My Year in Books

• Favorite novels (published in the past five years or so): Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games; Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey; James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack; Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
• Favorite novels (published in the past few decades or so): Patrick White, The Vivisector; Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them; Robert Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica; Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes; Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant; Elizabeth Taylor, Angel; Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate; Shusako Endo, Silence; Shusako Endo, The Samurai.
• Best SF: China Mieville, The City & The City. 
• Best Gothic: Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger.
• Most appalling narrator in a good neo-Victorian novel: Stannard in Jem Poster's Courting Shadows.
• Best reread novels: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale; E. M. Forster, Howards End. 
• I don't seem to be doing this properly: 1) I buy a monograph; 2) Choice asks me to review said monograph; 3) some months later, a scholarly journal also asks me to review said monograph.
• Worst Victorian poetry: tie between Benjamin Gough's Our National Sins and James Augustus Page's Protestant Ballads. 
• Novels I would have thrown at the wall, except that fixing and repainting the drywall would be annoying, and I'd prefer to spend money on other things, like buying better novels, so I only threw them at the wall in my imagination: Dan Simmons, Drood; Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-Dead.
• Most disappointing anthology:  Dark Delicacies II.  (Shouldn't a horror anthology generate...horror? Mild nervousness, even?  Obviously, your mileage may vary.)
• Novel I liked much better than my review might seem to indicate: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.  
• Sir, put down the pen.  Step away from the  Victorians: Dan Simmons.  (Simmons is an important SF novelist, but The Terror and Drood were, to put it none too kindly, dreadful.)  
• This was amusing once.  Maybe twice: Sticking vampires &c.  into random classic novels. 
• Novel I might have enjoyed more had I not read that other novel: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book.  (The Corner That Held Them handled the chronicle form much more gracefully, I thought.) 
• Most eye-popping demise in a Victorian didactic novel: Death by wasps in Langton George Vere's For Better, For Worse.
• Most eye-poppingly convenient demise in a Victorian didactic novel: The heroine of E. C. Agnew's Geraldine wants a celibate marriage, much to her husband's rather understandable annoyance.  A year later, he agrees to her request--whereupon he immediately suffers a Tragic Accident and dies, leaving her free to join a convent.
• Most eye-poppingly bloody moment in a Victorian didactic novel: In Mrs. John Cooke's Philippe, a young girl returns home to find the corpses of her murdered family (see here).    
• Most appalling Victorian novel: Anna Clay Beecher's anti-Semitic sequel to Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen.  
• The Bad Plot Prize: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (a key element of the plot simply vanishes). 
• Best novel read in the course of doing research for Book Two--which is no doubt why I wound up not writing about it: Emily Lawless, With Essex in Ireland.   
• Best Victorian Catholic novel: Mrs. Josephine (Wilfrid) Ward, One Poor Scruple. 
• Down the memory hole: My favorite supporting character from the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, the bibliophilic bookdealer Edwin Digweed, didn't even get a mention this time around. 
• Weirdest acquisition: "Frank Briton"'s By and By: A Thrilling Tale (late-Victorian anti-Anglo-Catholic propaganda in full-blown panic mode).
• Most common experience while browsing eBay auctions: Why, that book looks interesting OMG YOU WANT ME TO BID WHAT FOR IT?!?
• Best eBay deal, antiquarian division: the full nineteenth-century set of Church Association Tracts for 49.99.
• Best eBay deal, new division: The Lives of Victorian Political Figures, Part I, for $9.99.  That's...not what it retails for (and is substantially cheaper than even the secondhand copies). 
• I...wonder how that happened: The number of books in my collection topped seven thousand. 

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Many thanks for this, esp. the comment on The Children's Book.

[Brandon]

I think Simmons's work is usually quite dreadful; but I think science fiction gives him room to compensate for it with striking ideas that a reader can get caught up with, and so despite being dreadful in many ways, his SF is interesting and readable. (He reminds me of Frank Herbert on this point -- awful writer, but here and there the books are good despite it, because you get caught up in other things besides the writing.) SF easily allows epic sweeps and complicated quasi-allegories -- tends to favor them, in fact; and Simmons is good at precisely those things. Good historical fiction, however, tends to involve intricate detail-work, which makes both epic sweep and anything approaching the allegory very difficult.

Seven thousand is a beautiful number of books; in ancient times only the very finest libraries would have topped a number like that. But I will not be impressed until you top twelve thousand!

[Russell Potter]

Agree with you on Simmons -- the Franklin expedition is my professional speciality, and I don't object to fanciful fictional treatments of it (see William T. Vollman's "The Rifles" or Sten Nadolny's "The Discovery of Slowness"). But Simmons is so far over the top that his carefully-researched backdrop is all for naught. And as for Drood -- phew! -- the voices are all wrong. Collins would never write drivel such as "some say I am a gambling man" or "Dickens had many reasons to be smug" or "Dickens still needed a woman in his house." 775 pages of this stuff is 774 pages too many, but certainly would make quite a dent in the drywall!

[Bourgeois Nerd]

I third the "Simmons isn't actually a good writer, but in sci-fi his ideas paper over it" sentiment.

Ten thousand books, here we come!

[bookperson]

Re:

"Most appalling narrator in a good neo-Victorian novel: Stannard in Jem Poster's Chasing Shadows."

Jem Poster's book is "Courting Shadows," not 'chasing.' He is appalling, but I think that is part of the character; I don't think he's meant to be likeable. Don't you think?

[Miriam]

Oops, fixed the typo.

Oh yes, I agree that Stannard is supposed to be horrific.