Recommendations
For reviews and recommendations of the latest out, the NYTimes Book Review can't be beat.
For a peripatetic stroll through my own bookshelves, to see what you might have missed or never heard of, you’ve come to the right place.
I buy many of my books (a few thousand and rising) at secondhand stores – there’s no experience quite like browsing their shelves – and at Thriftbooks.com, which has great prices, fast shipping, a reward program that doesn’t take years to accrue points, and doesn't help make Amazon even bigger.
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A new book for 2022 on vampirism as a metaphor for disease and in particular, in the Victorian era when emerging science was overtaking superstition, and gothic and horror were part of the time's literary explosion.
The Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History by Vidya Krishnan
Related: my 2008 paper on Dracula as a metaphor for tuberculosis
An unusual (to say the least) compilation of images by Charles Addams, spoofing the nostalgia crazy by reminding us that not everything from the past is delightful. More information here.
Things I love about The New Yorker: the cutting-edge literature; the analysis of various artistic expressions that I read hungrily about like a starving orphan at a bakery window; the trenchant commentary on social issues framed by advertisements for toys, trip, and jewelry that cost more than the average American pays in yearly rent; and the cartoons. The magazine fosters cartoonists as assiduously as it does writers.
Roz Chast takes the abecedarian format in hand to showcase her many fears. I laugh but I also powerfully relate.
An absolute delight to read because it's written by one of those lucky, lucky people to whom research is a joyful treasure hunt. Marc Drogin, author of Medieval Calligraphy, Its History and Technique, presents the results of his search for book curses. He includes the context and information about book-making to enhance the curses themselves. This one was appended to a papyrus roll of the Iliad in the first century CE:
I am the guardian of the letters.
The reed pen wrote me, the right hand and the knee.
If you lend me to someone, take another in exchange.
If you rub me out, I will slander you to Euripides.
Keep off.