Please listen to the latest Big Read 'Cast episode! Bill and I talk through our Year in Reading for 2024. The below are edited excerpts from the last few months of my reading journal.
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, by Roald Dahl
What if instead of writing a really great sequel to the beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl decided to turn Willy Wonka into Doctor Who fan-fiction? The Glass Elevator acts as a minimally disguised Tardis, while Willy Wonka handles space dangers with the wit and encyclopedic knowledge that demand comparison to Britain’s favorite Time Lord.1 A forgettable, but not painful way to introduce younger readers to both sci-fi and anti-Americanism. The ending chapters owe a lot to The Phantom Tollbooth, and the explicit conflation of “Minusland” with Hell—well! Even mediocre books can have great moments. Not an outing to be revisited.
The Second World War, by Antony Beevor
I’m grateful to this book for being what I can only imagine is the best single-volume introduction to WWII. A sense of the drama, of the narrative as it unfolded at the time—the competing narratives amid so many countries—is somehow both coherent and episodic. Hitler is the greatest criminal the world has ever seen, and some of the folks battling him for the title in the 20th century either also dominate (Stalin) or skirt importantly around the edges (Mao). The brutality of the war years, on all fronts and however varying, is somehow captured without excessive, unworthy sentiment.
Beevor zooms in at the right moments—Jewish mothers hiding their babies amid their clothing as they enter the gas chambers of a Nazi concentration camp; the babies being found, and pushed inside as one might sweep the dirt into a dustpan. The evil, so universally invoked in our society, is eternally perplexing. It is so total in so many ways. The devastating trail of the Red Army’s revenge, the firebombing, the prisoner-of-war murders, the explicit call to kill the young in the name of ending generational reprisal, and more. All genres of human evil, it seems, were given free reign. I even joked with a friend that, “I never remember how much cannibalism is involved in WWII. It’s the kind of horror that usually takes the headlines.”
I need to keep reading, but I wonder if WWII will ever be exhausted for our culture. It can be misused, of course, but it remains the mythological event of the modern world. If we ever erase our histories and our writings, some tale of the war across the world will survive—the Holocaust and the atom bomb and the protean destruction that transformed humanity at material, cultural, and spiritual extremes.
I’m saying nothing, of course. Only Antony Beevor can write substantial generalizations about WWII, and I’m glad he took the time to do so.
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
George Saunders once confessed that he thought this was “a perfect book.” He knew it was very unfashionable to say so. But, in truth, his career could be summarized as a “punk rock Christmas Carol,” the supernatural do-goodery stretched to its eerie, oddest, funniest maximum.
I also love this short book. Like many slim classics, it can feel slight revisiting it because the impression—the cultural as well as personal footprint—is so large and distinct. “We’re already playing games with nephew Fred? But the story just began!” I hope to read it more or less every year.
Cover Her Face and A Mind to Murder, by P.D. James
It’s strange to find comfort in a writer so obviously aloof, but I always do.
The first and second titles in James’s Inspector Dalgliesh series, these were much stronger than I remembered. Cover Her Face in particular caught me off-guard. The balance she wants isn’t quite in place yet—a lack of mastery, to be honest—which is most obvious for the reader who tries to keep track of every character. (Uh, you know, any reader.) I think it took me half the novel to reconcile formal names (“Mrs. Riscoe”) with first names. But the parlor room drama microwaved by murder is more or less fully formed from the outset.
A Mind to Murder felt slightly bathetic this go-around, but maybe I was so surprised on my first read that this reaction was inevitable. Again, I’m not sure the control is quite there yet. Having two viable suspects is fine, and Dalgliesh being drawn to the more interesting personality—as he always is—works. But the timeline coincidence for the two suspects is overcooked.
The cast of psychiatrists, and the conflict and tension between them, is given a remarkable face-lift with the matronly, witty Dr. Maddox. A beginning novelist might think, “You can’t have a character pop in for only one chapter even if she dominates the chapter; what’s the point?” The less formulaic sophomore says, “Why not?” Only the superior writer can get away with it, though, and James does.
I love you all.
This book was published in 1972, well after the 1963 debut of Doctor Who’s first season.