Best Books Read in 2020

Near the top of my selections for best books read in 2020: Reinhard Hutter's John Henry Newman on Truth & Its Counterfeits: A Guide for Our Times. I devoted two posts to my review of it: here and here. As I summarized my impressions of the book and its impact on me:

The bibliography is excellent, and the footnotes, as I mentioned, are important to read. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the influence of Newman's teachings and writings on conscience, faith, ecclesiology and the Church's magisterium, and the idea of a university. I enjoyed and benefited from "hearing" Professor Hutter's voice of reason and experience throughout his discussion of these important subjects. It's a book I've had a hard time putting down even after I read the last word.

In contrast, Eamon Duffy's brief study of Newman was the most disappointing read of 2020. It could have been written by his brother Frank or Edwin Abbot.

Either a close second or tied for top spot: Robert R. Reilly's America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. It also merited two posts for my review: here and here. For me, Reilly's survey of the influences on our countries founders as framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America was a great philosophical education:

Robert R. Reilly, whom I saw speak at the Midwest Catholic Family Conference in Wichita (cancelled this year by COVID of course) a few years ago on his book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, in this book offers an exploration of the philosophical and intellectual sources that inspired the Founders of the United States of America in their quest for independence from Great Britain and the establishment of a new nation.

He goes all the way back to the pre-philosophical era, explores Greek philosophy focusing on Aristotle, Jewish monotheism, and the Latin/Roman Catholic synthesis of Greek philosophy and Revelation focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas, and continues his philosophical lessons through to the eighteenth century.

Other best non-fiction books: Lisa McClain's Lest We Be Damned; Maura Jane Farrelly's Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860; and Liturgical Mysticism by David Fagerberg.

I did not read much fiction last year, so Simon Tolkien's No Man's Land is my top pick in that category.

For the most entertaining book read last year: G.K. Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature. In his chapter on the Great Victorian Novelists, he shows a great appreciation for Jane Austen, which I appreciated:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

If you like, please cite your favorite books from last year in the comments. 

Happy New Year!!

Book Review: Simon Tolkien's "No Man's Land"

I went to Eighth Day Books (no longer a "bookeasy" with secret knocks at the back door or curbside service) on Thursday this week to browse. I stopped inside the front door to glance at the growing collection of books by and about Flannery O'Connor. Just to the right of them I saw two copies of the paperback edition of Simon Tolkien's World War I/Mining novel, No Man's Land, one of which I purchased (along with an edition of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical introduced by Etienne Gilson, an Image paperback (The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII). I have been wanting to own and read both of these books for quite some time. Eighth Day Books had just received them recently so my timing was good.

My late husband Mark had in fact discovered the Tolkien novel among the new/future releases advertised by our local public library on his Kindle. He'd reserved the Ebook and the paperback in 2017 but it had never come through. He wanted me to read it out loud to him: we enjoyed sharing books that way.

So I started reading it immediately when I arrived home before going to Mass for Ascension Thursday (Extraordinary Form), continued it when I came home after Mass, and finished it yesterday morning. It was hard to put down. According to the publisher, Penguin Random House:

London, 1910: young Adam Raine’s impoverished childhood becomes even darker when his mother is killed in a workers’ protest march. His grieving father, Daniel, seeks a second chance for them in a coal mining town, where he begins working for the miners’ union. But tensions escalate between the miners and their employer, Sir John Scarsdale, and finally explode with tragic consequences.

In the aftermath, Adam is brought into the opulent Scarsdale family home where Sir John’s son subjects Adam to a succession of petty cruelties for daring to step above his station. When, despite everything, Adam finds love with the beautiful parson’s daughter and wins a scholarship to Oxford, he starts to feel that his life is finally coming together—until the outbreak of war threatens to tear everything apart. Inspired by the real-life war experiences of the author’s grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien, No Man’s Land delivers a Dickensian, page-turning novel of Edwardian England and World War I.

As I read the novel, however, I thought less of Dickens and more of A.J. Cronin. I see the Dickensian aspects of the story in the descriptions of poverty and horrific living conditions in London and in the labor issues in the mining community of Scarsdale, but the spirit is more like A.J. Cronin's novels of young men fighting against the odds, encountering great loss and suffering, and finding their way to happiness and success, personally, not socially defined. I've read several of A.J. Cronin's novels: The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom, The Green Years, Shannon's Way, The Stars Look Down, and his autobiography, Adventures in Two Worlds (he was a doctor before he became a very successful novelist). Several of his books were made into movies or television mini-series.

Adam Raine is a Cronin-style protagonist: orphaned, always feeling separate from the people he lives with whether in London, Scarsdale, Oxford, or No Man's Land, encountering and overcoming many dangers--especially from conniving and morally-blunted people--absorbing loss and grief, and by the end of the novel he wants to be a writer because he wants the dead soldiers of World War I to speak beyond the grave. He wants the people of England to know what it was like to fight in the trenches. The novel ends with Adam on the way to the publisher with his manuscript!

Tolkien's omniscient narrator describes Adam's thoughts and recounts the events of his life vividly. Perhaps the best twist in the novel is that the term No Man's Land applies not only to aspects of his wartime experience at the Somme and even on leave during the war but also to his antagonist's situation, as Brice Scarsdale, the son of his mentor Sir John Scarsdale who is described above as "subject[ing] Adam to a succession of petty cruelties for daring to step above his station" has both succeeded in obtaining everything he wanted but also has failed to enjoy or benefit from it because of one horrific action, or rather his actions after that action (not giving away much the plot, I hope!).

Simon Tolkien dedicated this novel to J.R.R. Tolkien: "This book honours the memory of my grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien, who fought on the Somme between July and October 1916." The novel certainly does honour Tolkien, and I highly recommend it. I think that Mark would have liked the book, and it's so appropriate that I read it before the Memorial Day weekend. If you want a copy, there's still one on the shelf at Eighth Day Books!

The only thing that I wished for was for Adam to find faith in Jesus Christ, which the elder Tolkien so devoutly lived.

In the aftermath, Adam is brought into the opulent Scarsdale family home where Sir John’s son subjects Adam to a succession of petty cruelties for daring to step above his station. When, despite everything, Adam finds love with the beautiful parson’s daughter and wins a scholarship to Oxford, he starts to feel that his life is finally coming together—until the outbreak of war threatens to tear everything apart. Inspired by the real-life war experiences of the author’s grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien, No Man’s Land delivers a Dickensian, page-turning novel of Edwardian England and World War I.

London, 1910: young Adam Raine’s impoverished childhood becomes even darker when his mother is killed in a workers’ protest march. His grieving father, Daniel, seeks a second chance for them in a coal mining town, where he begins working for the miners’ union. But tensions escalate between the miners and their employer, Sir John Scarsdale, and finally explode with tragic consequences.

In the aftermath, Adam is brought into the opulent Scarsdale family home where Sir John’s son subjects Adam to a succession of petty cruelties for daring to step above his station. When, despite everything, Adam finds love with the beautiful parson’s daughter and wins a scholarship to Oxford, he starts to feel that his life is finally coming together—until the outbreak of war threatens to tear everything apart. Inspired by the real-life war experiences of the author’s grandfather J.R.R. Tolkien, No Man’s Land delivers a Dickensian, page-turning novel of Edwardian England and World War I.