My Year in Books
- Favorite historical novels: Graeme Macrae Burnet, Benbecula; Michael Crummey, The Adversary
- Best historical novel with a ghost as one of the protagonists: Laura Elvery, Nightingale
- Historical novel with the most unusual narrator: Olga Ravn, The Wax Child
- Neo-Victorian novel with the most unexpected mashups: Virginia Teito, Victorian Psycho
- Historical novel with the most abrupt ending: Suzanne Desroches, A Bride of New France
- Favorite genre deconstruction: Anna Biller, Bluebeard's Castle
- Favorite single-author horror collection: Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds
- Favorite horror (?) novel: Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell
- 1930s horror novel with the most uncomfortably realistic subplot: Alexander Laing's The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (one of the protagonists is the president of a state college who is forever worried about the likelihood of the legislature stripping its funding)
- Favorite Victorian novels I had not read previously: Anthony Trollope, Mr. Scarborough's Family; Mary Taylor, Miss Miles
- Best novels reread for a class: Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun
- Best twentieth-century ghost (sort of) story reflecting on Jane Eyre: Marjorie Bowen, "Elsie's Lonely Afternoon"
- Most times the line "the author doth protest too much, methinks" swam into my head while reading a novel: Philip Pullman, The Rose Field
- Novel I suspected that I would dislike intensely, and, in fact, I did: Martha Wells, All Systems Red
- Most surprisingly competent Victorian religious novels: Jean Ingelow, Allerton and Dreux; Lily Watson, The Vicar of Langthwaite
- Victorian religious novelist most defeated by any format longer than three hundred or so pages: William Francis Barry
- Favorite twentieth-century religious novels: Sheila Kaye-Smith, The End of the House of Alard; Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede
- There really were an unusual number of nuns and pseudo-nuns in my reading this year: Agustina Bazterrica, The Unworthy; Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede; Lauren Groff, Matrix; Viggy Parr Hampton, The Rotting Room; Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints
- Book bargain that most people would probably find it odd to be excited about: William Jackson, Stories and Catechisings in Illustration of the Collects (all three volumes)
- Most useful yet exasperating bibliographical discovery while in the British Library: slowly realizing that some cataloger in the nineteenth century had misattributed a number of tracts
- Unexpurgated memoir belatedly expurgated: the first edition of William Carus Wilson's Memoir of a Beloved and Long-Afflicted Sister (1831) (the second edition erases its subject's rather, um, snippy comments about various guests, as well as all the complaints about one of her brothers being a terrible correspondent)
- Most antiquarian purchases: three volumes of Berquin's The Children's Friend (1786); Harriet Corp, Coelebs Deceived (1817); Elizabeth Sandham, The Twin Sisters (1819)
- Most useful but ill-advised purchase while traveling: three volumes of Chester W. Topp's Victorian Yellowbacks and Paperbacks, which was a bit heavy to lug back in one's suitcase
- Arguably the oddest book to be carting around in one's purse: John Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology
- Most interesting Victorian studies monographs: Alexander Murray, Decadent Conservatism; Joseph McQueen, Liturgy, Ritual and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
- Most interesting non-Victorian studies monographs: Arnold Hunt, Protestant Bodies: Gesture in the English Reformation; Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England
- Book that I apparently misshelved somewhere and therefore wound up buying a second time out of sheer frustration: Peter Sangster, Pity My Simplicity