Nightstand

What Dr. King is reading now...

 

 

 

Updated 8 January 2016

Foster-Wallace, David.  Infinite Jest

I've been "meaning to get to" IJ since....well, since it pretty much was released.  Now that it's 20 years old (!), I figured it was about time.  It's a weird experience.  So far (and I'm only about 300 pages in) I'd agree with every review its had:  it is daring, bold, and compelling AND ALSO frustrating and annoyingly precocious.  Nevertheless, I look forward to my DFW time every night. 

 

Updated 16 October 2014 ('cuz Madison B. told me to)

Greenblatt, Stephen.  Will and the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.  Recommended to me by my friend Richard as we sat befuddled and bewildered through a production of Pericles at the Shakespeare Tavern, I've enjoyed this book every bit as much as he told me I would.  I know, my historian friends would sneer at it as "McHistory," but I don't care; I think it rocks. 

Wilde, Oscar.  The Importance of Being Earnest.  Re-reading this one for about the twentieth time and STILL laughing out loud.  Brilliant.  Simply brilliant. 

Austen, Jane.  Mansfield Park.  OK, repeat after me: "It's not that it's bad, it's just that it looks bad because the other books are so good."  Repeat as necessary.  Seriously, if it were even15 pages longer, I think the remaining survivors from the Austen colloquium would defect to Dr. Wilcox's Shakespeare class.    

 

 

 13 August 2012

Fraser, George McDonald.  Flash for Freedom!  re-reading Fraser's "Flashman" series in hopes of getting something out of it for the journal Neo-Victorian Studies.  Alternating between hope that I'm on to something really provocative and interesting and the despair that it's pretty obvious, trite and will be summarily rejected with condescending note.  So, business as usual.

Woolf, Virginia.  Orlando.  My background in the Edwardians and the modernists is shockingly shaky.  I'm embarrassed about how little I know of the era--especially since I teach "just next door" at the Victorians.  But I'm enjoying this work and getting some stuff out of it.

 

Updated 18 August 2010

Clark, Clare.  The Great Stink. Murder mystery set among fetid Victorian sewers. What's not to love?

 

4 November 2009

Trollope, Anthony.  He Knew He Was Right See, I'm almost sure that I read every published word Trollope wrote, but I think I either skipped this or read an abridged version without realizing it, because there are things in here that are rocking me like a hurricane. 

 

 

Updated 14 August 2009

Sterne, Lawrence.  Tristam Shandy.  Delightfully frustrating.  No, he won't ever get to the point.  Why do you think you deserve a point

 

 

 

Updated 2 March 2009

Fraser, George McDonald Flashman Picks up the adventures of Tom Brown’s arch-enemy after he is expelled from Dr. Arnold’s Rugby school.  I was thinking there was a conference paper in here somewhere, but now I’m not quite so sure.  It is riotous good fun, though. 

Dickens, Charles.  Great Expectations.  You know a book is great when even on your sixth or seventh reading you’re getting old chills again.  This book teaches so well, it shouldn’t even count. 

Truss, Jane Eats Shoots and Leaves   Reading along with my English 1101 kids; wondering if they get it at all. 

(updated 31 October 2008, by special request from a person not to be trifled with…)

 

Eliot, George.  Felix Holt, the Radical.  This book is a super, under-rated and under-taught work of one of my favorite Victorian novelists.  Felix Holt is smart, sophisticated, and perhaps a little more accessible than other Eliot novels.  Why do Victorianists only teach Middlemarch and The Mill and the Floss when there’s good stuff like this around?

 

Hurston, Zora Neale.  Their Eyes Were Watching God .  I’m re-reading this (about the sixth time) along with my Bildungsroman students.  When I was in graduate school one of my favorite undergrads (student aide in our Writing Center) was a double major in English and Women’s Studies.  She claimed she had been assigned Their Eyes six times in her years at DePaul.  I don’t care if it’s overtaught, it’s that good.

 

Galbraith, Michael Patrick. Voices of Teens: Writers Matter.  Known as “Mikey G” around the King household, my good friend and baseball compadre Michael’s book is as honest, passionate, and uncompromising as he is.  It’s a beautiful thing when great people do great work.  You can learn more about Mikey G and his work here:  http://www.michaelpgalbraith.com/

 

Other memorable recent reads since the last update include….

Bronte, Charlotte.  Jane Eyre.

Dickens, Charles.  Great Expectations. As with the above, re-reads for Bildungsroman colloquium. 

Gissing, George.  New Grub Street  I’ve never read Gissing until this point; his reputation as king of the hacks scared me away.  Pity; he’s good--another hole in my graduate education plugged!

Eliot, George.  Daniel Deronda. Simply intoxicating. 

Schama, Simon.  Citizens:  A History of the French Revolution it’s so fashionable to skewer Schama now, what with the “Spitting Image” satire and that character in Bennet’s History Boys, it’s easy to forget what made him notable in the first place.  This book helps one to remember.   

      -and about a dozen others whose titles escape my addled brain 

 

(updated 27 August 2007)

Dickens, Charles.  A Tale of Two Cities.  It’s not Great Expectations or Bleak House; in fact, it’s not even David Copperfield.  But it’s still Dickens and has got all that Dickensian stuff going on:  good, evil, and social upheaval –plus some astounding coincidences.  What’s not to love?  (Perhaps it just looks good after that dreck below.

