Brooklyn Book Festival

I have wanted to attend the Brooklyn Book Festival every year I have been in New York. It's an annual kick-off to banned books week, that I've never managed to get myself across the river to because, well, my own book. This year, since I'm really trying to strike a better balance between work and life, I took a few hours and went.

I bought these three books:

The top one is a bilingual anthology of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry. The book is a beautiful object, but I've already caught a pretty egregious typo in the Arabic of the first poem I opened the book to, so I'm a little less optimistic about the typesetting. The bottom one is a novel about Cuban exiles in Madrid which I didn't realize until I got home had been written by a language lecturer in my own department (and in view of the recent discussion in the Twittersphere about the high level of qualifications of many adjuncts, let me castigate myself: bad, oblivious tenure-track faculty member!).

The middle book is the one I"m most excited about. It's the memoir of a man who grew up as a bit of a rogue, learned the bookbinding trade in Italy and went on to become one of the most important antiquarian book dealers in North America. My conversation with the woman at the booth where I found this book went as follows:

Her: Do you collect antiquarian books?

Me: No, I'm a medievalist.

Her: [Stunned silence.]

Fin.

Interstate Book Commerce

I went to Philadelphia yesterday for the material text colloquium at Penn (the talk was on library lists from late-medieval Aragon) and I bought material texts while I was there.

Pulp, Theory, and History

I was miserable and tired and upset this week and so, shamefully, I bought books. They are cold comfort, in the end, but I'm looking forward to reading them all the same.

This week's damage:

This Week in Book Purchases

Both via amazon.es. Variación y cambio is for teaching — I'm trying to convince my department to let me take over our inexplicably popular undergraduate-level history of the language course after the member of faculty who teaches it retires next year. El lector de Julio Verne sounded good and I feel like I should be keeping up better with contemporary peninsular literature since I do teach in a Spanish department. I exercised great restraint, though, in not buying any Brill books at the AOS this week, so all in all, I count this as coming out ahead.

My 2013 in Books

Borrowed from The Little Professor and adapted, because I clearly don't read nearly enough detective/spy fiction despite really enjoying the genre. Hers is also better than mine because I really failed to read enough for pleasure this year. Something to aspire to in 2014. At the same time, I left out my heavy-duty academic reading because I'm too far in the thick of finishing my book manuscript for it to be fun in quite the same way. (I love my research, but...) I may update this a little bit throughout the day as there were a few other categories I was considering including. Anyway, happy reading in 2014, all!

Favorite academic novel:
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin by Harry Karlinsky

Most disappointing petering out of a series of academic novels about German philologists:
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil by Alexander McCall Smith

Series that started out sublime but collapsed under the weight of its own metaphors:
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis

Historical novel set in medieval Spain that could potentially be so bad that it's been sitting on my nightstand since I bought it but haven't quite been able to bring myself to crack the cover:
The Guide of the Perplexed by Dara Horn

Historical novels set in/reflecting on medieval Spain that I'm excited to swap into this round of my "Al-Andalus in Modern Fiction" course:
The Conquest of Andalusia by Jurji Zaydan; Days of Awe by Achy Obejas.

Historical novel set in medieval Spain that is sufficiently problematic that I've swapped it out of this round of my "Al-Andalus in Modern Fiction" course:
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Favorite novels by Arab authors:
ḤWJN by Ibrahim Abbas, Arabic, banned in Saudi Arabia; Guf sheni yaḥid (Second-Person Singular), Sayed Kashua, Hebrew.

Favorite graphic novel:
The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins
(Also favorite book lugged back from the United Kingdom in my suitcase. Also-also favorite book about a giant beard that was evil.)

Graphic novel that most horrifyingly appropriates medieval characters to serve modern religio-political purposes that would have been antithetical to them:
Rabbeinu Shmuel Hanagid by Aryeh Mahr and Esteve Polls

Graphic novel with a surprisingly wonderful, nuanced presentation of religious history:
The Rabbi’s Cat, vols. 1-2, by Johann Sfar

Graphic novels I found on the give-away/book-swap table in the basement of my apartment building:
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel; Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan; The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey (There was one other, but it just ended up kicking around my apartment so I put it back and it was clearly so memorable that I've forgotten what it was...)


