Friday Links, December 31, 2021
On the seventh day of Christmas and the last day of 2021 . . .
+ The Catholic Gothic Club
+ Best books read in 2021 from Catholic World Report editors with several familiar DT editor and contributor names.
+ Plough editors favorite essays published in 2021 mentions another familiar DT name.
+ Which bestsellers are still remembered over the past century?
Meet the ‘Catholic Gothic Club’
“Three Catholic writers encounter vampires. . . . Meet Karen Ullo, Eleanor Bourg Nicholson and Fiorella de Maria. All are Catholic writers who have written novels with supernatural themes.” Karen Ullo is a former Dappled Things editor, Chrism Press co-founder and editor; Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is a former DT editor, and both she and Fiorella de Maria have been published often in DT.
“The Best Books I Read in 2021”
Over forty Catholic World Report editors and contributors share and reflect on their favorite reads from this year. A surprise is how many of these deep thinkers mentioned reading Kristen Lavransdatter, surprising because the trilogy was published in the 1920s, and it’s about a Norwegian couple’s life during the Middle Ages—although one of the editors described the main characters as awful and unsympathetic.
Some excerpts below mention many other quite familiar names:
Dale Alquist: “This Thing of Darkness by K.V. Turley and Fiorella De Maria, a creatively told tale revolving around none other than Bela Lugosi.”
David P. Deavel: “Adults need good books, too. A rereading of Belloc’s The Path to Rome and a reading of James Matthew Wilson’s new poem collection The Strangeness of the Good helped me think of the odd person we call God.
Eleanor Nicholson: “In Pieces by Rhonda Ortiz & An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer. . . . The interplay of personality was fascinating in Ortiz’s novel and the detailed descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo were riveting in Heyer’s.”
Jared Ortiz: “Brother Wolf and The Letters of Magdalen Montague, Eleanor Bourg Nicholson. The first is a rollicking good time and theologically interesting; the second was charming and quite moving.
“In Pieces, Rhonda Ortiz. My lovely wife wrote a lovely novel. Not my usual genre, but so well done and thoughtful and, I must confess, moving unto tears.”
Rhonda Ortiz: “Brother Wolf by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson (Chrism Press, 2021). . . . No one understands the Gothic literary tradition and its symbolic, literary, and theological potential like Eleanor Nicholson. Only Karen Ullo, her managing editor, and the rest of the Catholic Vampire Fiction crew can keep up with her. ”
Is Undset happy that four CWR editors read her Kristen Lavrandsdatter trilogy this year? Or is she giving the side-eye to the editor who thinks Kristen and her husband are awful? (Portrait of Sigrid Undset by Signe Scheel, early 1900s.)
Plough editors choose their favorite Plough articles published in 2021
Leah Libresco Sargeant picked an essay by Ann Thomas, DT managing editor and contributor.
Here are the Biggest Fiction Bestsellers of the Last 100 Years
This l0-screen long and interesting compilation from best-seller lists since 1918 shows that the “biggest bestsellers of any given year are not necessarily the books we remember 20, 30, 50, or 100 years later”—which may be encouraging to writers whose books don’t sell well at first. As Emily Temple, managing editor at Lithub writes:
“As the year draws to a close, some of us like to look forward, and some of us backward—and some way backward. Last month, while working on the not-at-all-controversial Books That Defined the Decades series, I was often surprised by the dissonance between the books that sold well in any given year and the books that we now consider relevant, important, or illustrative of the time.”
Do you remember any of the titles on the book covers below?
