I’m not quite ready for my traditional posts about what I’ve read and written in the past year: for one thing, I often read at least one really great book between Christmas and New Year’s, when the holiday bustle has ended and the book-shaped packages under the tree have revealed their secrets! (In fact, I’m currently reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which seems a likely contender for any “best of 2018” list.) That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not looking back over 2018 and ahead to 2019, trying to figure out where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’d like to be going.
Taking stock in this way is particularly relevant for me this year because as of January 1, 2019 I will be on a half-year sabbatical, which means instead of being caught up in the routine busyness of the new teaching term I will have the luxury of time to think and write, to consider and then advance my own priorities as a scholar and a critic–and as a teacher, since one of the most valuable things about a term off from actually teaching is a chance to reconsider reading lists and pedagogical approaches without an imminent deadline for book orders making the usual into the inevitable. (In another post, in part with the goal of making myself accountable, I will be drawing up a reading list to help me refresh, rethink, or reinvent some of my standard course offerings.)
I do have a sabbatical plan–you have to submit one as part of your application–and also some existing deadlines I need to meet, so I’m not heading into the new year entirely aimless. Still, the precise form my work on that plan will take is really up to me, and figuring that out will be my first and possibly hardest task. A crucial context for me is what I did on and then after my previous sabbatical, in Winter 2015. Over that winter I threw myself into writing what I hoped (and perhaps still do hope) would become a book of “crossover” essays about George Eliot. I wrote a lot of material, and then towards the end of the term I peeled off two parts that I eventually published as self-contained essays. (I did not really appreciate at that point how bad it might be for the book I was imagining to publish a lot of its intended content first.) By and large I enjoyed doing that writing: I felt very motivated and productive, and across my sabbatical my confidence in my overall portfolio grew–which is why I decided, at its end, that I was ready to apply for promotion. This administrative project, too, was initially exhilarating: I had done so much (I thought), in so many different forms, since my first promotion, and the result was (I thought) a body of work I was rightly proud of, some of it well within the usual academic boundaries, but a lot of the more recent work reaching across them or representing my principled resistance to them.
Well, we all know how that turned out…and since the 18-month saga of arguments and counterarguments, appeals and, ultimately, rejection ended, I have struggled to regain the buoyancy that had led me to what in retrospect seems like a terrible error in judgment. I have been gradually (if unevenly) reconciling myself to the change in my professional outlook and I have found renewed pride in what I have accomplished since the university handed down its verdict against me. Now that I’m not seeking institutional validation any more, though (which of course is wonderfully liberating in some ways), I face the rather more existential question of what it is that I really do want from my work–what am I writing for?
In the last couple of years the kind of writing I’ve been doing has, more and more, been book reviews. I like doing this: I enjoy the variety of books and the challenge of finding a way in, and while it can be frustrating trying to say something that I think is insightful and convincing in what is often a pretty tight word limit, that too has its gratifications. I am starting to feel, however, as if I am on kind of a plateau where this work is concerned. I could probably keep puttering along doing a regular string of reviews indefinitely now that I have proven myself reliable to a couple of editors at different places. Is this what I want? Is this enough? Looking over some of my old reviews for Open Letters Monthly, which were a minimum of 2000 words and often more, I envied their roominess, and even more, I envied the greater freedom I felt in the writing, which is partly from having the space but also from the confidence my co-editors gave me in my ideas. I would like the chance to stretch like that again–but who will give me that kind of room to play and both trust and help me to use it well? The closest I’ve come so far outside of OLM is my TLS piece on Dorothy Dunnett: I was and am so thrilled that the editor I proposed it to took me up on it. (I’m sorry that this, like most of my TLS reviews, is behind their paywall; if anyone ever really wants to read one of them but can’t subscribe, just let me know.) On my sabbatical, one thing I want to do is think about what other opportunities like that I might reach for.
