What to read over Christmas break
Washington Examiner Staff
Some 150 books a year are reviewed here in the Washington Examiner’s Life & Arts section. Some untold greater number mentioned and read to produce the rest of the magazine. We love books. But not all books are right for the occasion, and of course, not all readers are right for all books. Different times of year and different purposes call for different selections. With that in mind, and with Christmas break looming just around the stocking-strewn corner, some of the magazine’s editors and its most stalwart culture contributors collected their recommendations for books to read or give, or both, over the holidays. Take your pick, and we hope you enjoy.
-Nicholas Clairmont, Life & Arts Editor
Hugo Gurdon: A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is a magnificent achievement — 12 slim and accessible comic novels, written between 1951 and 1975, in which narrator Nicholas Jenkins encounters hundreds of characters, real and imagined, from school days in the 1920s through to his waning years as an elderly gent in the 1970s.
The title is taken from Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the four seasons dancing hand in hand in an awkward outward-facing circle while winged Time dictates their meter by plucking a lyre. Powell’s characters move similarly in rotating saliency, unable fully to see each other, both recognizable but also changed by the passage of years since they last came into view. Kenneth Widmerpool, who is the Dance’s greatest imaginative creation, reappears in each book to play a central role and to reveal how core characteristics — in his case, blind lack of self-awareness, deadly hunger for power, and contemptible masochism — persist but evolve throughout a life and color or afflict the lives of others.
Powell’s work is a fittingly modern echo of Marcel Proust. The parallels are explicit when, after the Allied landing in Normandy, Jenkins, now an infantry captain, looks out at makeshift military docks and transport ships cluttering the bay off Cabourg, which was the glittering seaside setting for Marcel’s first fateful stirrings of obsession with Albertine. Like Proust, Powell ventures into philosophical contemplation, art, and literary criticism, but he is also marvelously funny as his characters’ lives converge and separate and mingle again like streams running through most of the 20th century.
Hugo Gurdon is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Examiner.
W. James Antle III: Right from the Beginning by Patrick J. Buchanan
These days, almost everyone would like to take a holiday from politics. Unfortunately, with 2024 soon upon us and the Iowa caucuses coming a little over a week after the Eastern Orthodox celebrate Christmas, such a respite may not be possible.
Given the political climate, it is as good a time as any to revisit Pat Buchanan’s memoir, Right from the Beginning. It was written after he eschewed a 1988 presidential bid just four years before challenging President George H.W. Bush, and you needn’t share Buchanan’s ideological views to find it an enjoyable read.
But Buchanan was a precursor to the populist-nationalist currents now overtaking the Right. The Republican presidential primaries next year may well turn on whether that shift becomes institutionalized with the renomination of former President Donald Trump or accommodated in some modified fashion by the selection of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) or Nikki Haley, Trump’s former United Nations ambassador. In the latter case, it helps that Buchanan’s outlook remains substantially Reaganite in this late Cold War-era book.
While no one would mistake Buchanan for a sunny optimist, Right from the Beginning is a product of a more civil political era as well, some of which could be restored even if the old social consensus cannot. Perhaps a jolly old elf will spirit a copy to Vivek Ramaswamy.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Graham Hillard: Howards End by E.M. Forster
No, it isn’t particularly Christmassy. And yes, it lends itself to racist “progressive” reframings (e.g., 2019’s white-genocide fantasia Knives Out). But grab some cocoa and take up E.M. Forster’s saga of Edwardian domesticity and original sin. Easily the best book of the 1910s, it may well be the finest Condition-of-England novel ever written. And not just England. In Forster’s pages, universal questions arise: Who should rule? To whom does the future belong? With whom should we be pleased? Perhaps, like mine, your answer is the same in each instance: “The clever.” Howards End will test you. So, too, though, will it challenge those who insist on “the poor,” “the meek,” or “the downtrodden.” An inheritance plot adorned with cutting social commentary, the book forces us to the marrow of human nature and worth. Oh, and it has a Christmas shopping scene, come to think of it. Read it this holiday season without guilt.
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Peter Tonguette: Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin
For me, Christmas has always been a time of cocooning within one’s space. When I first read Laurie Colwin’s 1988 book Home Cooking, I knew I had found a kindred spirit. “Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home,” Colwin writes in her idiosyncratic quasi-cookbook, which presents homey recipes framed by inviting and incisive reflections and memories.
Colwin counsels readers on the preparation, consumption, and aftermath of a meal of pot roast, potato pancakes, homemade applesauce, and orange ambrosia: “This meal, which takes some time to prepare, must be eaten slowly. Afterwards it is best to stretch out on the sofa, balancing a cup of coffee on your stomach.” Beef stew, fried chicken, and steamed chocolate pudding are among the other dishes offered, but it’s Colwin’s description of their salutary effects, the nourishment they provide the soul, that endures. “To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night,” she writes, “all you really need is soup.”