Best use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
(Also best reworking of Shakespeare. Also-also book I started reading almost fully two years ago when it first came out, misplaced my copy, and only just finished it now.)

Worst use of the ‘I found a manuscript!’ framing device:
A Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Cohello

Because somehow removing all references to detective fiction seemed wrong, given the original contents of the original list/Literary pop culture mass delusion in which I willingly participated:
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, aka J.K. Rowling

Books I read this year about museums I visited this year/Real-life obsessional private-eye tale/Best art crime book/Needed to include more detectives on this list:
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Bossier

Books about famous books I've seen in museum exhibitions:
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'ān by Denise Spellberg

Books about books (general category):
In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon; Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby; Fragments and Assemblages by Arthur Bahr; Textual Situations by Andrew Taylor.

History of Jews in random and unexpected places:
When General Grant Expelled the Jews by Jonathan Sarna; The Mauritian Shekel by Genevieve Pitot (nobody who knows me in real life is allowed to give me a hard time about having read this).

History of Muslims in random and unexpected places:
Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford

Books currently in my bathroom that normal people don't keep in their bathrooms:
Maimonides: Life and Thought by Moshe Halbertal; Meditaciones del Quijote by José Ortega y Gasset

Academic book a student couldn't read because the title was so ridiculous:
Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric.  Or so the student informed me.  

Worst prose in any novel assigned for class:
The English translation of López de Gómara's General History of the West Indies. So impenetrable that I took mercy on my freshmen and told them to skip it.

Best novel reread for a course:
Don Quijote

I have not managed to stop this trend:
Argh! When I first read LP's list, I thought of something spot-on for this category, but it has since left my brain. I'm sure I'll think of it. Round about February. Clearly I have also not managed to stop the trend of me completely losing my mind.
   
Book I read in the theory-freakout fugue aftermath of the chair of my department telling me: “You're doing very theoretically sophisticated work, but you blanch any time anyone says the word ‘theory’ to you”:
The Monolingualism of the Other by Jacques Derrida

Works of theory that are more my speed that I read once stopped freaking out about theory: How to Do Things with Fictions by Joshusa Landy; On Literary Worlds by Eric Hayot; Against World Literature by Emily Apter; Dark Tongues by Daniel Heller-Roazan

Books I'm reading as I try to come up with a better answer for when people ask me what my academic discipline is:
The Logics of History by William Sewell, Jr.; Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg. (See also: previous category.)

Groupings of books I'd like to write review essays of as blog posts, but haven't gotten my act together:
Grouping 1: Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War by Alexander Nemerov; Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina by Gordon Campbell, et al.; A Most Dangerous Book by Christopher Krebs; and the much-maligned The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.
Grouping 2: The Forgetting River by Doreen Carvajal; Al-Andalus Rediscovered by Marvine Howe; Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History by Aaron Hughes; and Inheriting Abraham by Jon Levenson.

Best massive discounts from Amazon:
Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship; A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations

Most antiquarian acquisition:
Facsimile edition of the Sarajevo Haggadah

Out-of-print books acquired through ABE:
War Reporter by Dan O'Brien; The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit by Sylvia Plath

Book I was most relieved to remember that I own after I forgot I owned it, looked it up in the NYU library catalogue, and realized it was going to be seriously difficult to get my hands on a library copy by the time I needed to have read it:
Rethinking Medieval Translation, eds. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills

Largest single acquisition:
I inherited a large chunk of a former professor's library. Currently in boxes in my front hall. In addition to reading more for pleasure, my big book goal for 2014 is going to be to catalogue those and figure out where to shelve them.

Final book-listing task for 2013:
The bibliography for an article that's due tomorrow and will be submitted tomorrow, come Hell or high explosives.

Cambridge Book Shops

This week's damage is extra-special because it happened at Schoenhof's:

The guy who was working there said he was especially happy to see Los sefardíes going to a good home as it had been on their shelves for going on ten years. It's a bit outdated, but it is nonetheless a foundational work in the field.

And as much as I have placed a moratorium on buying books that look good for teaching, I made an exception for these two because it's useful for me to have some more resources for students in Spanish for certain courses:

My major victory for the day, though, came after the strap on my tote bag broke right when I got into the subway. The train let out right in front of the Harvard Coop and I really wasn't going to be able to march around much with quite so much stuff in the snow to look for another place to buy an emergency replacement bag, but I managed to walk into the Coop and acquire a bag that did not have the word Harvard on it.

