The Cast of 2015

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This is a moment I always enjoy: the moment at the end of the year when I get to look back, sometimes happily, sometimes with a bit of annoyance, at what I've read over the past twelve months.  It's a fun tradition that requires little brain power and no originality, and as Jenny reminded me of it by posting her 2015 book list, I decided to follow her lead in topic and style and roll out the (eclectic) literary cast of 2015.  Hope you don't get bored by the histories.

2015 book list

january

The Moon Spinners [Mary Stewart] - My first read of the year, this one had gorgeous prose on the one hand and a not-so-compelling story-line and romance on the other.  Light, inspiring when it came to description, but ultimately a bit frustrating.

To Change the World [James Davison Hunter] - A compelling, thought-provoking, dense work, one which probably needs to be read more than once to be "gotten."  Hunter's call for "faithful presence" and a Christian challenge to the world via "a bursting out of new creation from within it" is worth reading, considering, and realizing.

february

The First Crusade [T. Asbridge] - Read for a course on the Crusades I took in the spring.  Light and accessible, but heavy on the adjectives and adverbs (history can be interesting without reliance on these grammatical tools! really! it can!) and lacking, in my opinion, a good balance of historical empathy and moral discernment.

They Found Him Dead [G. Heyer] - I don't think I'll be reading any more of Heyer's mysteries - or if I do, it will only be when I really need something light, quick, and mindless.  Characters, prose, and resolution here were all pretty unremarkable; Agatha Christie has more challenging, satisfying mysteries, however cliche that opinion may be.

march

Much Obliged, Jeeves [P.G. Wodehouse] - Needs no commentary.  And honestly, I can never remember what happened in a given Jeeves & Wooster novel; they're all much alike, but make for fun occasional reading.

The Fourth Crusade [D. Queller & T. Madden] - Also for the Crusades course!  This one was at the opposite extreme from The First Crusade: good on analysis, a bit weak on drama.  Seriously, the crusaders breach the walls and all the authors say is that we know these particular people died.  Really? Where's the blood and gore, people?

april

Around the World in Eight Days [J. Verne] - Where is the hot air balloon?  I specifically signed on for a hot air balloon.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes [A. Maalouf] - For some reason I didn't put this on my Goodreads account; I think I must not have wanted to rate it.  At any rate, while I do think it is excellent to have works that portray the Crusades from the perspective of the Arabs (the Frankish perspective gets most of the limelight), I remember finding this attempt problematic - to say the least.

may

The Great Plague [Moote & Moote] - Doesn't Moote & Moote sound like a law-firm out a Dickens novel?  Anyway, this was the assigned reading in the three-week course I took this past May on "Plague! In the 1660s," and it was excellent.  Cheerful?  No.  Surprisingly compelling and even inspiring?  Yes.

june

Jamaica Inn [D. du Maurier] - du Maurier, why did you let me down?  Your prose was beautiful as always, your depiction of Cornwall haunting and bleak - and then I got to the end and wanted to bean the characters with my life science book.  Go. To. Your. Rooms.

The Perfect Prince [A. Wroe] - I don't even know what to do with this one.  It began so intriguingly, with such attention to detail - even the detail of a signature or an illustration; aaaaand then there I was in a bog of information and names and I was alternately confused, bored, and guilty (maybe I should care how much the pews in the church cost? But I don't?).  I don't think I'm building a summer home here.

july

Sir Nigel [A. Conan Doyle] - This book seemed to alternate between romanticism and realism, and I liked the realism better.  Conan Doyle has some compelling descriptions and interesting side characters, but Sir Nigel himself was too ideal for me.

august

American Lion [J. Meacham] - Totally arbitrary read - I don't do much American history - that unfortunately didn't turn out to be a gem.  In fact I complained about the style and the use of sources all the way through.  I think my family wanted me to stop reading.

Faith and Treason [A. Fraser] - Among the top two or three books I read this year (which isn't saying much, because this year saw a lot of 2 star books).  I was going to say it blew me away, but that's kind of a bad pun for a book dealing with the 1605 Gunpowder Plot...  Drama, empathy, argument, a grasp of the sources: it has it all.  Except it was so good that when the conspirators were caught, I was disappointed.  That might not be a good thing.

september

She-Wolves [H. Castor] - Mini-bios of some of England's ruling ladies since the Empress Maud (who, by the way, is the coolest.  Just pointing that out).  Some were more interesting than others, but the prose is burdened (again) with melodrama.

october

The Ghost Map [S. Johnson] - Congratulations!  You win Worst Book of the Year!  The arrogance of it took my breath away, while the commitment to urbanization and the almost callous treatment of individuals left me angry.  

The Prince [Machiavelli] - Read for a course on political thought, this classic work was alternately funny and perplexing.  On the one hand, it seems refreshing after you've been reading Plato, because Machiavelli deals with things as they are in real life; on the other hand, he doesn't concern himself at all with larger moral truths or with how things should be.  Also, I love how he keeps saying Cesare Borgia was the very model of a modern major general...and yet Borgia got sick and failed at everything.  Score one for "Fortune."

