Time for the annual reading in perspective post

A year ago, Kim Shay blogged a reading challenge that was suggested by one of the women in her fitness accountability group, to read 20 books in 2020, in a variety of categories. While I'm not connected to Kim or her group, nor a woman, nor fit, nor accountable, I thought the challenge sounded fun, so in addition to my regular reading, I decided to take it up as well.

Deciding what books to read for each category came fairly easily for the most part, though there was a small quantity where I hadn't made up my mind until well into the year.

• A Shakespeare play: Henry VI, Part 2. Late in 2019, I made plans to read through all of Shakespeare's plays on weekends, in their (theorized) chronological order, in 2020. I actually started during my Christmas break, reading The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Henry VI, Part 1. Hence Henry VI, Part 2 was my first play of 2020. This is the best of the Henry VI trilogy, and the source of the classic (and oft-misinterpreted) line, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (Incidentally, it's thought that Shakespeare wrote the Henry VI trilogy out of order- part 2, 1, then 3. I took the liberty of re-ordering them for my own reading.)
• A classic detective novel: The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. This was Christie's second mystery, following The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It introduced Tommy and Tuppence. husband-and-wife private detectives. Though they're not as well known as Christie's other creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, she published five novels featuring them. To be fair, I suppose this novel may be as much an espionage thriller as a mystery. But there was plenty of detecting.
• A classic children's book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. As a youngeter, I had an abridged edition of Tom Sawyer as a youngster, so while I knew all the major plot points, I'd never read the full-length novel. My original choice for this category was Treasure Island (also abridged in the same volume), which I also read this summer, but once I had settled on re-reading Huckleberry Finn (see below), reading the two books back-to-back made perfect sense.
• A contemporary novel: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. At one point, I contemplated re-reading The Handmaid's Tale (also assigned during high school) or putting it in the "classic book by a female author" category. Either way, I was going to get to The Testaments, published in 2019. This novel takes place roughly 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It takes the form of an epistolary novel, intertwining the testimony (or confession) of three figures: the teenage daughter of a Commander, a teenage girl living as a refugee in Canada, and Aunt Lydia, the principal antagonist of The Handmaid's Tale. Each one tell their story, hinting at the cause of the downfall of the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead. It seems to me an unnecessary sequel (perhaps intended to cash in on the success of the Handmaid's Tale TV series), but I still found it an enjoyable way to pass the time. On the other hand, the big reveals toward the end are underwhelming. Overall it was a worthy read, though I'm not sure if it was a Booker Prize-worthy one.
• A historical fiction novel: Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian. This is the fifth book in O'Brian's series of naval adventure novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon and secret-agent friend Stephen Maturin. I've been reading this series off and on over the past few years. In this novel, "Lucky Jack" receives a new command, the fourth-rated HMS Leopard, and is commanded to transport a group of prisoners to Botany Bay. A battle with a Dutch warship in the middle of the novel is absolutely gripping. The Leopard was a historical ship, though of course Jack Aubrey's command of it was fictional. It was involved in a skirmish with an American ship, resulting in an international incident that was one of the indirect causes of the War of 1812.
• An ancient Greek play: The Clouds by Aristophanes. I'm sure anyone else taking up Kim's challenge opted for a better-known drama like Oedipus Rex or Lysistrata. On the other hand, I've wanted to read The Clouds ever since reading Plato's Apology in university. Socrates may have believed that his portrayal in The Clouds, in which he is portrayed as a buffoonish swindler, contributed to the charge that he corrupted the youth of Athens, for which he was put to death. As for the play itself, it's nothing special. Apparently it wasn't well received in its own time, either. The popularity of fart jokes is as old as dirt, though.
• A collection of short stories: The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor. I've owned this anthology (originally published in 1970) for years, but never opened it, though my university curriculum included reading "Revelation," "Good Country People," and perhaps also "A Good Man is Hard to Find." in university. O'Connor's writing was wonderful, though her characters are ignorant, nasty, and bigoted. This was by design: she was a devout Catholic, writing about how these grotesque characters encountered divine grace.
• A biography or memoir: Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times by George Sayer. This is another book I've owned for years and never read until now. Contrasted with A. N. Wilson's better-known, unflattering Lewis bio of 1990 (published two years later) this biography paints him in a more positive light, without glossing over his faults. Sayer was a student and personal friend. The emphasis is on Lewis' earlier life. It seemed to me that his later years, apart from his marriage to Joy Gresham, were rushed through a bit too hastily. Otherwise, this was a very good book.
• A devotional work: Morning Exercises by William Jay. Admittedly, I'm terrible at sticking with daily devotions, reading the Bible through in a year, and things like that. But at least this year I read more of Jay's book than I have in past attempts. Jay was an English Congregationalist minister in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His morning devotions are wonderfully rich; you'd be lucky to get this level of theological depth in a contemporary devotional book.
• A book about books: What Happens in Hamlet by John Dover Wilson. Wilson was the editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare series published by Cambridge Univeristy Press in the early 20th century. His opinions on Shakespeare, though held confidently, were frequently controversial. Why, for example, in Hamlets play-within-a-play, is Claudius spooked by the murder scene, but not the pantomime murder that precedes it? Wilson argues that implicit stage directions in the text suggest that the players bungle Hamlet's modifications to their play, threatening to give away his plan to expose Claudius as a murderer. Fortunately, Claudius, is too distracted by Hamlet's antics to notice. (The dumb-shows included with plays at the time were meant to be symbolic rather than literal; more likely, Shakespeare's intent was simply that, unlike the play itself, the dumb-show caused Claudius no concern.) Even if Wilson's opinions were often wrong, What Happens in Hamlet renains one of the most influential critical works on the play.

