox (Second Friends: C. S. Lewis and Ronald Knox in Conversation Ignatius 2008). This year, I’m pleased that there is further evidence of a Knox revival with the publication of The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox by David Rooney (Ignatius 2009), an excellent literary biography that serves as a perfect introduction to Knox’s life and work.
Finally, and at the risk of being accused of self-promotion (heaven forbid!), I must wax lyrical about the new Ignatius Critical Edition of The Merchant of Venice (Ignatius 2009). The selection of critical essays assembled in this edition is simply second to none. Anyone wishing to understand this most controversial of Shakespeare’s plays will find no better edition anywhere.
A man is confined to a hospital bed and researches the history of Richard III to relieve his boredom. This seemingly dull plot produced what the NY Times called “the best mystery novel of the twentieth century,” and it is a page-turner of the highest order. No kidding. The Washington Post reported, in 2004–if memory serves–that it’s never been out of print since its publication in 1949. Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is a fictional setting for her research, revealing the more than strong probability that Richard III is the most wrongfully maligned figure in history, and that the ending of the Plantagenet dynasty was accomplished only by murder. The War of the Roses, it appears by extension, was concluded only with a colossal lie–which casts Woolsey’s later fears of its resurrection in favoring Henry VIII’s divorce into a piece of equally colossal historical irony.
Shakespeare’s source was St Thomas More, but More’s source, whom he would not have questioned, was utterly unreliable–in fact, Tey shows the source’s data to be impossible.
Best book of 2009 for me.