The other question is whether I want–or in some sense need–to stop working (only) in small increments and re-commit myself to a book project, and if so, of what kind? If an essay collection of the kind I have long been playing around with is a non-starter unless I self-publish it (which I might yet do), is there another kind of book I would feel was worth the long-term single-minded effort to produce? I have long objected to the academic fixation on “a book” as a necessary form. I suspect, now, that there is a similar bias in non-academic publishing, or at any rate that one way to get off the kind of plateau I am on is to publish a book of my own which might (at any rate, it seems to have, for others) give me increased visibility and credibility as a critic. I resist that implicit pressure too: I think it’s a good thing to have practising critics who are one step removed from the immediate business of publishing. How long, I wonder, or in what venues, do you have to write reviews before you are perceived as having any stature as a critic, though? How is that kind of professional credit or reputation earned? Do I care? I guess so, or I wouldn’t be wondering! But should I? Is it possible, even if it might in theory be desirable, not to eventually start thinking about going further, doing more, being more?
So: these are some of the things on my mind as 2018 yields to 2019! I’m not sure how I will answer these questions; indeed, one of my plans for January is precisely not to try to answer them but to reread my archive of essays and reviews (and blog posts) and try to understand and evaluate it–not with a judgmental eye on my past but with an eye out for what aspects of it I especially want to bring with me as I move ahead. I’m hoping I will learn something from that exercise, about both my writing and myself.
Thinking more about Kindred after I’d finished reading it, I wondered if I would notice more subtleties in it if I knew more about the specific genres it combines: it is a hybrid of time-travel fiction and the slave narrative, and while I have read an example or two of each of these, I have never given sustained thought to their conventions and I have little, therefore, to compare Butler’s effects or choices to. The reader’s guide in my edition includes an essay by Robert Crossley that says some things about these contexts. “One of the protagonist’s–and Butler’s–achievements in traveling to the past,” he says, for instance,
Not great, just fine. Its strength is its protagonist, who I found just the right side of too contrived as a misfit, a figure of semi-comical pathos with a running undercurrent of desperation. That deeper, darker layer, however, for me was the novel’s weakness. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine purports to be a novel about 
The main driver of the novel’s plot is less the distribution of the postcards themselves than the investigation launched to discover the writer of these ineffectually seditious messages. It is led by Inspector Escherich, who pursues the criminal he dubs the ‘Hobgoblin’ more out of stern professionalism than any particular dedication to the Führer. When he finally has the Quangels in custody, though, Otto “vanquishes” him with the reality of this long-awaited victory: in “just” doing his job, he has been willingly complicit in the regime’s cruelty and injustice. “You’re working in the employ of a murderer,” Otto points out, “delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man.” Pressured by the celebratory SS to join them in “baptizing” Otto by smashing their glasses over his head, Escherich has “the sense that he was hitting out at himself, striking with an ax at the roots of the tree of his own life.” Unable to bear what he has done and who he has become, Escherich–“Otto Quangel’s only convert”–takes his own life.
More clutter to clear out of my head, if I can — something that has been on my mind for about three weeks now, but in an unfocused or inconclusive form. In fact, I’ve started and then deleted a couple of posts about this already; I just couldn’t seem to get very far before either deciding I didn’t want to get into it after all or running out of energy. But now the topic feels like mental debris, so let’s see if I can make any kind of sense of it so I can move on. One thing my blog is supposed to be for is freeing me to write about things without having to be absolutely certain about them, after all.
This is all good! That is, it is all good if these are the activities you want your students engaged in–and I genuinely have no problem with that. I’m just not interested in doing that kind of thing myself, and what I was trying to figure out is why, and then whether this signals a deficiency of some kind in my own pedagogical approach. After some reflection, I decided the answer to the first part of that question is that increasingly, I do not approach my classes as steps towards making students into scholars, as part of a program designed to train them to do academic things. Instead, I aim to engage and train them as readers–attentive, well-informed, rigorous readers, to be sure, but with their eyes first and foremost on the page, not on contexts or scholarly apparatus or digital tools.
I’m not saying that the kinds of hands-on learning students get from constructing timelines (or whatever) can’t contribute to the conversations I prioritize, and clearly it can also give them valuable experience of other kinds, including building the skills set required to work with these kinds of digital tools. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that these projects take time away from, or redirect attention from, the books themselves, and there are so few contexts in which a sustained focus on reading is even possible, much less required and supported. If my own work and interests were in the field of book history, I expect I would find these tools more personally congenial. At the same time, my own estimation of the value of some forms of scholarly work has also eroded so much in the past decade or so–my own impatience with its insularity, with the feeling of playing insider baseball, has gotten so acute– that I have far less interest in drawing students into that world than I have in … well, in doing what I do in my own classes, which is pretty well documented here across the decade-plus history of 
When you don’t blog for a while, or at least when I don’t, one of the obstacles to getting back into a routine is the clutter of possible things to blog about, which becomes strangely unmotivating because it’s hard to pick one topic and just get started. This is an attempt to clear out some of that clutter!
