Matthew Walther’s Favorite New Books

Also: An entertaining history of Hampton Court, Jean-Paul Sartre’s nativity play, the end of “Sports Illustrated,” and more.

Dec 04, 2023

Thomas Cook, *John Aubrey* . Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Two weeks ago, I explained why I don’t read those long, end-of-year book lists from The New York Times and other national publications. “What I want to know,” I said, “are the favorite books of people I know or trust.”

Collin Garbarino, an editor at WORLD, shared his favorites last week. John Wilson, I believe, will be sending a list soon. Matthew Walther, whom I first met while he was smoking outside a First Things event in Washington D.C. about ten years ago, sent me his favorite books the other day. His list is below.

Matthew is a regular contributor to The New York Times’s opinion pages and the editor of The Lamp, an excellent “little” magazine not unlike the little magazines of yore, though with a Catholic bent. I subscribe. It would make an excellent Christmas present for a loved one if you’re looking for ideas.

When it comes to the buying of new books, I must confess to being a classic chump. Two or three times a month, nearly always on the basis of a review in a Quality Publication or a notice in a publisher’s catalogue (slightly more reliable, in my experience), I find myself purchasing, e.g., a new history of Stuart England or a survey of the rise of Christendom. The “universal destination of goods” is a concept in moral theology that will be familiar to many of your readers; in my house one observes what one might call a “universal destination of (new) books,” which is to be thrown across the room with a howl of agony from yours truly. Having written opening sentences on the order of “The seventeenth century was a tough time to be alive” or “Early in the second decade of the fourth century AD, the Roman emperor Constantine was deeply embroiled in his own game of thrones,” their authors should expect no better. The volumes remain otherwise unread in random corners of our house. Had I but world enough and time, I would bring legal proceedings against the critics who dare to call this stuff “dazzling,” “indispensable,” “magisterial,” etc.

More seriously, here is the problem I face: very few new books seem to me worth reading, and those to which I most look forward tend to be scholarly publications, such as Kate Bennett’s edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives for Oxford University Press. So-called “literary fiction” is for me a series of closed books; I have no interest in what the M.F.A. guild considers good writing, and even less (if that is possible) in the psychological abnormalities of the characters or the humorless narration of sordid incidents that comprise the plots of such works. In “genre” fiction I find that there are few critics I trust, which means that when I do happen upon enjoyable crime novels, it is always by chance. Among nonfiction books the ones which receive the largest amount of attention—political “tell-all” books or campaign manifestos, celebrity memoirs, airport nonfiction organized around absurd conceptual schemes—are precisely those in which I disclaim all interest.

Which brings us to the sorts of nonfiction books in which I am interested, at least in theory (history and biography, especially literary biography). Here the situation is little better. Unlike in Britain, where A.N. Wilson, Selina Hastings, and a handful of others have kept alive the tradition of the man of letters, in this country “serious” books tend to be written by professors who do not aspire, consciously or otherwise, to the vanished ideal of haute vulgarisation. Instead their academese is translated into journalese by put-upon commissioning editors. Meanwhile reviewers and literary editors appear to be either unaware of how poorly written most books are or simply too cowed to publish reviews devoted to questions of style (as opposed to so-called “first-order” concerns, such as how a given book’s obvious heft and appearance under a certain venerable imprint tell us that it is obviously the last word on its subject bla bla bla). With very few exceptions, the writing of narrative history which was once the glory of our language—Gibbon, Macaulay, Prescott, Parkman, Adams, Trevelyan, Knowles, Trevor-Roper, Runciman, Hobsbawm—is a dead tradition.

Phew. It occurs to me that I promised you a list, which I will now offer along with an apology. Here are the (new) books I most enjoyed this year:

Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind (Princeton University Press): the best autobiography written by a historian since G. M. Trevelyan’s brief sketch of his life
Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming (Harvill Secker; American edition forthcoming next year from Harper): some English critics said that it was too long, but as there is unlikely to be another biography soon, it is better to use all the material—which I found uniformly delightful, as it happens
Adam Sisman, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper): while I wish that he had simply incorporated some of this previously unpublishable material into a revised edition of his earlier biography of the subject, Sisman is the living writer I most admire—I would read his grocery lists if he chose to publish them
Nicholas Orme, Tudor Children (Yale University Press): in the popular imagination the historiographic revolution begun by Jack Scarisbrick and continued by Orme, Peter Gwyn, Eamon Duffy, and others never took place, and the late Middle Ages are “Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell”; for the rest of us, Orme’s latest is a triumph of the historical imagination
Francis Young, The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds (Boydell Press): for diehards only
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare in Bloomsbury (Yale University Press)
John Walsh, The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film (Titan Books)
Geertjan Zuijdwegt, An Evangelical Adrift: The Making of John Henry Newman’s Theology (Catholic University of America Press): addresses a period in Newman’s development ignored or misunderstood by virtually all previous writers

Also: one book to which I have returned many times since its appearance in 2016 is The Outlandish Knight, Minoo Dinshaw’s splendid biography of Sir Steven Runciman. This is, simply put, the best book written in English by a living person under the age of forty and one of the five or so best ones published in my own lifetime. For reasons I have never been able to discover, the book somehow failed to secure an American publisher, which means that many of your readers will not have seen it.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that I am currently writing a book of my own, Heart Unto Heart: The Romantic Life of John Henry Newman, to be published by Yale University Press in 2025.

