This turned out to be a really bad year for reading, what with pandemics, morphing into a department chair several months earlier than anticipated, and, er, various other sources of stress. But still--
If I have no access to a research library to do this project, I'd better buckle down and do some investing: Yes, I buy many books, but I don't buy books with $200 pricetags. Or, at least, I didn't until I picked up the first two volumes of Oxford's edition of Charlotte Bronte's letters.
Favorite monographs: Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History.
Object lesson in why it can be dangerous to have too many shelves: I appear to have misshelved my copy of Patrick Bronte's correspondence. After several weeks of looking for it, I gave up and bought another copy. I'm sure I'll find the first copy at some point.
Number of books purchased twice because I neglected to check my LibraryThing catalog first: Three.
A fine novel, but don't read it if you are already feeling gloomy: Stefan Hertmans, The Convert.
Most revolting moment in a Gothic novel: the slug in Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia. (I am not giving details.)
Best historical novel to inadvertently subvert itself: Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light. (My theory: the novel's increasingly diffuse narrative structure reflects Cromwell's own loss of control over the "story" he had earlier been able to tell the king...except that still leaves us with an increasingly diffuse narrative structure, which, well.)
Best novels reread for class: Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.
Number of books currently vanished into the USPS somewhere: Five, including a book that has been holed up at the Rochester distribution center for *checks notes* seventeen days.
A trend that has, one hopes, come to a halt: Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu mashups.
Favorite horror (horroresque?) novel: Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day.
Book most resembling a Norton Anthology in its proportions: Andrew Sharp, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838.
Monograph sent to me for review that also clarified something I was trying to formulate: Clara Dawson, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation.
Now this book is back in print: Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which I had wanted to teach last year--when it wasn't available.
Neo-Victorian series with the most varied types of filth: Mick Finlay's Arrowood. Yes, the Rules do call for "Dirty and Damp" environs, but this series makes me want to scrub down my iPad afterwards.
Most antiquarian purchase: The Village in an Uproar; or, the Thresher's Visit to the Missionary Meeting in London, 1814.
Well, that was annoying: The Great Library Flood of 2020 from earlier in December, which took out a chunk of my floor--but, to make matters worse, took out the chunk of my floor underneath the bookshelves containing the nineteenth-century books, which is not actually convenient if you are a Victorianist. (The books are all stacked up in an adjoining room.)
Happy new year! This is the year in which I order books, forget about them, and then get surprise presents in the post. Actually reading them is another thing . . .
Posted by: Dame Eleanor Hull | January 01, 2021 at 06:44 PM
Belated happy new year!
Let's hear more from you!
Posted by: Roger | January 28, 2021 at 05:48 PM
From the Amazon description of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Over a short period in the 1840s, the three Brontë sisters working in a remote English parsonage produced some of the best-loved and most-enduring of all novels: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that created a scandal when it was published in 1884 under the pseudonym Action Bell.
Posted by: Diane LaBarge | January 30, 2021 at 05:59 PM