Favorite historical fiction: Naomi Alderman, The Liars’ Gospel; Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire; Elizabeth Jenkins, Harriet; Tabish Khair, The Thing about Thugs; Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake; James McBride, Song Yet Sung; David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
Snarkiest historical fiction: Julian Rathbone’s Kings of Albion and The Last English King.
Favorite horror: Alan Judd, The Devil’s Own Work; Patrick Senecal, 5150, Rue des Ormes.
I feel as though I had the wrong reaction to this novel: I…gather everyone else liked David Mitchell’s Slade House? Perhaps if I had read The Bone Clocks first…
Most meta horror novel: Joyce Carol Oates, Jack of Spades.
Best horror story devoted to disposing of an annoying writer: Ruskin Bond, “The Prize.”
Most self-sabotaging novel: Dan Simmons’ Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Fifth Heart, whose characters are awfully insistent that the Holmes stories aren’t very good.
Really, you can stop now: The Sherlock Holmes pastiche industry, which is not improving in quality as it goes along.
…Well, perhaps except for you: Robert Ryan’s Watson series is quite enjoyable.
Best (or worst) pun in a Sherlock Holmes pastiche: Ruskin Bond, “The Daffodil Case.”
“Sherlock Holmes, eh? And you’ll be Dr. Watson, I presume?”
“Well, no,” I said apologetically. “The name is Bond.”
I don’t suppose there’s some sort of incantation from the Harry Potter series that would make people cease writing about this character: Jack the Ripper. We have run out of things to say about Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper does not lead to any new insights about horrible conditions in late-Victorian Britain. Put a halt to writing sadistic novels about Jack the Ripper. STOP IT RIGHT THIS INSTANT. DO NOT MAKE ME COME OVER THERE WITH MY BLUE PENCIL OF DOOM.
Outrageous revelations that kind of redeem a Jack the Ripper novel: Stephen Hunter, I, Ripper. It’s hard to tell if the revelations about a) the narrator and b) the inspiration for the novel’s plot are ridiculous or wildly inspired, but they’re certainly different.
There are only so many times that a retired detective can be plausibly brought back from retirement: The most recent Inspector Rebus, Even Dogs in the Wild, was…pushing it.
Favorite SF short story: Rachel Swirsky, “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap).”
Favorite sequel: John Harding, The Girl Who Couldn’t Read.
Most unnecessary sequels: Coelebs Deceived and Coelebs Married.
Best nineteenth-century novels read for the first time: John Banim, The Nowlans; Gerald Griffin, The Collegians.
Book that caused the most “this is screwing with my mind, but in a good way!” reactions from my students: Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox.
Unreliable narrator considered most unlikable by my students: John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
Most unforgivable sentence I committed in a Choice review: “The book goes out with a bang in a chapter on pyrotechnics.”
Religious fiction that led me to seriously consider abandoning my current vocation and taking up a career as a downhill skiing commentator: Mary Winter, Alton Park; anything by E. H. Dering; Magdalene Nisbet; Henry E. Dennehy, Alethea; Present Times and Modern Manners (all four volumes of it).
Most unexpected cross-dressing plot in a religious novel: A. Kevill-Davies, The Girl-Priest (a young woman successfully passes herself off as a young man and is ordained).
Most frequently recurring name in Victorian religious fiction, other than Eustace: Cuthbert.
…unless the character is Jewish: In which case, Reuben.
Most implied sex in a religious novel: Hubert Sherbrooke, Priest.
Most destroyed art in a Catholic novel: Mother Francis Raphael’s The New Utopia, which recommends wrecking any art tending to immorality.
Most false advertising: The novel His Last Will, published by the Church of England Temperance Society, has nothing to do with temperance--or anything else related to alcohol, for that matter. Runner-ups are Nunn’s Court: A Tale of Church Restoration, which forgets all about the subtitle until the end, and John Drummond Fraser: A Tale of Jesuit Intrigue in the Church of England, which ditto.
Protagonist with the fewest teeth in a religious novel: The title character of Tobiah Jalf, who is down to five.
Most aggravating reading experience in the British Library: The Sandy-Row Convert, which turned out to be lacking something (i.e., most of the novel).
Most amusing moment in the British Library: The discovery that, pace the catalog at the time (now corrected), the final chapter of Present Times and Modern Manners wasn’t missing—it was just bound in the third volume instead of the fourth.
Antiquarian novel purchased because it was cheaper to do so than print it from microfilm in the British Library: Henry Digby Beste, Poverty, and the Baronet’s Family.
Useful note for the next time I travel to the UK: It’s cheaper to purchase another suitcase and pay the extra luggage fee than it is to ship books to the USA. Oy gevalt.
Publisher indistinguishable from Bed, Bath and Beyond: Routledge and its endless run of 20% off sales, none of which make the books even remotely affordable.
Publisher which needs to get with the times, or at least with the e-readers: Ohio State University Press and its CD-ROMs. Um, guys? E-books? They’re a thing?
Hail and farewell: To my first publisher, Ashgate, which was digested by Informa/Taylor and Francis.
Best bargains: eleven volumes of the reprint series “Novels of Faith and Doubt”; The Correspondence of Henry Edward Manning and William Gladstone (4 vols.); English Catholicism, 1680-1830 (6 vols.).
Meine Frau read the David Mitchell's in order, and she was not taken with either, especially Slade House. I keep waiting for him to do something as good as Cloud Atlas again.
Posted by: Scott Bailey | December 01, 2015 at 06:16 PM
Couldn't agree more with the Jack the Ripper fatigue (not that I was ever particularly intrigued by him I'm the first place). I simply don't understand the Ripper's grip on cultural imagination for the past century.
Posted by: Deb | December 02, 2015 at 06:36 PM
Always pack an extra bag to avoid buying yet another one for bringing back extras! Took me years to learn to do this. "This time" will not be different, will never be different. There will always be more stuff to buy.
Posted by: Dame Eleanor Hull | December 03, 2015 at 03:16 PM
I can't really comment on how Ohio State handles current titles, but one thing I like about them is that they make lots of their backlist titles free to read on the Web about five years after publication. You can find over 400 free titles from as recent as 2009 in this repository:
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/handle/1811/130
The 2010 titles in this collection should be opening up soon as well.
Posted by: John Mark Ockerbloom | December 04, 2015 at 08:37 AM