The one stand-out experience in my recent romance reading was Kate Clayborn’s Best of Luck, which I did not pick up haphazardly at the library but had pre-ordered on the strength of the first two books in the series, Beginner’s Luck and Luck of the Draw. I liked the first one just fine and then really liked the second one a lot; both have also stood up well to rereading. Best of Luck is a good finale for the trilogy. Like the first two, its biggest strength is its characters, who have both distinct and plausibly complicated personalities and histories and genuinely interesting work to do–something Clayborn gives a lot of attention to. I like that: I have a documented fondness for ‘neepery’ and each of her books offers it in spades. The books are not particularly funny or witty, but they are not ponderous, and they earn their angst rather than piling it on (which is what I thought happened in my one excursion into Alisha Rai). The pacing is good and the alternating points of view for each chapter keeps things interesting as the conflicts develop and then resolve. I realize these comments are sort of generic! But that’s because reading and liking Best of Luck after reading and either not liking or not caring much about a handful of other books in the same genre got me thinking about what makes a romance work for me. Voice has a lot to do with it, and so does freshness, and for me the ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ books get high marks for both.
The other book I was reading for a while (inspired by my not entirely successful experience with N. K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season) was The Hobbit. It turns out that The Hobbit (like Little Women) is a book I know so well from my childhood that it is almost impossible for me to really see the words on the page. It isn’t so much that I read it often as that my brother had the marvelous 
I find myself at something of a loss about how to respond to The Fifth Season. The bottom line, I suppose, is that it didn’t work for me: I felt frustrated from the outset at the barrage of unexplained particulars, and though I think the advice that I got from more proficient readers of SFF to just read on and let the logic of Jemisin’s world and its inhabitants emerge from the action was good advice, and it more or less worked (by the end I did, as promised, have a reasonable grasp of the various terms and elements), the process of getting there–the struggle to understand those crucial building blocks of the story–proved too great an obstacle to my engagement with the novel’s drama for me to get much pleasure out of it. I got intermittently caught up in particular scenes, especially towards the end, but they were never sustained long enough for any momentum to build–and then the final, quite intense, scenes were cut short in the kind of open-ended cliff-hanger that seemed obviously meant to sell the next book in the series. Perhaps that is considered fair play in a genre that seems dominated by series that are cumulative rather than simply sequential, but I felt frankly resentful that after the effort of getting to that point I was not given any satisfactory sense of closure for this installment beyond its having finally (and it really did feel like finally! to me) brought the dispersed parts of the novel together.
I have had bad experiences before when stepping into unfamiliar genre territory, and I am very aware that reading something well–which doesn’t necessarily mean liking it, but rather knowing how to deal with the kind of book it is–requires recognizing the conventions and norms and expectations that it is dealing in. (At any rate, this is true of genre fiction, which typically relies on a kind of reciprocal proficiency between writers and readers–for me, at any rate, this is one of the ways I define “genre fiction.”) I thought Lord of Scoundrels was ridiculous 
It’s not that The Fifth Season didn’t give me anything to think about. Probably what preoccupied me the most, though, was not thinking about the issues of identity and social order and oppression (and geology) that I take to be central to Jemisin’s project so much as wondering why the unreality of her world grated on me in ways that the equally artificial fictional worlds of other authors don’t. It’s not as if the town of Middlemarch isn’t also made up; it isn’t (to go with a more apt comparison) as if the souls of the unwillingly departed really lingered in the cemetery where Lincoln’s son was interred and intervened to change both his fate and the course of history. I learned to deal with vampires, werewolves, and witches in Joss Whedon’s universe, and, prompted by puzzling over what didn’t work for me about The Fifth Season, I just started rereading The Hobbit for the first time in decades and was immediately delighted.