—Matthew Walther is the editor of The Lamp

In other news, Thomas W. Hodgkinson reviews a history of Hampton Court: “The Dowager Countess of Deloraine, who was governess to the children of George II at Hampton Court and other royal homes, was a notorious bore — so much so that her ‘every word’ made one ‘sick,’ according to the courtier Lord Hervey. When she naively asked him why everyone was avoiding her, he replied with exquisite irony that ‘envy kept the women at a distance, despair the men.’ This kind of witty, skittish anecdote is scattered throughout Gareth Russell’s scintillating hybrid of a book, The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court, which is partly a biography of a place and partly something stranger: an episodic history of England from Tudor times to the present, illustrated by lightning flashes of gossip and politics, set against the handsome backdrop of Hampton Court.”

“There is nothing winsome” about Milton’s Jesus, David K. Anderson writes in his excellent review of Ed Simon’s Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, “but winsomeness is not, Milton believes, what we need from him. We need freedom. Milton’s lifelong commitment to liberty was manifest in his strident opposition to kings and priests, but he believed we can tyrannize over ourselves without their help. ‘I formed them free,’ the Father states prior to the Fall, ‘and free they must remain till they enthral themselves.’ Self-enthralled, we are now marked by an inborn and habitual propensity to sabotage our own happiness, with the contents of a bottle or otherwise. When Milton composed the flat, harsh utterances of Jesus and the Father his creative genius was not, as Blake had it, revolting against his conscious theology. They are his antidote to the ‘glozing lies’ of the one who having ruined himself would ruin us as well. One of the most remarkable aspects of Milton’s epic, then, is the way in which he puts his titanic gifts in the mouth of the enemy only to cut through them with a kind of anti-poetry, exposing the destructive fatuity of our cherished resentments, of our libido dominandi, or of our belief that, while we might have gone too far last night, we can still handle a few drinks.”

Jack Nuelle revisits Jean-Paul Sartre’s nativity play: “Sartre had been a prisoner in Stalag XII D since August 1940. At the time of his incarceration, he was thirty-five years old. While his most famous work, Being and Nothingness, wouldn’t be published until 1943, his best-known novel, Nausea, and his collection of short stories, The Wall, had already put him on the scene as one of Europe’s preeminent intellectuals. But in prison, Sartre wrote his first play, set in Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth.”

In praise of dressing well: “Many would argue that the abandonment of even semi-formal dress is a liberation, freeing us up from discomfort to get on with the things in life that really matter (though to my mind jeans are the most uncomfortable garment ever invented). I wonder if our embrace of scruffiness really makes us feel good, or whether it is reflective of something bleaker about our state of mind.”

In praise of fixing stuff: “Do farmers have a right to repair their own tractors? The American Farm Bureau Federation thinks so. That’s why this year it reached an agreement with John Deere in which the manufacturer promised to enable farmers, as well as third-party mechanics, to fix their own green-and-yellow machinery, for example by providing service manuals and diagnostic tools that earlier only licensed shops could access. For many farmers, this change could be economically transformative, enabling older tractors to be used longer rather than being replaced because of the high repair costs. The farmers’ federation is now working to reach similar agreements with other manufacturers. The John Deere agreement is one more small but significant victory for the right to repair movement, which has been taking aim at practices in industries ranging from automotive to consumer electronics that restrict the ability to fix things, driving up costs for users and (often deliberately) forcing them to replace items that might still work.”

Is this the end of Sports Illustrated? “Sports Illustrated, now run as a website and once-monthly publication by the Arena Group, at one time was a weekly in the Time Inc. stable of magazines known for its sterling writing. ‘Its ambitions were grand,’ said Jeff Jarvis, author of Magazine, a book he describes as an elegy for the industry. On Monday, the Futurism website reported that Sports Illustrated used stories for product reviews that had authors it could not identify. Futurism found a picture of one author listed, Drew Ortiz, on a website that sells AI-generated portraits. The magazine’s author profile said that ‘Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature.’ Upon questioning Sports Illustrated, Futurism said all of the authors with AI-generated portraits disappeared from the magazine’s website. No explanation was offered.”

Bologna to repair its leaning tower: “Officials have announced plans to repair one of two 12th-century towers in the Italian city of Bologna after the area around it had to secured last month over fears its leaning could lead to collapse. The city said the €4.3m (£3.7m) project to shore up the Garisenda tower – one of the Two Towers that look out over central Bologna, providing inspiration over the centuries to painters and poets and a lookout spot during conflicts – would proceed in January and February.”

People apparently are not buying “woke” books according to The Daily Mail: “Among the works responsible for huge losses is the once hotly anticipated memoir by the actor Elliot Page about his journey transitioning. Pageboy received a $3 million advance but has sold just 68,000 copies . . . Other recent ‘woke’ flops are Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan described by the New York Times as ‘a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.’ The novel was acquired in a deal estimated to be worth more than $250,000, but has shifted just 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021. Another example is ‘queer feminist Western’ Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens which has sold around 3,500 copies despite commanding a $500,000 advance.”