My Year in Books
- Favorite novels: Margaret Forster, Lady's Maid; Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars; William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War; Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers; Harry Karlinsky, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects; Sylvia Townsend-Warner, The Flint Anchor; Mark Dunn, Under the Harrow; Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke.
- Favorite novel I approached with some trepidation: Felix J. Palma, The Map of Time.
- Favorite historical mystery: Stephen Gallagher, The Bedlam Detective.
- Favorite unclassifiable novel: Felix Gilman, The Half-Made World.
- Favorite reworking of Shakespeare: Scott G. F. Bailey, The Astrologer (it's Hamlet). (I may teach this one the next time I swap King Lear out for Hamlet in intro to lit.)
- Detective who refuses to stay retired: Ian Rankin's Rebus. He retires! (Because he ages in real time.) Rankin replaces him with Siobhan Clarke! (That doesn't work.) Rankin replaces him with Malcolm Fox! (That also doesn't work.) Rankin brings him back and has him work with both Clarke and Fox! (Don't think too hard about how realistic this is.)
- Detective who ought to be retired immediately: "Benjamin Black's" Quirke.
- Supporting character in a detective series who ought to be retired immediately: Hamish, the "ghost" in Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge series. Given that he barely appeared in the last one, I suspect even "Todd" is growing tired of this gimmick.
- Detectives who need to come to an understanding, stat: Stephen Booth's Cooper and Fry, who must set some kind of record for agonizingly slow character development.
- Neo-noirs that will convince you that there is no goodness remaining in the world and we might as well give up right now: Caryl Ferey's postcolonial mysteries Zulu, Utu, and Mapuche. The gloom is only heightened by Ferey's cheery habit of killing off all of his characters in incredibly sadistic ways, although Mapuche threatens to have a happy ending. Uh, sort of.
- Trend in Sherlock Holmes pastiches that should be cut off at the pass: Dropping steampunk elements into otherwise realistic narratives. This strategy is no doubt an aftereffect of the Robert Downey, Jr. films, but it doesn't work particularly well.
- Best new Sherlock Holmes appropriation: Eleanor Arnason, "Holmes Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery."
- I continue to think this may be one of the best Sherlock Holmes pastiches ever written: Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind.
- Neo-Victorian novel that elicited the most "NO JUST NO" responses: Faye Booth, Trades of the Flesh.
- Neo-Victorian novel with greatest number of creepy guys per square inch: Katy Darby, The Whore's Asylum.
- Religious novels so beyond redemption that they made me rethink my entire career trajectory: Fiction But Not Falsehood; The Waning Church.
- Famous novel (er, to people in my line of work) I was finally able to read: Miss M. G. Lewis, The Jewish Maiden.
- Novel responsible for wrecking a student's life: Varney the Vampire. Or so the student informed me.
- Worst prose in any novel assigned for class: Er, Varney the Vampire.
- Best novel reread for a course: Daniel Deronda.
- Most unintentionally hilarious attempt to combine the Gothic with soft-core porn: Dracula: The Darker Passions. Because we all know that vampires really get off on spanking each other.
- I have not managed to stop this trend: "Sexed-up" classic novels. CEASE AND DESIST.
- Is it the novelist, or is it just me?: I'll just throw up my hands right now and confess that after reading several of Robert Edric's novels, I still don't "get" him. Why do all of his narrators share the same toneless, almost robotic interior voice?
- I'll concede that it's just me: Tried James Blaylock years ago, found him not to my taste; tried him again, still not to my taste.
- Just how much introduction does one anthology need?: The introduction to The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes, which occupies fully half the book.
- Favorite academic books: Ciaran Brady, James Anthony Froude; Valerie Weaver-Zercher, The Thrill of the Chaste; Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis.
- Most antiquarian acquisitions: Amelia Bristow, The Orphans of Lissau, and Other Interesting Narratives, Directly Connected with Jewish Customs, Domestic and Religious (ca. 1830); Robert Wilson Evans, The Rectory of Valehead (1832) and Tales of the Ancient British Church (1841); Rachel McCrindell, The English Governess: A Tale of Real Life (1st US ed., 1844).
- I'm glad I was sent these to review, because they certainly weren't in the budget: Sir Walter Scott, Introduction and Notes to the Magnum Opus (Edinburgh, 2 vols.); Gerald Manley Hopkins, the Correspondence (OUP, 2 vols.).
- Best massive discounts from Amazon: Ian Haywood's The Literature of Struggle and Chartist Fiction, Vol. II; Keith A. Francis and William Gibson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689-1901.