Inferno by Dan Brown

This book felt light to me. It opens in medias res, and I spent the first two-thirds thinking the trail was too easy to follow. Of course, there were twists, and it was not quite as simple as it first appeared, but when all was said and done, it all wrapped up in a pat way that seemed more in service of making a point about the world's population and offering a magic bullet to put the world right than in telling a really good story. All of which is not to say that the ride wasn't a lot of fun--I enjoyed reading about the art and the architecture and following the story. This book would be a great beach read.

American Photographs by Walker Evans

This volume reproduces the exhibit catalogue for Walker Evans's 1938 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a descriptive essay by Lincoln Kirstein. The photographs are gorgeous and really display a lovely variety of American life and culture, from rural to urban (some of the pictures are repeated in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). The photographs are magnificent and the collection is well-worth looking into for anyone interested in American history or American photography.

The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston by Maurie McInnis

This book looks at material culture in antebellum Charleston to understand the complex political and social system in place there at that time. McInnis reads the architecture, art (ranging from public sculpture to privately-owned paintings), and furniture and decoration of the buildings in the city to show both the elite's reliance on and attempts to control enslaved peoples and the enslaved people's resistance (mostly in the form of carving out space for a private life). This book supplements its readings of material artifacts with both primary written accounts and secondary, scholarly accounts. Overall it is an intriguing book that paints a compelling portrait of antebellum Charleston without romanticizing its history.

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson

This book is a massive cultural study of postmodernism that declines to define postmodernism. I found parts of the book very difficult to follow: the theory was dense (and drew on philosophers with whom I am not familiar). I thought Jameson offered convincing readings of film (in ways that reminded me of the way that film works in Infinite Jest) and architecture especially. This book makes me glad my interests are in the nineteenth century.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

This book juxtaposes the history of the 1893 Columbian Exposition and its architect Daniel Burnham and the author's exposition of a series of crimes committed around the time of the fair by a psychopath who called himself H.H. Holmes. I thought this book worked really well. Larson does a good job with the historical aspects, and makes a convincing case about Holmes's murders as well. I happen to find World's Fairs fascinating, and this book made me really wish I could visit the White City in 1893, see the Midway, and ride on the world's first Ferris wheel. The book also has a lot of footnotes--while it's not the most scholarly book I've ever read, I really appreciated that the author made it possible for readers to trace his work.

The Julius House by Charlaine Harris

I quite enjoyed this murder mystery. I thought there was a good mixture of red herrings and hidden clues, although I still think Roe's husband is pretty creepy. This novel may be one of the best of Charlaine Harris's Aurora Teagarden series.

Faulkner's Fictive Architecture by William Ruzicka

This book explores Faulkner's architecture in several, but by no means all, of his novels. It has a good theoretical component, excellent floor plans, and fairly keen observations. It is organized by novel rather than by type of architecture.

William Faulkner and the Tangible Past by Thomas Hines

Written by an architecture professor with familial connections to Faulkner, this book provides an overview of architectural styles at play in Faulkner's fiction by style rather than by book. The architecture side of things seems solid. In terms of Faulknerian criticism, this book is an heir of Jane Haynes's William Faulkner: His Tippah County Heritage and William Faulkner: His Lafayette County Heritage, although this book has more areas related to Faulkner's fiction. O good overview of the architecture, and lots of beautiful plates.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

I found this gothic novel to be a very quick read. Indeed, as the first gothic novel, it sets up some of the classic tropes including a creepy, haunted castle with subterranean passages, mistaken identities, revelations of noble birth, Italian settings, religious figures, and lots of violence. Particularly interesting to me was Walpole's dropped attempt to frame the manuscript as found.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

By my count, this time was my fifth reading this book, and it remains one of my absolute favorites. I love the layers of story-telling, the resonances between Quentin, Shreve, and Henry, and even that demon, Sutpen. In this reading, I noticed many more similarities between Sutpen and his son Charles, the novel's tendency to use economic metaphors to describe transactions of the heart, and the chronological misplacement of Haiti in the narrative. I was also awed by the beautiful structure, which carefully builds up to the novel's awful climax. It's clearly a novel about what it means to tell a story, about perspective, about multiple discourses (including those we can never know), about the South, and about love, friendship, and pride. I don't recommend reading this novel once--read it many times, or never pick it up.