My Year in Books
- Favorite novels (published in the past five years or so): Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games; Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey; James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack; Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
- Favorite novels (published in the past few decades or so): Patrick White, The Vivisector; Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them; Robert Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica; Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes; Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant; Elizabeth Taylor, Angel; Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate; Shusako Endo, Silence; Shusako Endo, The Samurai.
- Best SF: China Mieville, The City & The City.
- Best Gothic: Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger.
- Most appalling narrator in a good neo-Victorian novel: Stannard in Jem Poster's Courting Shadows.
- Best reread novels: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale; E. M. Forster, Howards End.
- I don't seem to be doing this properly: 1) I buy a monograph; 2) Choice asks me to review said monograph; 3) some months later, a scholarly journal also asks me to review said monograph.
- Worst Victorian poetry: tie between Benjamin Gough's Our National Sins and James Augustus Page's Protestant Ballads.
- Novels I would have thrown at the wall, except that fixing and repainting the drywall would be annoying, and I'd prefer to spend money on other things, like buying better novels, so I only threw them at the wall in my imagination: Dan Simmons, Drood; Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead.
- Most disappointing anthology: Dark Delicacies II. (Shouldn't a horror anthology generate...horror? Mild nervousness, even? Obviously, your mileage may vary.)
- Novel I liked much better than my review might seem to indicate: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
- Sir, put down the pen. Step away from the Victorians: Dan Simmons. (Simmons is an important SF novelist, but The Terror and Drood were, to put it none too kindly, dreadful.)
- This was amusing once. Maybe twice: Sticking vampires &c. into random classic novels.
- Novel I might have enjoyed more had I not read that other novel: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book. (The Corner That Held Them handled the chronicle form much more gracefully, I thought.)
- Most eye-popping demise in a Victorian didactic novel: Death by wasps in Langton George Vere's For Better, For Worse.
- Most eye-poppingly convenient demise in a Victorian didactic novel: The heroine of E. C. Agnew's Geraldine wants a celibate marriage, much to her husband's rather understandable annoyance. A year later, he agrees to her request--whereupon he immediately suffers a Tragic Accident and dies, leaving her free to join a convent.
- Most eye-poppingly bloody moment in a Victorian didactic novel: In Mrs. John Cooke's Philippe, a young girl returns home to find the corpses of her murdered family (see here).
- Most appalling Victorian novel: Anna Clay Beecher's anti-Semitic sequel to Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen.
- The Bad Plot Prize: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (a key element of the plot simply vanishes).
- Best novel read in the course of doing research for Book Two--which is no doubt why I wound up not writing about it: Emily Lawless, With Essex in Ireland.
- Best Victorian Catholic novel: Mrs. Josephine (Wilfrid) Ward, One Poor Scruple.
- Down the memory hole: My favorite supporting character from the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, the bibliophilic bookdealer Edwin Digweed, didn't even get a mention this time around.
- Weirdest acquisition: "Frank Briton"'s By and By: A Thrilling Tale (late-Victorian anti-Anglo-Catholic propaganda in full-blown panic mode).
- Most common experience while browsing eBay auctions: Why, that book looks interesting OMG YOU WANT ME TO BID WHAT FOR IT?!?
- Best eBay deal, antiquarian division: the full nineteenth-century set of Church Association Tracts for 49.99.
- Best eBay deal, new division: The Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part I, for $9.99. That's...not what it retails for (and is substantially cheaper than even the secondhand copies).
- I...wonder how that happened: The number of books in my collection topped seven thousand.