Nancy Hightower offers a list of best sci-fi/fantasy books of 2015.
About this time last year, io9 offered this list of the year’s anticipated books. Compare that list to this one from Valentina Zannoni.
Monthly Archives: January 2016
Rare Puritan Books Now Online
To the Right Worshipfull, Sir Miles Fleetewood, Knight, Receiver Generall of his Maties Court of Wards and Liveries: All welfare in Christ IESVS.
Noble Sir:
IT is a truth able to endure the most fiery times & trialls, None but Christ, none but Christ. Ignatius expresseth as much, drawing neare to his Martyrdome, Let come upon me fire, crosse, meetings of wilde beasts, cuttings, tearings, breakings of bones, rendings of members, dissolutions of the whole body, and all torments of the devill, … only that I may gain Jesus Christ. Thus he, intreating the Romans not to intercede for him, and hinder his suffering for the Gospell. And thus the servants of God in these last times, when Romanists have thrust them into flames and other calamities.
Christ is all, and in all, said the Apostle.
The above comes from the first two pages of Christ Reveled by Thomas Taylor (Full title: Christ revealed: or The Old Testament explained A treatise of the types and shadowes of our Saviour contained throughout the whole Scripture: all opened and made usefull for the benefit of Gods Church. By Thomas Tailor D.D. late preacher at Aldermanbury. Perfected by himselfe before his death.)
The John Richard Allison Library in Vancouver has put its collection of rare Puritan works into clear, readable digital editions for free, online reading. Justin Taylor has a list of what’s available. This is awesome, friends. It’s wonderful to be able to see the actual pages of these books instead of stumble through the mistakes in OEM translated ebooks.
Cold comfort
Minneapolis in January. Artist’s conception.
Thoughts thought while closing my garage door:
My back yard seems like an entirely different place in winter. Places where I could walk easily in summer are hard going — or dangerous — in winter. The contours are different. The colors are different. That muddy place I try to avoid in summer doesn’t even exist (conceptually) now.
It’s like I’ve moved.
I’ve lived in the north and I’ve lived in the south. As I’ve said many times, I hate winter with a hot hate that I only wish would warm me up.
But winter does give us the opportunity to travel, so to speak. My yard in Florida was pretty much the same all the time. My yard in winter is a foreign country.
Not a very nice foreign country, I’ll grant. But it’s a change. A poor man’s holiday. In Siberia.
A Very Unsecular Candidate
Ted Cruz has been rallying for religious liberty for months, and his efforts to draw conservative Christians to his camp have pulled out all stops. Last month, the presidential candidate said, “If we awaken and energize the body of Christ–if Christians and people of faith come out and vote our values–we will win and we will turn the country around.”
That reference to “the body of Christ” has drawn more attention this week when a commentator on CNN said she didn’t know anyone who takes their religion seriously who think Christ Jesus should rise from the grave to serve the Cruz campaign. Apparently, she interpreted Cruz’ reference to the church at large as a specific reference to Jesus himself, who was still in the grave.
Joel Miller points to this and mistakes made in the New York Times, even by columnist David Brooks, as evidence that the pundit class is biblically illiterate.
Imagine, says [Michael] Peppard, if they let slip “Columbus’s voyage on the Mayflower” or “Malcolm X’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Such an error would say that the facts of basic American history are unknown. To let Jesus’ supposed resurrection into heaven or his imaginary address to the Corinthians skate by betrays a sad reality: the basic facts of the Bible, the font from which so much of our culture flows, are increasingly unknown.
‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria
J. R. R. Tolkien never warmed to Joy Davidman, the woman his friend C. S. Lewis fell in love with and married. Looking at it from his point of view, it’s not hard to see why.
For decades, he’d watched “Jack” Lewis live almost a slavish life, working long hours as an instructor at Oxford, then going home to wait hand and foot on a selfish, small-minded old woman, Mrs. Moore, whom he’d promised a friend, her son, he’d take care of in case of his death in World War I.
But now, in the late 1950s, Jack’s indenture was over. The old woman had died. Tolkien had improved the situation by calling in personal favors to get Jack offered the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a position that would give him three times the salary, and half the work, of his old job at Oxford. Tolkien was confident that with all this new freedom, the pent-up energy of all those years of servitude would gush forth in a flood of scholarship and creativity. Jack would finally get the recognition he truly deserved.