• A foreign (non-Western) novel: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. I'm pretty sure this is the first non-Western novel I've ever read. (In fact, I'm fairly sure my non-Western reading has been limited to the Bible and some early Christian and Jewish literature.) One of my ongoing reading projects is to read all the novels that have won the Hugo or Nebula science-fiction awards, in chronological order. This novel won the Hugo in 2015, so it was in my long-term plans to read, and I bumped it to the front of the queue. In this story, an astrophysics graduate, who fell out of political favour during the Cultural Revolution, is working as a technician at a secret SETI installation when she makes surreptitious contact with an extraterrestrial civilization on a planet with three suns, whose orbit is therefore destructive and unpredictable (the "three-body problem" of the title). It reminds me somewhat of The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, which I had coincidentally been reading when I switched over to Liu's book. Both novels are about first contact with an alien species, in which the laws of physics play a major role. The Three-Body Problem is the first novel of a trilogy; I'll be sure to read the sequels sometime soon.

  My original choice for this category was Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, a 16th-century classic of Chinese literature—until I found out it was over 2,000 pages long. Based on my experience with the (considerably shorter!) Les Misérables, there wasn't enough free time left in the year. I may still revisit this book in the future.

• A "guilty pleasure" book: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. My grandparents' summer cottage had a modest bookshelf, mostly of pulp novels: Ian Fleming, John D. MacDonald, Leon Uris, Galaxy science fiction, that sort of thing. At that age, most of the books there weren't of interest to me, but there were a few good ones that I made a point of reading every summer that I visited: Casino Royale and For Your Eyes Only by Fleming; The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells; and, of course, Catch-22. I don't know what the appeal of this WWII satire was to my 13-year-old self, but in subsequent years, I read it at least three or four times on the beach. I'm sure my older self would find most of those other books guiltily pleasing as well—why else have them at the cottage? I haven't spent a summer there in years, and my parents have since remodeled, but for all I know, all those books are still there, (Other than the Wells one—that's on my bookshelf now.)
• An intimidating book you have avoided: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Having earned an English degree, I'm not precisely intimidated by literature. So I used this particular challenge to read one of my "cursed" books, which I've started multiple times but never gotten around to finishing. I've made at least two false starts on Bleak House. I have a weekly session with a friend on Friday nights, and I was using the walk home to listen to it in audiobook form. At roughly a chapter per week or a little more, I had planned to listen to the entire novel over the course of the year. Unfortunately, the stupid pandemic hasn't been helpful; with no reason to go out on Friday nights, I only made it through 15 of its 67 chapters. The curse remains, apparently.
• A book of essays: From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, edited by David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson. This is a selection of essays in defense of the Reformed doctrine of particular redemption, including such notable authors as Michael Haykin, Carl Trueman, Sinclair Ferguson, John Piper, and others. I worked through most of this book, occasionally reading one essay at a time; unfortunately that approach just didn't leave enough time to finish in 2020. It is, nonetheless, an excellent theological resource, though for casual reading I might have preferred something a little less scholarly. My original plan for this category was a collection by a notable literary essayist: G. K. Chesterton or Dorothy Parker, perhaps.