For All the Tea in China [S. Rose] - Pretty sure this is the only book my list shares with Jenny's.  A slim read and good for any tea-drinker, if rather in need of some polishing and FOOTNOTES.  Or at least endnotes.  Please.  Please?  No?  Okay, fine.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [R. L. Stevenson] - I'd been wanting to read this for a while, but despite its atmosphere, I just didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.  "I consider morals to be an admirable trait of character in a book, but they can be overdone."

november

The Great Influenza [J. Barry] -  Like The Ghost Map, this was read for a course on the history of Western medicine I took this past semester.  Better than The Ghost Map in that it has a far better handle on the sources and a much more nuanced reading of them, it nonetheless could have done with some slimming down.  

december

Great Expectations [C. Dickens] - Finished this one before Christmas.  It wasn't actually my favorite Dickens of the ones I've read thus far; the ending was...too happy.  I would have liked some more bitter in that "bittersweet."  Oops.

In Defense of History [R. Evans] - My advisor got me this for my birthday back in January, while I was taking a course on historiography, and I just finished it yesterday (no, I haven't been reading it all year).  It's both solid on its philosophy of history and funny in its treatment of other historians or historical controversies.  A gem with which to finish out the year.

what did you read this year?  was it a good year by the numbers, or did you find some new favorites?  neither? both?

Do Justice, Love Mercy

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In the last few days before my classes start, my family and I have been 'catching up' on some movie-viewing time courtesy of Netflix.  (During the school year we get a disc in the mail and then it sits on our counter, unwatched, for the next four weeks or so until we either have an evening to spare or simply say "eh" and mail it back for the next impatient viewer.  We're feckless subscribers.)  Last night we finally settled down for the last installment of the Hobbit trilogy, after having seen the first two in theaters and been too severely underwhelmed by both to go watch "The Battle of the Five Armies" when it came out.  It was, I felt, somewhat better; they made a hash of Bard, but Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage were excellent as Bilbo and Thorin, and that covers some sins at least.  After having watched a few others movies in the past few weeks, though, notably Von Ryan's Express, I tended to fixate on the very minor, added, unnecessary plot point of the coward Alfrid.

Or, rather, the fact that none of the main characters seemed willing to give Alfrid the fate he deserved.

Alfrid doesn't have a whole lot of purpose in the story, except as an object for the viewer's disgust.  He isn't the horrible, 'fantastic' evil of the orcs and goblins and so forth; he is the normal, everyday evil of greed and selfishness taken to a ludicrous degree.  In the early scenes, after Alfrid (who, I might add, is basically the same character as Wormtongue with a little more screen time) has attempted to escape with the Master of Laketown and been abandoned, the townsfolk quite reasonably attempt to lynch him.  However, Bard - like Aragorn with Wormtongue in the film version of The Two Towers - stops them, insisting that enough people have died already.  Thereafter, the good characters show a curious insistence on entrusting Alfrid with important responsibilities (which, of course, he fails to perform) and refuse to make him answer for his misdeeds; Bard even allows him to go on his merry, gold-laden way when Alfrid deserts the makeshift army of Laketown.

Much the same scenario plays out in the 1965 Von Ryan's Express, in which the two protagonists, one British and one American officer, take very different views on mercy and the demands of war.  When the soldiers get out of the POW camp, the Brit, Major Fincham, insists they kill the officer in command of the camp; Von Ryan overrules him, arguing that the officer cannot simply be killed in cold blood.  The decision comes back to bite him, costing quite a few of the soldiers their lives, and yet when the protagonists encounter a similar situation later on Von Ryan again errs on the side of mercy (and it once again backfires).

Why the emphasis - perhaps the over-emphasis - on mercy?  Why can't we just hang Alfrid or shoot the evil Italian or German?  From the writer's perspective, the choice seems to have far less to do with the antagonist (we don't really care what happens to Alfrid: he's a despicable character anyway) than it does with the protagonist: viewers are uncomfortable with a 'good' character taking a life into his hands, particularly in the role of executioner, and writers don't want to wrestle with the moral ambiguities through their protagonist.  The evils the antagonist has committed aren't worth the protagonist getting his hands dirty.  Hence this pattern of having a Bard or a Von Ryan choose not to kill a (human) antagonist - or, better yet, having the protagonist stop other characters from killing the antagonist - is such a recurring element that it now seems taken for granted. "Mercy isn't a weakness" is a mantra in fiction.

common explanations

• "too many people have died already"
• "he's not worth the powder"
• "he's suffered enough"
• "if I kill him I'll be just as bad as he is"

Don't get me wrong: mercy is huge and powerful and absolutely crucial.  I think the contemporary focus on it - in literature, but also in such debates as whether or not the death penalty is acceptable - is an outgrowth of Christianity; I'm glad we have such things as the Geneva Conventions that recognize the worth of human life in a manner unheard of centuries ago.  On the other hand, I think we need to wrestle with the dynamics of "doing justice and loving mercy."  What does it mean to "do justice," anyway?  Are there times when mercy isn't ours to give?  What do we do when our protagonist is in a position of authority, holding the fates of others in his or her hands, and has to decide how to act?  Of course the answer differs from character to character, but it seems to me that we shouldn't be too flippant in having the character withhold judgment for the sake of illustrating their goodness through their clemency.  Maybe sometimes we need to let the characters (and the readers or viewers) deal with the consequences of moral decisions and the weight of responsibility, as Von Ryan eventually does. 

Mercy is huge, and because it is huge it should be illustrated thoughtfully, intentionally - not brought in carelessly because that is what the consumer 'expects,' or because justice is too messy to handle.

You tell me!  Do you think Bard should have killed Alfrid?  How have your characters wrestled with these issues?