Today's (Art-Historical) Damage

Visited the Met today. Books were 20% off for members. Bought these. Now having them guarded by a fuzzy heraldic animal that is extremely pointy at five of six ends.

The Best Bookstore in the Universe

I visited the very best bookstore in the known universe today. It's wondrousness is neatly epitomized by the fact that it has a dedicated "Used Malory" section. As distinct from used books by other medieval English writers. And as yet distinct again from new copies of Malory. If I have to explain it further, you'll never be able to understand.

The damage was as follows. You'll see I was in a mostly historiographic mood:

Plus this:

Plus Moomintroll notebooks:

The Book Display!

The last time I was at the World Congress of Jewish Studies was not the previous one four years ago but rather two congresses ago, in 2005. I had just graduated from college, was living in Jerusalem and basically just went up for one day to hear a friend who is somewhat more senior to me in the profession give a paper. Going back, I have the sense that I must have been a little kid then. Everything seemed a lot smaller and more manageable this time.

Tomorrow I give my paper and I will listen to papers on Wednesday, as well.

But today was for meeting colleagues and buying books. When I was last at the World Congress this friend and I each bought a copy of Joshua Blau's descriptive grammar of Judaeo-Arabic and then went out to the botanic garden and had a race to see who would exclaim "Cool!" first while reading. That is the kind of dork I was and am and associate with. (Although I don't actually associate with that particular dork anymore.) This time, though, I was looking for text editions, which is pretty much what I've limited myself to buying these days; and this book fair is actually a pretty inexpensive way of buying books (all told, the one pictured below plus one that I picked up at the request of a colleague was just under $100 US) and so I bought three editions that I needed:

I also purchased this earth-shatteringly important work of Hebrew literature:

(The really funny thing is that the way that they've translated "terrible-horrible," as "ayom ve-nora" makes it sound like Alexander and Yom Kippur.)

I recently submitted an abstract for a paper on the seriously confused provenance of a Hebrew Alexander the Great manuscript to an edited volume under the title "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Codes." The paper was accepted, but I was told that I definitely could not keep the title. They have to let me use it now, right?

Deaccessioned from... (?)

In the freshman honors seminar that I am giving in the fall, I am really looking forward to teaching about the Ottoman Hebrew translation of some of the Spanish-language New World chronicles as a way of demonstrating the continuing connections between the Judaeo-Islamic universe and Spain even as it moved forward from its increasing catholicization and oppression and expulsion of religious minorities. I ordered a copy of the Hebrew text from a British bookseller featured on ABE Books.

It arrived with the unaltered mark of it former owner:

I wish that either the library, when it sold off or donated surplus books, or the bookseller when he acquired it, had marked it as "deaccessioned" or in some other way defaced the owner's mark. This makes me just a teeny bit nervous that perhaps it was removed improperly from the library and somehow ended up illicitly in a secondhand bookshop.

Of course, given that I'm currently working on a question of owner's marks in late medieval and early modern books, I'm probably overthinking this.

Zero-Sum Game (Not in a Helpful Way)

I didn't buy any ridiculous Brill books at the conference I attended this past weekend. Made up for lost time, though, by ordering a bunch of new books on Amazon that I'd been meaning to buy for a while. From left to right:

David Nirenberg. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: Norton, 2013.

Efraim Kanarfogel. The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz. Wayne State UP, 2012.

Kim Haines-Eitzen. The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing and Representation in Early Christianity. Oxford: UP, 2011.

Jon D. Levenson. Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Princeton: UP, 2012.

Marvine Howe. Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia's New Muslims. New York: Columbia UP, 2012.

Aaron Hughes. Inheriting Abraham: On the Uses and Abuses of History. Oxford: UP, 2012.

Samuel Romanelli. Travails in an Arab Land, eds. Norman and Yedida Stillman. University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Jonathan Safran Foer. Tree of Codes. Visual Editions, 2010.

Vladimir Nabokov. The Original of Laura. New York: Knopf, 2009.


They're all work related. (Even the Nabokov. Really.) Some for research, some for teaching, some for more general writing; expect these titles to crop up here in the not-too-distant future.

Media Mail

This week's damage. (Well, actually, the damage from about three weeks ago. It just took this long to get here from Japan.)