(Like rather a lot of other people, or so Twitter tells me, I found myself unable to read for anything except work for much of 2021. More recently, I've found myself getting fully back into the swing of things.)
Best postcolonial rewrite of Adam and Eve: Michael Crummey, The Innocents.
Best historical novels: Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet; Mudrooroo, Master of the Ghost Dreaming.
Best postapocalyptic novel: Paul Kingsnorth, Alexandria.
Neo-Victorian fiction will be immensely improved by forgetting this personage ever existed: Jack the Ripper.
"Well, that's a plot twist," I said, dubiously: Christian Klaver, The Classfied Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula.
Sherlock Holmes novel that unintentionally makes a good case for the current Mrs. Watson divorcing the Doctor: Nicholas Meyer, The Return of the Pharoah: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.
Perhaps we are exhausting this mine of pastiches: Sherlock Holmes.
Novelist most willing to make himself look incompetent in fiction: Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill.
Most interesting tribute anthology: When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.
Best horror anthology: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One.
Most epic schlimazels in the history of horror?: the protagonists of Gretchen Felker-Martin, Ego Homini Lupus.
Creepiest use of medical terminology: Michael Blumlein, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" (in Ellen Datlow, Body Shocks).
Most disturbing revenge tale: Kaaron Warren, "A Positive" (ditto).
Favorite monograph sent for review: Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876.
Favorite monographs on literature and religion: Christopher Stokes, Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773-1832; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History.
Favorite historical monographs: Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790-1860; Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and MIssionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast.
Academic publisher whose business model I continue not to understand: Palgrave Macmillan.
Finally, I found a copy of this: Rachel McCrindell, The Convent; A Narrative, Founded on Fact.
Physically smallest book purchased this year: Old Jessie, The Hindoo Mother (a Methodist tract).
Most underrated short story by a Victorian woman writer?: Geraldine Jewsbury, "Agnes Lee."
Best mildly irate Victorian response to Jane Eyre: Margaret Oliphant, "The Story of a Wedding-Tour."
Least-enjoyable epic-length nineteenth-century poem: Charlotte Elizabeth, Osric.
Every time I teach it, I am again convinced that this is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's best short story: "At Chrighton Abbey."
Victorian ghost stories of a sort that tend not to be anthologized: Mrs. Molesworth, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction.
Modernist novel with the worst TV adaptation: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
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