My Year in Books
- Favorite academic books: Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow; Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction; Billie Melman, The Culture of History; Herbert Tucker, Epic.
- Favorite fiction: Howard Sturgis, Belchamber; Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity; Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls.
- Hmmmm: Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry. Not quite sure whether I liked it or not, but I was intrigued enough to buy another one of her books.
- Most pleasant surprise, in a manner of speaking: Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly.
- Absolutely the worst novel in the history of nineteenth-century British fiction, even including Queen-Hoo Hall: Mrs. Robertson's Florence; Or, the Aspirant.
- Novel containing what is quite possibly the silliest moment in Victorian religious fiction: Richard Cobbold's Freston Tower.
- Oddest religious novel: "Christmas Eve" with the Spirits, an Anglo-Catholic take on A Christmas Carol.
- Yes, Virginia, even Victorian religious fiction has sex in it: in one Catholic novel, the resident Nasty Protestant very obviously orders his wife to go out and prostitute herself to support him.
- Best religious novel: Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Constance Sherwood.
- Detective novel most enjoyed by freshmen: Dee Goong-An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee).
- Victorian novel that proved hardest to teach: Charlotte Bronte's Shirley.
- Victorian novel that improved most on rereading: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
- Amazingly, my freshmen did not defenestrate me for making them read this: Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers.
- This was a movie tie-in?: Robert Mack's edition of The String of Pearls, a.k.a. Sweeney Todd.
- You book-buyer, me doorstop: Franco Moretti, The Novel, Volume 2; Adrian Hastings, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought; Herbert Tucker, Epic.
- Most likely to make non-specialists say "What on earth...?!": Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
- Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement: Cambridge UP has been reprinting some of its backlist in relatively affordable (e.g., in the $30s) paperback editions.
- Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement II: Ohio State UP making books from its OOP backlist available for free online.
- I could have sworn that one of the reasons to review a book was to get a free copy: Choice twice asked me to review books I had already bought.
- What is that whirring sound coming from your internal hard drive?: I managed to walk into a bookstore and buy a book I already owned not once, not twice, but three times.
- Book I had to return because reviewing a monograph by the director of your dissertation is really not quite the thing: Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts.
- Ewwww: Patrick McCabe, Winterwood. (Not bad...just ewwww.)
- AWOL character in a detective series: Reginald Hill seems to have mislaid Edwin Digweed somewhere.
- Niftiest antiquarian book: Charlotte Maria Pepys, The Diary and Houres of the Ladye Adolie: A Faythfulle Childe, 1552 (1853).
- Most consistently interesting reprints: The NYRB Classics.
- Best gift from a colleague: An omnibus edition of William Combe's Doctor Syntax poems.
- Still in transit: I'm sure Transit of Venus is in the house somewhere, but goodness knows where.
- Most likely to cause severe eye trauma: the teensy-tiny font in my copy of Eleanor Agnew's Geraldine.
- Best eBay deal: Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England (8 vols.) for about $50.
- Trend that should be nipped in the bud immediately: Selling ARCs as "paperbacks." Technically, yes, but otherwise, no. Especially when you've advertised the book as something else.
- Book responsible for satirical blog post: a "very good" (hah!) copy of Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism prompted this.
- The slightest breeze will lead to my immediate collapse: The Union Review and The Girl's Week-Day Book, both of which are practically looseleaf.