What makes the difference? Is it that Saunders and Whedon–to go with the ones who clearly aren’t offering “the nearest thing to [real] life”–are not completely replacing our world but adding a dimension to it, so I am still anchored in familiarity, and as a result the application (if that’s the right word) of their fantastical elements to my thinking about the world I actually live in is more straightforward? Though I am sure Jemisin’s work is meant to reflect on our reality in some way, it’s so complex and elaborate on its own terms that it seems an awfully long way around. (Also, a big part of the point of a book like The Fifth Season is presumably that world building on its own is something readers can simply take an interest in as an alternative reality; maybe my realist habits of mind are precisely the problem.)
I know there are readers who are as unmoved by Dunnett as I was by Jemisin. As Henry James said, the house of fiction has many windows! I don’t like to preemptively close any of them: I have long thought I must be missing out on a lot of good reading because I don’t read SFF (I haven’t even read Ursula Le Guin-don’t @ me!). I’m not necessarily giving up, on the genre or on Jemisin. If I keep reading around, maybe, as happened with romance, I will find my footing, at which point perhaps I would reread The Fifth Season and find, as with Lord of Scoundrels, that I’m able to appreciate it in a way I can’t now. On the other hand, there are just so many other books and authors I haven’t read that seem likely to engage and excite me without my having to struggle quite so much just to get it that I’m not sure how much of a priority to make that attempt. 
I am perhaps in a blogging slump, not a reading slump, though it can be hard to tell the difference. There have been a lot of comments recently about blogging as a dying form, a remnant (and how odd this characterization seems, after all the flak bloggers used to — and still do — get 
Tim is not talking about book blogging, though, and there (here) I don’t think as much has changed–or, that things have gotten so bad–though I do notice a slowing down, a fading out, not across the board but certainly among some of the folks whose blogs and comments used to be steady sources of stimulation and conversation. That seems natural, though I really miss some of them: people move on, priorities change, the intrinsic rewards of something that has never (for the kind of bloggers I follow, anyway) been tied to extrinsic rewards can fade. The times have changed, in some scary and upsetting ways, and as a result people’s anxiety is high and, amidst the hubbub, their attention is scarce and precious. Other things rightly take precedent. The ebbing of energy is contagious, too: when posting diminishes and commenting declines, and bookish people quite understandably back away from (or just get overwhelmed on) Twitter, it gets harder to imagine who you are talking to when you contemplate writing up a post yourself.
I’m not really going anywhere in particular with this: I’m just thinking out loud in public, which is what having a blog lets me do! I also trusted (because it works every time I’m in a blogging slump) that if I actually started writing something, anything, here, things would start to turn around for me, because the process itself is a tonic. “It remains important to me to think: today, I might blog,” Tim says in his post, “And to think: I have a place to do it in.” This is very much still true for me. I do a lot of other writing (well, right now it doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s a subject for another post, especially with a sabbatical coming up) but this is the one place where I can write entirely on my own terms: no rules, no assignments, no editors, no second-guessing, no need to know what it will add up to or if I can pitch it or where I can include it on my annual report. I cherish that writing experience; when I don’t get around to doing it for a while, whether it’s because I’m too busy at work or too tired and distracted or because I think I don’t have anything to say–then I really miss it. Putting things in words is clarifying, and when I’m not under pressure, it’s also fun. Maybe blogs are now internet dinosaurs, but what matters to me (in this as in so many things) is not whether the form is trendy or innovative but what the form enables. Also, lately I’ve been feeling a bit prehistoric myself: maybe form and content are just syncing up!
As for the possibility of a reading slump, well, I have been reading quite a bit; I just haven’t been blogging about it, because (perhaps unsurprisingly) nothing since Lincoln in the Bardo has seemed worth much notice. I might do a ‘recent reading round-up’ type post next, just to clear the air, or I might wait and see how I do with The Fifth Season, which so far I am finding an odd balance of baffling (and thus off-putting) and gripping. Seasoned sci-fi readers assure me that if I press on, the estrangement will fade, the world-building will work its magic, and I will be on my way. We’ll see! In the meantime, at least I’ve reminded myself why I do this: because I like to.
I was looking back over some old posts in this series and November entries have a certain … similarity, shall we say! We’re all–students and faculty alike–tired, busy, and kind of gloomy. The introduction of a week-long break (coming next week for us) has not made as much difference as you might think: last year I was struck by how much more tired and behind a lot of my students seemed when classes started up again, and because the break also comes quite late in the month, we all felt a bit frantic after it because the end of classes was suddenly so close.
