The Little Professor

This Week's Month's Acquisitions

(Colleague, as I was towing books down the hall: "If you need a handcart to carry your books, you're probably buying too many books."  One can never have too many books! Never! [I'll grant that you might have too many books if the house collapses; otherwise, no.])

  • Emma Jane Worboise, Husbands and Wives (James Clarke & Co., 1879).  Religious novel about, as you might expect, the spiritual significance of marriage.  Biographical overview of Worboise here. 
  • Adolphe Monod, Lucilla; Or, the Reading of the Bible (RTS, n.d. [1880s]).  Translation of this short anti-Catholic novel by a very popular French Protestant preacher.  If you like, you can read the book in French. 
  • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Oxford, 1997).  Dead man reflects on life from beyond the grave.  (Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea why Oxford sent this to me, but I won't argue.) 
  • Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead (Pantheon, 2006).  Why are all the dead people disappearing from the afterlife?
  • Jane Rogers, Island (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).  Young woman heads to remote island on a quest to find her mother. 
  • ---, The Voyage Home (Overlook, 2004).  Woman makes discoveries while reading her father's diaries. 
  • Michael Redhill, Consolation: A Novel (Little, Brown, and Co.).  First a historian and then his widow search for a nineteenth-century photographer and his lost photographs.
  • Robert Edric, Gathering the Water (Doubleday, 2006).  In 1847, a man prepares to flood a valley.
  • Joseph O'Connor, The Star of the Sea (Harvest/Harcourt, 2002).  Intrigue on a ship crossing the ocean from Ireland to the United States. 
  • Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Baylor, 2006).  Examines the emergence of "spontaneity" as a positive value during the Enlightenment, along with its religious implications.  I'm reviewing it for Choice.
  • Patricia Murphy, In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Missouri, 2006).  Representations of women as scientists.  I'm also reviewing this for Choice. 
  • Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland & America (Chicago, 2006).  How Scottish Enlightenment texts were produced and distributed. 
  • Elizabeth Warren, The Story of Martin Luther (John F. Shaw, n.d.).  Late-Victorian children's biography.
  • Stella Tillyard, A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings (Random House, 2006).  It's not as though the Windsors are uniquely inept in managing their personal lives, after all...
  • Christopher Summerville, ed., Regency Recollections: Captain Gronow's Guide to Life in London and Paris (Ravenhall, 2006).  Memoirs of a Regency dandy. 
  • R. H. Hutton Essays Theological and Literary, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1880).  Collected edition of Hutton's, um, essays.  Hutton was a well-known Victorian editor and literary critic.  There's a biographical sketch of Hutton at Wikipedia; Hutton's biography of Newman is available at the Newman Reader. 
  • The Parish Magazine (1875-76).  Two years' worth of this Christian periodical, edited by J. Erskine Clarke.  More on Clarke (a prolific magazine editor) here. 
  • Samuel Edgar, The Variations of Popery, 2nd ed. (Seeley & Burnside, 1838).  Lengthy anti-Catholic polemic by an Irish Presbyterian.  There's some discussion of Edgar in this article.
  • R. F. Littledale, Plain Reasons Against Joining the Church of Rome (SPCK, 1884).  Brief anti-Catholic polemic by a Tractarian.  There's a brief bibliography (and an e-text) at Project Canterbury; see also this short discussion of Littledale on the eucharist.
  • The Rev. W. Waterworth, S.J., Origin and Developments of Anglicanism... (Burns & Lambert, 1854).  Catholic attack on the Reformation in England and its results. 
this-weeks-acquisitions