 

 

(updated 16 August 2007)

Grange, Amanda.  Mr. Darcy’s Diary. I wanted to like this book.  Really.  And it is a clever idea.  Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy gets to tell his side of the story of his courtship of Eliza Bennett. (I was hoping it would be another Wide Sargasso Sea.)  But the execution of said clever idea is just so amateurish that I’m almost embarrassed for the author as I turn the pages.  I know that many Austenites are so committed to the cause that they’ll buy anything remotely connected to it (and in this way they’re strangely similar to goth kids, neo-con Republicans, and fans of the LSU Tiger football team) but Geez-Louise, at least put some effort into it.  Crimeny!  Again, my aforementioned neurotic commitment to finish any novel I begin bites me on the rear.  The longest 230 pages you’ll ever go through; save the fourteen bucks and just re-read P&P again. 

 

(July 2007) 

Brands, H.W. The First American:  The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.  Heartily recommend this work.  I don’t generally read biographies if they’re not directly related to my field.  But this one…man, what a life; what a guy.  Did you know his son was the Royal Governor of New Jersey during the war?  And as such, they were on different sides of the conflict? 

 

(June 2007)

Dumas, Alexander.  The Count of Monte Cristo.  I have this stubborn trait where I absolutely HAVE to finish any novel I start, you know?  Well, let’s just say I needed that trait or I would have never gotten through CoMC.  Worst thing to learn was that at six-hundred two chunky pages, the Barnes and Noble edition I was reading was an abridgement.  So if the abridgement comes in at 602, what’s the unabridged version weigh in at?  Yikes. 

 

(May 2007)

O’Brian Patrick.  The Reverse of the Medal.  I know I said I had read the last Jack Aubrey novel in the series a year or so ago, but I was wrong.  There’s this one:  where everything that used to go right for Captain Jack, goes wrong.

 

(last updated May, 2007)

Collins, Wilkie.  The Moonstone.  I know, I know, another thing I should have read in graduate school, but I pooh-poohed Collins.  (I am such a fool.)  Well, at least, I pooh-pooh no more. 

(last updated 9 January)

Doyle, Arthur Conan.  “A Study in Scarlet”  The  bad thing about getting a PhD is that the scholar is put in a position where he or she is so intent on becoming an “expert” on one little area of literature (mine was the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope) that the would be-PhD must naturally forego other authors, other modes, other books.   The cool thing about getting a PhD is then after it’s been garnered, you can traverse back and read all the junk that was so tempting in the first place.  Somehow, I made it out of LSU with a PhD in Victorian literature without ever having read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  No more.  This stuff is addictive. 

(updated 20 December)

Elizabeth Gaskell.  Wives and Daughters.  Being a “Trollope guy” I really should have read more Elizabeth Gaskell –in many ways, she was working on the same sort of things Trollope was working on using young women characters instead of men.  Oh, well; better late than never.  This book rocks; Henry James said it had a bit of a slow start, but after it gets cooking, watch out.  Gaskell never finished it, but don’t let that deter you. 

(last updated 8 August)

Hugo, Victor.  Les Miserables.  This guy I used to know was a real theater nut and owned an “official” Les Miserables tour jacket –the kind they give to touring actors and stagehands.  It was embroidered with the show’s logo on the back (poor little Cosette) and the name of the show stitched on the left breast. One day, he was wearing his spiffy jacket while shopping at a late night grocery store. The clerk asked him how he pronounced his last name.  Not understanding, my friend asked “what?”  The clerk, irritated, asked my friend, who he incorrectly referred to as Les how he pronounced his last name.  

 

But that’s neither here nor there.  1,400 pages of French fin-de-siecle suffering and misery.  Yikes.

 

(last updated 8 July)

Amis, Kingsley.  The King’s English.  Nobody beats Martin Amis’s Daddy at being a crusty grammarian.  Tremendous fun. 

Bullfinch, Thomas.  Bullfinch’s Guide to Mythology.  OK, dirty little secret time:  I don’t know as much about Greek and Roman mythology as I should.  I read literary criticism and I get to a comment like, “of course, the story is obviously a re-telling of the myth of the Hesperus….” and I nod and smile along with everyone else, but, truth be told I don’t know the myth of the Hesperus from the finale episode to Kaptain Kangaroo.  So I’m trying to close that gap…not to mention the fact that these stories are just plain rollicking good yarns. 

 

Fainaru-Wada, Mark and Lance Williams.  Game of Shadows. Bonds, bad.  Steroids, bad.  BALCO, very, very bad—and that’s pretty much all there is to it.  Still, it’s pretty damning stuff.  Meticulously researched. 

 

(last updated 13 February 2006)

Truss, Lynne.  Eats Shoots and Leaves.  Good rollicking punctuation fun. (Yes there is too such a thing as punctuation fun.) And yes, I know everyone else on the planet read it three years ago, but I was writing my dissertation then and I'm just getting to it now.  My students will probably be glad to see me finish it as I think it has made me even less tolerant of slips.   

DeFord, Frank, ed. The Sports Illustrated Guide to Great Baseball Writing.  Who's ready for spring training?  Dr. King, that's who. Cubs win. Cubs win. 

O'Brian, Frank.  The Truelove.  One of the few Jack Aubrey "Master and Commander" novels I haven't read yet.  I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I finish a series like this one, but I will be very sorry to say goodbye to my friends in this outstanding series of adventure novels.  Godspeed, Captain Jack!

Hardy, Thomas.  Tess of the D'Urbevilles.      As a Ph D in Victorian literature, I'm ashamed to admit I've never read this classic of the field. As a child of the 1980s, I was turned off to the story by the truly dreadful Roman Pulanski film version and just recently picked the book; am so glad that I did.