My Year in Books

• Favorite novels, in whatever genre: Jeffrey Renard Allen,Song of the Shank; Ann Harries, No Place for a Lady; Jane Harris, Gillespie and I;Robert Player, Let’s Talk of Graves, and Worms, and Epitaphs; James McBride, The Good Lord Bird; idem, Song Yet Sung; Lloyd Shepherd, Savage Magic; D. J. Taylor, Derby Day; Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests; A. N. Wilson, The Potter’s Hand.
• Favorite academic books: Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child; Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home; W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism; Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing.
• Favorite genre anthology: Richard Thomas, ed., The New Black. 
• The returns are diminishing at an ever-increasing rate: Sherlock Holmes pastiches, of which there are too many, mostly terrible.
• There are no further returns to be had: DO NOT PUT VAMPIRES IN DICKENS.  DO NOT PUT ZOMBIES IN AUSTEN.  DO NOT PUT WEREWOLVES IN THACKERAY.  (To be clear: to my knowledge, nobody has put any werewolves in Thackeray’s fiction.  Don’t do it.)
• At least be original about vampirizing your fiction: Michael Talbot’s A Delicate Dependency, which is pretty much J.-K. Huysmans WITH VAMPIRES!
• If I come across this character one more time, I’m going to turn into the Hulk: Jack the Ripper.  You know, other things happened in the nineteenth century. 
• Understandable, albeit vaguely depressing, cover art: All those reprints of Sherlock Holmes novels with Cumberbatch and Freeman on the cover. 
• Most unforgivable line in a Sherlock Holmes pastiche: “Holmes, you are clever, very clever.  But I am not done yet,” hissed the Professor.  (Moriarty, of course.  No, I’m not going to i.d. the author.) 
• On second thought, no: Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter, which I thought might be a useful novel to teach opposite Macbeth.  Of course, then I discovered that the novel was nearly seven hundred pages of teeny-tiny type.
• Reason #19991 why using electronic texts in the classroom can be frustrating: My elderly iPad turned into the equivalent of an aluminum tray in the middle of teaching a book I only owned as an e-text, leaving me to get through the rest of it using my cellphone.
• Novel most indebted to Cormac McCarthy: Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven. 
• Best fictional attempt to deal with Victorian religious crises: Stevie Davies, Awakening. 
• Best attempt to get at least some religion into Victorian historical fiction: Will Thomas’ Barker and Llewelyn series.  (May also qualify for the Novelist Who Remembers the Existence of Victorian Jews and Novelist Aware That Not All Residents of Victorian London Were White awards.) 
• And now I’m sinking into permanent gloom: The cumulative effect of Alex Grecian’s Scotland Yard series.
• Best revision of a Victorian novel: Daniel Levine, Hyde. 
• Best books reread for class: Scott G. F. Bailey, The Astrologer; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day;  Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Nina Revoyr, The Age of Dreaming.   
• Unreliable narrator most amusing to my students: Soren in Scott G. F. Bailey’s The Astrologer. 
• Author most unexpectedly interesting to my students: Mrs. Sherwood, of History of the Fairchild Family fame. 
• There’s Self-Insert Fic, and then there’s this: Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Hadrian the Seventh. 
• Most moralizing in a Gothic: Kim Newman, An English Ghost Story. 
• Best response to a classic SF short story: Don Sakers, “The Cold Solution.” 
• He synonymed, adverbly: Michael Talbot, A Delicate Dependency. “Please stop,” wailed the reader, wretchedly.
• OMG!!! Character development!!!: Stephen Booth’s detectives Cooper and Fry appear to have finally reached some kind of détente.   
• I’d suggest that you kill off this character, except that he’s already dead: The increasingly pointless Hamish in “Charles Todd’s” Inspector Rutledge series.    
• Most confusing plot in a Victorian religious novel: S. J. Hancock, Confession. 
• Most depressingly obvious symbolic name in a nineteenth-century novel: “Albion” in Patrick Bronte’s The Maid of Killarney (1813).  Yes, Albion is English.   
• Victorian religious novels that did not drive me to eat excessive quantities of chocolate-chip cookies: George MacDonald, Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood; Adeline Sergeant, The Surrender of Margaret Bellarmine.
• Victorian religious novels wretched beyond all hope of redemption: Who Will Win?; John Douglas DeLille, Canon Lucifer. 
• It’s not immediately clear to me why I didn’t already own this book: A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics, & Religion. 
• It’s a good thing the seller screwed up, because I already owned this book: For reasons unbeknownst to me, I ordered another copy of Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans; what showed up instead was some kind of vampire thriller (promptly deposited on the free books table).  
• Second time is the charm: Ross Gilfillan, The Edge of the Crowd (the last time I tried buying it, I got an ARC). 
• Rats, not again: In which I somehow wound up with a duplicate copy of George H. Miles’ The Truce of God.
• Er, well, this will make it easier to read on the plane: I picked up Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North at my local indie, then forgot I owned it and bought an ebook. 
• Review copy I was happiest to see: Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home.
• Most unexpectedly entertaining academic books: W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance; Michael J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain. 
• Most surprisingly affordable paperback: Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, The Cambridge History of Christianity: World Christianities, c. 1815-1914. 
• Best bargains: Mark Chapman, The Fantasy of Reunion; James Murphy, The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. IV.

Comments

[Kendra Leonard]

I'm so glad to learn 1) about the good books you read, so that I can add them to my to-read list; and 2) that I am not the only person who forgets what books she already owns and orders second copies.

[Rohan]

Did you read King Hereafter? I thought it was amazing. But not a good choice for class, I agree.

[Roger]

The problem with King Hereafter is that it's too big- metaphorically as well as literally- to be used as "support-reading" for something else, even if the something else is Macbeth.

[Cosquin]

Stephen Booth’s detectives Cooper and Fry appear its good