Wishlist list
To commemorate a somewhat unfortunate occasion--namely, my Amazon wishlist topping the 1K mark. (For the record, to reassure those experiencing a sudden spasm of anxiety about my checkbook: I use the wishlist to keep track of books that might come in handy someday, not necessarily books I intend to buy in the immediate or even distant future. Sorry, Amazon.)
- Most expensive book: Romanticism and Politics, 1789-1832 ($1070). I'm guessing that this is a multivolume set.
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Cheapest book: John Banville, The Newton Letter ($9.31 after discount).
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Books available used for .01: Amanda Prantera, Letter to Lorenzo; Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus: A Novel; Penelope Lively, Heat Wave: A Novel; Elizabeth Cook, Achilles: A Novel.
- Most consistently expensive university press: Oxford.
- Books that I really wish somebody would send me to review: Patrick R. O'Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture; Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature; Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (change of religious pace there).
- Books that I might actually use in a classroom at some point: Thomas J. Collins, Anthology of Victorian Prose; Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction.
- Potentially oddest novel: Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite. (I mean--Julia Ward Howe?!)
- Novel with strangest title: Richard Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion.
- Contemporary novel I'm most looking forward to reading: Jim Crace, The Pesthouse.
- Only graphic novel on the list: Will Eisner, Fagin the Jew.
- Books out of my field that I'd love to read: John N. King, Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture; Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr; Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation; Helen L. Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi; David Cressy, Bonfires & Bells.
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Books in my field that I really should read ASAP (er, of many): K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion; Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation And Belief in Mid-victorian Britain; Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953; Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press.
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Number of books that I've read, but keep on the list to remind myself that I should look at them again (or buy them) at some point: 25
- Book I heard the authors discuss while the manuscript was still gestating: Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869 (during a Nineteenth-Century Workshop meeting at the University of Chicago).
- Books with least illuminating Amazon reviews: William J. Astore, Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America ("An irreverant excuse for a publication that assumes WAY too much and poorly connects the elements of science, art and religion that would leave the spirit of Thomas Dick himself mourning in his grave"); Jeff Nunokawa, Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire ("Indeed, discipline appears to be the missing concept in Nunokawa's self-impressed, accordion-like unfolding of a screen that has precious little substance after one gets past the fanfare of the author's delight at his own meditations"); Peter White, Thomas Huxley: Making the 'Man of Science' ("This book is less of a pleasure read as it is an academic History of Science read").
- Book in which (apparently) I'm in the acknowledgments: Norman W. Jones, Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative (so Professor Jones tells me).
- Books written by people with whom I went to graduate school: Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel; Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property.
- Book written by another member of the Victorian Studies Reading Group of Upstate New York: Daniel Hack, Material Interests of the Victorian Novel.