My Year in Books

• Favorite academic books: Ian Duncan, Scott's Shadow; Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction; Billie Melman, The Culture of History; Herbert Tucker, Epic.
• Favorite fiction: Howard Sturgis, Belchamber; Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity; Joseph O'Connor, Redemption Falls.  
• Hmmmm: Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry.  Not quite sure whether I liked it or not, but I was intrigued enough to buy another one of her books.  
• Most pleasant surprise, in a manner of speaking: Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly. 
• Absolutely the worst novel in the history of nineteenth-century British fiction, even including Queen-Hoo Hall: Mrs. Robertson's Florence; Or, the Aspirant. 
• Novel containing what is quite possibly the silliest moment in Victorian religious fiction: Richard Cobbold's Freston Tower.  
• Oddest religious novel: "Christmas Eve" with the Spirits, an Anglo-Catholic take on A Christmas Carol. 
• Yes, Virginia, even Victorian religious fiction has sex in it: in one Catholic novel, the resident Nasty Protestant very obviously orders his wife to go out and prostitute herself to support him. 
• Best religious novel: Lady Georgiana Fullerton's Constance Sherwood.  
• Detective novel most enjoyed by freshmen: Dee Goong-An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee).
• Victorian novel that proved hardest to teach: Charlotte Bronte's Shirley.  
• Victorian novel that improved most on rereading: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  
• Amazingly, my freshmen did not defenestrate me for making them read this: Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers. 
• This was a movie tie-in?: Robert Mack's edition of The String of Pearls, a.k.a. Sweeney Todd.
• You book-buyer, me doorstop: Franco Moretti, The Novel, Volume 2; Adrian Hastings, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought; Herbert Tucker, Epic.  
• Most likely to make non-specialists say "What on earth...?!": Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.  
• Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement: Cambridge UP has been reprinting some of its backlist in relatively affordable (e.g., in the $30s) paperback editions.
• Academic publishing trend deserving of further encouragement II:  Ohio State UP making books from its OOP backlist available for free online. 
• I could have sworn that one of the reasons to review a book was to get a free copy: Choice twice asked me to review books I had already bought.
• What is that whirring sound coming from your internal hard drive?: I managed to walk into a bookstore and buy a book I already owned not once, not twice, but three times. 
• Book I had to return because reviewing a monograph by the director of your dissertation is really not quite the thing: Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts. 
• Ewwww: Patrick McCabe, Winterwood.  (Not bad...just ewwww.)
• AWOL character in a detective series: Reginald Hill seems to have mislaid Edwin Digweed somewhere. 
• Niftiest antiquarian book: Charlotte Maria Pepys, The Diary and Houres of the Ladye Adolie: A Faythfulle Childe, 1552 (1853).
• Most consistently interesting reprints: The NYRB Classics. 
• Best gift from a colleague: An omnibus edition of William Combe's Doctor Syntax poems. 
• Still in transit: I'm sure Transit of Venus is in the house somewhere, but goodness knows where.
• Most likely to cause severe eye trauma: the teensy-tiny font in my copy of Eleanor Agnew's Geraldine.  
• Best eBay deal: Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England (8 vols.) for about $50.
• Trend that should be nipped in the bud immediately: Selling ARCs as "paperbacks."  Technically, yes, but otherwise, no.  Especially when you've advertised the book as something else.
• Book responsible for satirical blog post: a "very good" (hah!) copy of Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism prompted this. 
• The slightest breeze will lead to my immediate collapse: The Union Review and The Girl's Week-Day Book, both of which are practically looseleaf. 

Comments

[dance]

Clearly you need a phone (iPhone) that will let you sync your book cataloging software to it (I know BookPedia has a phone version, not sure about the others, but they probably export). I'm sure you have book cataloging software--I'm assuming you export the purchases-this-week posts from it, though I've not seen you mention it.

[undine]

Ohio U P or Ohio State U P? I went right over to Ohio U P but didn't see a link.

Nice list, by the way, and I am with you on the selling of ARC copies as paperbacks.

[Aleppo]

Warwick Gould was my favourite professor at University. I do not know why you need to know this.