My Year in Books
- Favorite fiction: Kate Atkinson, Transcription; Richard Beard, Lazarus is Dead; Hamish Clayton, Wulf; Barbara Hanrahan, The Albatross Muff; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun; Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset; Adam Roberts, The Black Prince.
- Favorite historical mystery: Elizabeth Haynes, The Murder of Harriet Monckton.
- Detective with most eye-watering dress sense: Richard Jepherson in Kim Newman’s The Man from the Diogenes Club.
- Weirdest take on Christianity: Robert Shearman, “Pumpkin Kids.”
- There are unpleasant boarding schools and then there are…whatever this is: Colin Winnette, The Job of the Wasp.
- Novel that made me want to yell “Why on earth would you ever keep doing this?!” over and over again, which is pretty awkward when you’re on a plane to the UK: Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
- Novel reread for the first time since I was about ten: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.
- Best novels reread for class: Laura Fish, Strange Music; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
- Most fun novel to teach: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
- Now I’m seeing it everywhere: The result of teaching a Pilgrim’s Progress course.
- Actually Dickensian neo-Victorian novel: Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick.
- Most unusual bildungsroman: Lorna Gibb, A Ghost’s Story.
- Best unintentional demonstration that nineteenth-century economists were not necessarily brilliant novelists: Robert Torrens.
- Discovery resulting in a moment of existential despair: Turning up far too many Victorian epic poems about the Crusades. (It has occurred to me that I should really do some writing about Victorian religious poetry. However…)
- What is this I just read: A Christian with Two Wives.
- There are times one suspects the author lacks inspiration: The first name of the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is…Lady.
- Most unusual Sherlock Holmes pastiche: Gordon Alpine, Holmes Untangled.
- Funniest Sherlock Holmes pastiche: G. S. Denning’s ongoing Warlock Holmes series. OK, the humor is broad, but I laughed anyway.
- Sherlock Holmes mashup trend that is not perhaps entirely necessary: Do we need two different series in which Holmes gets mixed up with the Cthulhu mythos?
- Sherlock Holmes anthology that best created the fiction of a singular voice: Christopher Sequeira, ed., Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook.
- Most wearisome ongoing Neo-Victorian trend: Given the number of Jack the Ripper copycats wandering through nineteenth-century London, it’s amazing that England made it into the twentieth century with most of its female population intact.
- Monograph finally discounted enough for me to purchase it: The third volume of Michael Watts’ study of Nonconformity in Britain.
- Most antiquarian purchases: Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children and a first edition of Grace Kennedy’s Father Clement, both 1823; Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care, a Tale Founded on Fact, 1825.
- The duplication blues: Yet again, I somehow managed to purchase books I already owned.