• A book by a minor author: Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara. O'Hara was a bestselling author in the early 20th century, though today he's nearly forgotten. This novel's name comes from W. Somerset Maugham's version of a Middle Eastern legend about a man in Baghdad, who encounters a woman whom he recognizes as Death. He flees to Samarra to escape his fate—but, as the reader learns, Death was surprised to encounter him in Baghdad, as she was expecting to meet him later in Samarra.

  This legend is the Appointment in Samarra's epigraph. Once you grasp its significance, you'll understand that things are going to go very poorly for our protagonist. Julian English, a well-to-do car salesman, engages in three days of self-destructive behaviour over the Christmas season that ruin his business, his marriage, and his reputation. It all seems inevitable. I don't think I've ever read a much more fatalistic novel. Something by Thomas Hardy, like Jude the Obscure or Tess of the d'Urbervilles, might compete with it.

• A classic book by a female author: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin. This novel is about a human ambassador who attempts to establish diplomatic relations on a planet whose humanoid species is androgynous, taking on distinct sexual characteristics only at mating time. The emissary, as a human man, is regarded as perverted because his sex is immutable, leading to distrust and political intrigue.

  The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970, establishing LeGuin as a major SF author. Oddly enough, for a novel considered a seminal work of feminist science fiction, the androgynous characters seem overwhelmingly masculine in their behaviour, even when they're in their androgynous form. I'll be sure to read LeGuin again: indeed, her novel The Dispossessed, which also won the Nebula and Hugo in 1974 and 1975, respectively, is on my list for this year.

• A complete volume of poetry by a single author: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. While it's short (I read the whole thing in about an hour), I've wanted to read this collection of light verse for a long time, even before I was an English major. Eliot wrote these poems for his godchildren, so of course they're far more accessible than, say, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• An "out of your comfort zone" book: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. This summer's race riots led to a surge of sales of books about anti-racism, amongst the most notable of which are Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and this one. Books about race relations are not something I would normally bother with (excepting, perhaps, Martin Luther King's wonderful rhetoric). Kendi's book is engaging and personal. In some respects, he isn't as radical as some anti-racists: he strongly denies the currently popular canard that white people are inherently racist (which, by contrast, DiAnglelo does assert) while black people cannot be. On the other hand, he also makes ridiculous assertions: for example, that there can be only "racist" and "antiracist," and no "in-between safe space of 'not racist.'" This false dichotomy leads to the logical absurdity that I've termed Kendi's Paradox: if you take "not racist" in its clearest definition (an absence of racial prejudice), then a) someone can be simultaneously not racist and racist, and b) it is impossible to be both antiracist and not racist. That's obviously nonsense, but some of his other assertions are actually dangerous: he writes, "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only reemedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." In other words, the only way to end racism is with more racism. How is this helpful? Kendi wants a constitutional amendment and government department of anti-racism, presumably to give his ideas the force of law. The anti-racism movement has sometimes been described as quasi-religious. Ibram X. Kendi is its chief theocrat.
• A reread through a book you read in high school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. This, probably the greatest American novel of all time, was part of English curriculum in grade 10. (My English teacher knew I had read it before, though, so he assigned me John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps instead, to pass the time.) In addition to being, probably, the best juvenile adventure novel ever written (unless someone wants to make a case for Treasure Island), Huck Finn is probably the finest work of prose literature that I was taught in high school, at least before the grade 13 lit courses. Cue for Treason? The Catcher in the Rye? I ask you.

So by the end of 2020, I had started all 20 books in this challenge, and I finished 17. I'm going to call that a qualified success, and chalk the three incomplete books up to a combination of circumstances and poor planning. If I hadn't tried to shoehorn these selections around all my other recreational reading, I would have easily finished all of them. All in all, though, it was a fun challenge, and I read at least a few books that I otherwise might not have picked up.

This year, I'm going to set a somewhat more easygoing milestone. While I read a lot of science fiction, I don't tend to read much fantasy (apart from a semi-regular reread of The Lord of the Rings). There are some fantasy series that I've wanted to read for a long time, and this year I'm going to work my way through as much of them as possible:

• Titus Alone, the last novel of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy
• Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber
• T. H. White's The Once and Future King
• Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy
• Finally, if time permits, Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker.

But I'm going to start off 2021 the same way I've read in each new year since I discovered Lee Child back in 2012: with a Jack Reacher novel, about which (like Reacher) I will say nothing.