My Year in Books
Favorite novels: Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It; Ernest Weiss, Georg Lethem: Scholar and Murderer; Cormac MacCarthy, Blood Meridian.
Favorite scholarly works: Gregory Jackson, The Word and Its Witness; Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question; Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book; Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in the Early Modern Period.
That figures: Why is a relevant scholarly book coming out two months before the final draft of Book Two is due? *sigh*
Best novels reread for a course: Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now; George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Now I remember why I usually don't assign this book: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh.
Charlotte Bronte: Despite my nefarious career as a student of books nobody else wants to touch with an electrified twenty-foot pole, I wound up completing three articles related to CB this year (one forthcoming in a Cambridge In Context, one forthcoming in Bronte Studies, and one this past summer in Open Letters Monthly).
Most readable eighteenth-century Gothic novel: Sophia Lee, The Recess.
Number of novels by John Le Carre read since October: Five.
Novel I'm editing: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere.
Best genre anthologies: Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction; Harlan Coben, The Best American Mystery Stories 2011.
Genre anthology by which I was most pleasantly surprised: Stephen Jones, The Mammoth Book of Dracula.
Best anthology involving Sherlock Holmes: John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, eds., The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Best short story in an otherwise unmemorable anthology involving Sherlock Holmes: Laura Lippman, "The Last of Sheila-Locke Holmes," in A Study in Sherlock, eds. Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger.
Novel I didn't finish: Graham Moore, The Sherlockian.
Novel I couldn't finish: The Banished Ones Fetched Home, a bizarre Hebrew Christian novel serialized between 1872-1875. Alas, I was done in by the vagaries of digitization: only part of the relevant periodical run was available online.
Favorite mystery novel: Ian Rankin, The Complaints.
Detective series gimmick most in need of retirement: The hallucinatory Hamish from Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge series. (Of course, without Hamish, you'd have to retire the series, so...)
Favorite dark comedy: Robert Olen Butler, Hell.
Favorite neo-Victorian novel: Jim Crace, Signals of Distress.
Favorite SF novel: Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl.
Favorite exhibition catalogs: John Martin: Apocalypse; From Van Eyck to Breugel.
I know it can take forever to make up your mind, but this is ridiculous: After eight years of seeing Gordon N. Ray's The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790-1914 sitting on the shelf in one Ithaca bookstore, I finally broke down and bought it.
Most utterly, irredeemably, hopelessly inept novels: Rossetta Ballin, The Statue Room; Gorges Lowther, Gerald: A Tale of Conscience.
Greatest number of inadvertent zombies: Truth without Fiction, and Religion without Disguise. (The novelist's inability to develop a realistic chronology, combined with his habit of making his characters quote texts they couldn't possibly know, means that several historical personages show up after they ought to be dead.)
Religious novels I was most excited to read: Charlotte Montefiore, Caleb Asher; Gorges Lowther, Gerald: A Tale of Conscience (despite my critical assessment of same).
Religious novel I was most excited to find online: William Johnston, Nightshade.
Worst novel by a Victorian politician: William Johnston, Nightshade.
Religious novel featuring an inexplicable appearance by Benjamin Disraeli: Nightshade goes three-for-three.
Most bizarre religious novel: The escaped nun narrative Rosamond.
Number of books on my combined Amazon wishlists: 2100+ and counting. Oh, dear.
Book most likely to cause shoulder strain: Maria Louise Charlesworth, Ministering Children and Sequel (a deluxe omnibus edition).
Spelling counts: The otherwise unknown editor of Historical Tales for Young Protestants, a man identified as "J. H. Crosse" in the British Library Catalogue and other sources, is otherwise unknown because he's actually the quite well-known John Henry Cross, no "e."
Most confused Victorian title pages: The Heiress of Ravensby. A Tale of Pre-Reformation Times / The Heiress of Ravensby. A Tale of Reformation Times; Sister M. F. Clare's "two volume" novel Hornehurst Rectory, which is nevertheless complete in one volume. (It's not a double-decker bound singly, either--the pagination is continuous.)
Self-deconstructing scholarly work: Andrew Tate's Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, which is an excellent book. It's just that the whole thing fell apart while I was reading it, complete with leaves fluttering to the ground, one after the other...
Has anyone seen my stake?: Endless mashups of classic novels with modern horror tropes. Enough already.
Just buy a smart phone and be done with it: On one book-buying expedition, I managed to acquire two books I already owned.
Least expensive secondhand copy of a book from Cambridge University Press: Jonathan Schorsch's Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, which I picked up for one cent from Amazon.
Pet acquisitions: Margaret Anna Cusack's (Sister M. F. Clare) Catholic conversion novel Hornehurst Abbey; Jemima Luke's satirical yet anti-Catholic take on the escaped nun narrative, The Female Jesuit; M. G. Wiebe et al.'s most recent volume of The Benjamin Disraeli Letters.
Most delayed novel: Reginald Hill's next Dalziel and Pascoe novel, which was originally slated for late 2011, then for summer 2012, and has now been pushed back to summer 2013.