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
Micah Mattix: Sentimental Tales by Mikhail Zoshchenko
Christmas is always a great time to read Russian novels. It’s cold outside, and you have time to spare, so why not place yourself next to the fire and crack open Doctor Zhivago, Anna Karenina, or Ivan Turgenev’s touching A House of Gentlefolk, both a romance and a story about going home? But in case you don’t have time for a tome, let me recommend Mikhail Zoshchenko’s bitingly satirical and touching Sentimental Tales. Satirical and touching? Yes. All six stories are narrated by an imaginary provincial writer who ham-fistedly tries to imitate the social realism of the day as he writes about local characters who suffer what they must in a world ruled by forces they do not understand. Nikolai Gogol is an absurdist. Zoshchenko is a nuanced satirist and perhaps Russia’s best comic writer. The book was written between 1923 and 1929, before “the Soviet monoculture” had taken hold, as Boris Dralyuk notes in his introduction, and nearly every page contains a line that hits its mark.
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
Nicholas Clairmont: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion had been married for longer than four decades when, five days before Christmas, he collapsed dead from a heart attack across the table from her in New York. Over the next year, which was 2004, Didion kept notes, and, as she had since the ‘60s, she turned them into a book. The Year of Magical Thinking would become her best-ever bestseller because it’s what sensitive and bookish people buy for one another when somebody dies a little too soon, as I found when somebody important to me did in the last part of 2023.
A highly personal memoir of what Didion calls the derangement she experiences during her grief and mourning, it is, I think, the wrong book for this occasion. (Didion and I seem to agree: The book you are looking for when somebody close to somebody you love dies is Emily Post’s classic among classics, Etiquette in Society.) Nonetheless, it is the right book to read over Christmas. In crisp sentences that sing without trying too hard, it depicts the cold winter of a warm life in terms so clearly written and particular to her odd circumstances that, counterintuitively, the reader cannot help but feel less alone. And, more crucially, somewhere in it, the author recommends having a fire burning all the time.
Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Diane Scharper: The Complete Stories (1971) by Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor’s stories never grow old. My favorites include the wife (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) with a “face … as broad and innocent as a cabbage and tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears.” Then, there’s the Bible salesman (“Good Country People”) who seduces a cripple and steals her wooden leg. There’s the 12-year-old (“A Temple of the Holy Ghost”) who wants to be a saint but who’s “a born liar and slothful and she sassed her mother and was deliberately ugly to almost everybody.”
I’ve taught O’Connor’s work for 40 years to high school and college students and retirees. There’s always something new that jumps out in our discussions. Perhaps it’s as Elizabeth Bishop said, there’s more real poetry in the “odd insights” of O’Connor’s prose than in a dozen books of poems. It could be that her work is “gallant,” as Anthony Hecht described their clearheadedness in the face of death.
Or it might be the characters’ voices. No. I’ve never heard her characters speak, but I can hear their voices from the details that O’Connor provides that make them ever new.
Diane Scharper teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.
Dominic Green: English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments by Ferdinand Mount
Ferdinand Mount’s name is so familiar that it’s easy to forget how good a writer he is. Mount, born in 1939, began as a novelist, became the head of former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit and then the editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a broadsheet columnist, and is latterly a wonderfully engaging memoirist and historian. English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments (2015) was selected from three decades of essays and reviews. Like Mount’s memoirs Cold Cream and Kiss Myself Goodbye, it narrates the sweep of English literary and social life, placing the triumph and disaster of 20th-century politics in their cultural contexts.
Mount ranges from contemporaries such as V.S. Naipaul and John le Carré, back to Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, and John Keats, and sideways to obscure but illuminating figures such as Arthur Machen, Derek Jackson, and Elias Canetti. Every piece is beautifully written, and every piece is an education. I have no idea if it’s available in the United States, but copies can easily be found online.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
David Mark: The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald
Generations were introduced to The Great Brain series around third and fourth grade. Decades later, many are now parents of children in the age 8-10 audience originally intended for John D. Fitzgerald’s seven books, set in late 1890s Utah. And they’re every bit as readable for adults, to this peer of those parents. The books confront societal challenges still with us — immigration and assimilation, the rights of religious minorities, business ethics, and much more.
Set in the first two years of Utah’s statehood, between 1896 and 1898, in the small fictional town of Adenville, the stories are loosely based on Fitzgerald’s childhood experiences, in the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” tradition. The stories mainly center on the escapades of the author’s head-smarter, mischievous, conniving older brother Tom Dennis Fitzgerald, “The Great Brain,” who at key points also displays compassion and empathy for less fortunate children, and sometimes adults, in what’s still very much America’s Wild West.
The author narrates in an older but wiser, lessons-learned style reminiscent of Richard Dreyfuss in the early teenage coming-of-age film Stand By Me. He recalls, in vivid details, growing up the youngest of three sons in a “Gentile” family, as Catholics and all other nonmembers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are referred to in heavily Mormon Utah. Catholicism is central to the family’s life and identity, a recurring theme in a town where members of that faith are distinctly in the minority.
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David Mark is the managing editor of Washington Examiner magazine.