We aren’t quite there yet, however: there’s still the rest of this week to get through. In Mystery and Detective Fiction we’ve just wrapped up our discussions of Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. Although I think Knots and Crosses is gripping and clever, I’ve been wishing that I left The Terrorists in instead when I decided which book to cut to make room for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, because its political engagement is in some ways more immediately relevant and its morality is more complicated. That said, Knots and Crosses offers a pretty direct engagement with what we now call “toxic masculinity.” Its Gothic games seemed a bit too pat to me this time, though–I don’t entirely disagree with Rankin’s own assessment of it as a bit too clever, a bit too much the self-conscious work of a young writer immersed in literary theory and history and eager to show off what he knew.
In 19th-Century Fiction tomorrow we are finishing our time on Silas Marner. Because I have only taught Silas Marner once or twice before, and many years ago, I have been feeling my way a bit hesitantly, not being entirely certain which questions will catch students’ interests or draw them most naturally towards the novel’s big ideas or best moments. Oddly, perhaps, I’ve found it difficult precisely because the novel is so short, though I chose it hoping that its brevity would make George Eliot more accessible than usual. I dialed back the amount of context I provided at the outset, but even so it took up nearly one whole class, and that left us only three more to talk more freely about the novel. With Middlemarch, in contrast, I typically have at least three weeks’ worth of classes, or around nine hours, and we get even more time when I assign it in Close Reading. And yet three hours is actually plenty in some ways too: because not a great deal happens in Silas Marner just in terms of plot, I feel as if I have been struggling to work on the meaning of what does go on without repeating myself. Still, I think it has been OK overall. In fact, I have been pleased at both the quantity and the quality of participation in class discussion, which certainly suggests to me that they are finding the novel’s distinct combination of realism and moral fable engaging. We have already talked a fair amount about the importance of taking responsibility and making deliberate choices, rather than trusting to luck, fate, or God, as key to Eliot’s moral vision; tomorrow we will talk about this in the specific context of family, especially parenting, including both Silas’s choice to raise Eppie (in contrast to Godfrey’s actions) and Eppie’s choice to stay with Silas. I think this is the only one of Eliot’s novels that comes close to being unironically sentimental, at least in the main plot line–and it’s just so lovely.
The three Cs are are Cold, Collins, and Chandler, and I am actually done with all of them now, but I haven’t blogged about my classes since they were all just starting up, so I thought it was time to get caught up. A trace of the first does remain in the form of a minor but lingering cough, but although I did end up having to cancel one day of lectures when I actually lost my voice for a bit, it wasn’t too bad. A number of my students and colleagues have been much sicker, poor things.
I also felt just a bit impatient with The Woman in White, though it is a lot more fun than The Big Sleep. At one point in our discussions this time a student actually asked a question I ask sometimes too about different novels, that could perhaps be summed up as “Are we giving this novel too much credit?” — or “Are we putting more interpretive weight on this novel’s details than they can really bear?” I feel that more with Lady Audley’s Secret (which I think is fundamentally incoherent, or indecisive, about some of its central thematic questions) than I do with The Woman in White, but I think it’s always a fair question to ask. It’s not one that I think can ever be answered definitively either way, but there’s no doubt that some novels seem less in control of their own meaning than others, while some can rather deflate under scrutiny. Some novels, too (as I ended up saying about The Woman in White, though not, if I remember correctly, to the same student) raise a lot of interesting questions or stir the pot in thought-provoking ways without necessarily resolving every aspect.
In 19th-Century Fiction we are actually on our penultimate novel, Silas Marner. I’ve been a bit nervous about how it would go, as it starts out pretty slowly and Eliot’s prose requires closer attention than any of our other novelists’. I also haven’t taught it very often–only twice before that I can remember, and never in a lecture class of this sort. Today was “big picture” day so I set up some key ideas and then we began talking about Silas himself, first as he is seen by his neighbors in Raveloe and then as we come to understand him thanks to the narrator’s explanations and commentary. I tried to emphasize the importance of noticing the different ways people arrive at their explanations for what they see, which I think is key not just to the themes of the novel but also to its pacing, in which not much often seems to be happening but we realize, if we know to look for it, that a lot of the action is in perception and interpretation. One student brought up Silas’s beloved pot, which I thought was a particularly nice detail to have picked up on:
Novel Readings 