My Year in Books
Favorite novels: Colm Toibin, House of Names; Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children; Lesley Krueger, Mad Richard; Richard Francis, Crane Pond; Rohan Wilson, To Name Those Lost; Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child; Steven Price, By Gaslight; Joshua Harmon, Quinnehtukqut; John Williams, Augustus.
Funniest novel: Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters.
Best parody-cum-horror: M. R. James, “Wailing Well.”
Best genre anthology: John Sandford, ed., The Best American Mystery Stories 2017.
Best book reread for class: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
Most exasperating syllabus-building experience: Trying to find contemporary reworkings of Macbeth that were a) not several hundred pages long and b) more importantly, in print. Everything was either out of print, not yet in print, or in print somewhere other than the USA. (Hence Pratchett, above.)
Most unforgivably terrible religious novel by an author who remained wisely anonymous: The Tudor Sisters. And here I was thinking that E. H. Dering was the nineteenth century’s most incompetent religious novelist…
Unexpectedly readable religious fiction: Rowland Hill, Village Dialogues.
Most readable religious novelist in general: George MacDonald.
Worst grand romantic gesture in a horror novel: In Ken Greenhall, Childgrave.
Resurrected novel: Daniel Parsons, Stumpingford: A Tale of the Protestant Alliance; Jonah, and La Salette, which had apparently been hiding in someone’s attic. (The only other known copy was destroyed during the Blitz.)
Most antiquarian book purchases: Stumpingford; Sophie Cottin, Elizabeth; Or, the Exiles of Siberia. A Tale Founded Upon Facts; W. Carus Wilson, Youthful Memoirs.
Most metafictional genre novel: John Le Carre, Legacy of Spies.
I’m not sure about this trend in Sherlock Holmes pastiches: …Cthulhu? Really? Why so many of them? (Yes, I know “A Study in Emerald.”)
I knew there was a reason I should be entering my Kindle books in my LibraryThing catalog: Or, how I wound up with both electronic and paper copies of Mary Brunton’s Self-Control.
…Not that that helps when you can’t get WiFi access: Or, how I wound up with two copies of Katherine McMahon’s The Rose of Sebastopol.
...Or when one book is hardcopy and another paperback: Or, how I would up with two copies of Frederick Busch's The Mutual Friend.
…And this really seems to have been a running theme: Or, how I…actually, I’m not sure what my excuse is for having two copies of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs.
Polite request: Chapter headings should have something to do with the contents of the chapter, if you please.
Not-so-polite request: ENOUGH WITH JACK THE BLASTED RIPPER ARRRGHBRRRGHYRRRRRGH.
Please include a magnifying glass: Stop shrinking the font size in order to save money.
Greatest dissonance between the book and where I was reading it: The first volume of John and Jean Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution in…Times Square?
It’s not necessary to emulate this GoogleBooks tic: Some archive.org titles now only appear if you search for them via Google; they mysteriously vanish if you try to locate them using archive.org’s own search function.
Odd accomplishment: I seem to have purchased a lot of Purdue University’s library discards.
Most irritated comment made while in an archive: “Thank goodness we’ve now reached the typewriter era, because all of the people involved in this correspondence had the most awful cursive.”
Favorite trivia discovery made while trying to figure out why I couldn’t identify the reference: Wrong Scott, folks.