Instead, like an earthquake, Joy Davidman happened. She brought with her complicated domestic troubles, financial woes, two nice but active young boys, and a hint of scandal. Then, to cap it all, she brought cancer, the disease that had already scarred Jack as a young boy, when he lost his beloved mother. Continue reading ‘Joy,’ by Abigail Santamaria
Black Lives, In Fact, Matter
On Twitter, I have supported #BlackLivesMatter because I saw it in the Ferguson context and felt those who were using the hashtag were making good points. That’s the way hashtags are used. I didn’t think it might have been created for specific purposes. Today, Steven Wedgeworth describes the origins of what was meant to be a cultural movement and asks if Evangelicals should be co-opting the tag or consider themselves co-belligerents with them.
So far [Evangelicals] seem to be doing exactly what BLM asks them not to do. They are denying that BLM applies to a number of specific controversial political issues and are instead saying that it should primarily be understood as a generic affirmation of the defense and respect of Black life. There has been little to no interaction with the profound emphasis BLM places on sexual liberation, and Evangelicals have certainly not credited this ideology as the founding genius of BLM. In other words, you might say that Evangelicals have been stealing Black Queer Women’s work.
Wedgeworth suggests Christians advocate for the value of the black community and individual dignity in Christian terms and avoid draw unnecessary criticism to themselves by using other people’s banners.
Also in this vein, Jason Riley reviews Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael Javen Fortner.
The book’s broader point—and Fortner makes it in a clear, fluid prose style that rarely lapses into academic jargon—is that a black silent majority at the time “was much more alarmed about drug addiction and violent crime than its white analogue” and ultimately motivated to take action. It was blacks who instigated the crackdown on black criminality, often over the opposition of white liberals and black political elites.
Black families, particularly in New York City, were suffering from drug-related crime in the 60s and 70s, so they pressed for tough penalties for drug-related offenses, which incarcerated far more blacks than whites because of the criminal culture of the day. Now this racial disparity is criticized as racism within the law. Riley quotes Fortner, saying, “While the literature on mass incarceration has correctly highlighted racial discrimination within the criminal justice system, it has unnecessarily discounted the hurt and terror of those who clutch their billfolds as they sleep, of those who exit their apartments and leave their buildings with trepidation, and of those who have had to bury a son or daughter because of gang activity, the drug trade, or random violence.”
UPDATE: Ed Stetzer offers this brief perspective on the matter with his tag #HellenistWidowsMatter.
“It Made Less of Narnia For Me”
Author Neil Gaiman describes how he felt about seeing the allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia.
My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately still believe.
A Wodehouse Guide to Reading, Etc.
P.G. Wodehouse recommends a day of reading his own work.
Wodehouse is invoked in this post on antedating. “This sort of decisive antedating should remind us of the almost diametrical wrongness of a popular stereotype of scientists and humanists.”
P.G. Wodehouse’s language is as American as it is British.
‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
When I wrote yesterday that my life was “full of Viking stuff again,” I neglected to tell the whole of the tale. I was also finishing up my reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.
I find it difficult to get enough objective distance on this book to make any guess as to how the public at large will receive it. For me, and some of my friends, this book is a gift. All our lives we’ve heard of the young scholars Tolkien and Lewis sitting in their rooms at Oxford, reading Eddaic poems to each other in the original Icelandic (this was how the famous Inklings began). Yet in their published work, both men have surprisingly little to say on the matter. Tolkien gives us echoes in The Lord of the Rings, although those elements are generally as much Anglo-Saxon as Norse. And Lewis seems to have shed his passion for Northernness along with his atheism, as if he’d put aside childish things.
But here we have a genuinely Norse work from Tolkien himself. It’s not a translation. It’s an original poem, drawing on varied sources. The original poem he’s trying to refashion, found in the Codex Regius manuscript in Iceland (where she shares honors with the Flatey Book I mentioned yesterday), is interrupted in the middle by the loss of a whole signature of pages. There are other versions of the story extant, both prose and poetry, but they vary widely in quality and consistency. Tolkien determined to do his own version, in which he’d try to work out contradictions between the traditions.
The result was very pleasing to me. Tolkien has definite views about Old Norse Eddaic poetry, and in his view it’s a very different thing from the Anglo-Saxon kind he translated in Beowulf. Continue reading ‘The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
Canin: Uncomfortable Writing
“To me, point of view is everything,” Ethan Canin tells Julie Buntin for Publishers Weekly. “I read for the sensation of becoming another person; I write for the same sensation. As I write, I try to be the character.”
This process can be uncomfortable. “This book almost killed me,” Canin says. “I published my last book [the bestselling America America] in 2008, so that’s, what, seven or eight years ago, but I wasn’t working the whole time. Writing [A Doubter’s Almanac
] was actual agony. I remember going out to a bar with my closest friend in Iowa a couple of years ago and saying, ‘I’m going to have to give the money back. I can’t do it. It’s a huge, huge mess.’ ” This huge mess sits before us on the table, in ARC form, with its blockbuster cover and glowing blurb from Pat Conroy.