The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson

This book reminds me of both Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz. There's the personal aspect--as if it's a memoir, but there's also the observer aspect--like many other books about the South, it's author has one foot in and one foot out. I found the writing clear and the thinking on questions Southern (such as: what does history mean? what are the costs of maintaining certain kinds of memory? what things do we falsely assume about the South?) engaging.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

I really enjoyed reading this book. It purports to set everything out on the table at the beginning: it's the memoir of a woman who found herself working for MI-5 toward the end of the Cold War, and how falling in love caused her to be fired. But, as you reach the end of the novel, a gorgeous twist shakes our confidence in the entire story. I loved the way the story meditates on lies, the truth, betrayal, and art. This book is a fine example of McEwan at his most deft.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

This book focuses on the friendship between two families whose lives are on the brink of change: the husbands run a record business about to go under to the threat of a corporate store planned just a few blocks away, the wives' midwifery practice is under siege when a home birth goes wrong, a baby is about to be born (just as the father's illegitimate son reappears), and a teenage boy falls in love for the first time. Despite all these events, the book is about its vividly-drawn characters. I found this book easy and enjoyable to read (as opposed to, say, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which took me years).

Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre

This book is a send-up of US media culture. In the wake of a school shooting, the shooter's best friend--and the book's narrator and protagonist--is suspected of being involved with the plot. As the aftermath unfolds, however, we see the incompetent police, news media, and legal system, unfairly target Vernon Little. Although many descriptions of the book describe it as humorous, I was more horrified than amused. Winner of the 2003 Booker Prize.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society by Lauren Goodlad

This book argues that many of the contradictions on topics such as social welfare, poverty, and the government's ideal role in society inherent in Victorian viewpoints come from the fact that "Victorian Britain was a liberal society"--and that this liberalism cut in two ways to both promote freedom and to insist on state aid as a means of achieving social health (vii). While Goodlad sees a Foucauldian perspective as useful in untangling the different strains of thought in Victorian Society, she finds later Foucault more useful than the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish. Many of Goodlad's readings focus on pastorship--that is, someone (usually middle class) guiding the poor to better character and better living. She reads Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend), Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells among others. These readings arrive in conjunction with a careful social history: Goodlad does a nice job of showing the relationship between the literature, its authors' opinions, and the culture in which it was produced. I found her reading of the educational system in Our Mutual Friend particularly helpful. While this book is out of my field (and out of my usual mode of theoretical approach), I found its argument to be cogent and reasonably well supported.

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.

Cane by Jean Toomer

This book crosses all sorts of lines, both generic and social. It's a collection of short stories, dramatic pieces, and poetry that explores the conditions of culture in the United States. The first section is about life in the South and has a feminine feel; the second section is about life in the North and is masculine and sterile, and the third section is about a Northerner coming South, and has a synthesis. The book tries to rewrite our ur-myths from the rape fantasies that spurred lynching (instead of Southern white men needing to protect white womanhood, the real sin, according to the story, is hiding the root story, that of desire between a white man and a black woman), to Genesis itself (refigured in "Blood Burning Moon."). The book imagines that a Messiah figure could be replaced by an artist who might offer absolution for all the violence that marks US culture. Cane never fully gives us this healing, restorative art, however. Instead, we get the fragments. The poet can gather the fragments, but the collection implies that we need a community to assemble them into a whole. A beautiful, troubling, and ultimately moving meditation on race, culture, and the United States.

The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction by Scott Romine

In this book Scott Romine investigates the question of what constitutes the "real" South in the context of so many competing stories and narratives. He concludes that both "real" and "South" are terms that have little meaning without quotation marks--that is, spending a lot of time on figuring out what is "authentic" or "traditional" is less valuable than assessing how these cultural productions function. There are good readings of a variety of texts, ranging from Gone with the Wind to Roots to Daughters of the Dust to Dip's (a restaurant in Chapel Hill) to Confederates in the Attic to A Turn in the South. Finally Romine concludes that "my South" is always tenuous and dependent on who's talking, but that these overlapping Souths are more realistic and accurate than any single solid South could be.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

This book in some ways picks up where Orientalism left off, but in other ways it is far more universal in its reach. Said contends that empires generally--and especially the British, French, and American empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--do not exist as merely political and economic formations, but must also be supported and reinforced by the culture of the metropole. Similarly, though, resistance to imperialism, as it arises, also bears a cultural mark. This book combines a great idea with compelling close readings ranging from Austen to Conrad to C.L.R. James and beyond. As I read, I realized that lots of my ideas about both empire and how we can use literature and other cultural productions to understand, reinforce, and contest empire, come from this monumental study. This study gives critics a standard to which to aspire both in its content and its style.

The Valley of Horses by Jean Auel

This book alternates between continuing Ayla's story after she leaves the Clan and has to fend for herself and telling the story of Jondalar, who leaves his family on a Journey with his brother. I enjoyed moving back and forth between these two characters, despite the fact that they don't meet till the last third of the book. There was a lot of thought about domestication in this book (Ayla, through chance and her good-hearted nature, ends up with both a cave lion and a horse), as well as communication and language. I think I liked the first one better, but I'm definitely going to want to see what happens to Ayla and Jondalar next.

Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture: What Becomes a Legend Most by William Patrick Day

This book looks at the role of vampires in American culture. After a short introduction to the topic (bringing vampires out of folklore and into fiction, and from there into the twentieth century), this book focuses on twentieth century materials, ranging from film to television to novels, and focusing most (but not exclusively) on American works. Day suggests that three main modes of vampire stories exist: liberation stories, in which vampires have been sexualized and turned into the protagonist; horror stories, in which vampires are no longer the boogeymen of the past, but harbingers of a terrifying future; and slayer stories, which turn the focus back to the vampire slayers. The book gives good readings, and offers a basic theoretical framework--it wasn't bad, but nothing to knock your socks off, either.

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.

Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexican Border by Rachel C. St. John

This book gives a concise, yet informative history of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, especially between El Paso and the Pacific Ocean. In so doing, it shows how different people and governments use the border--not just to control immigration, but also to, at times, challenge state sovereignty, collect revenue, avoid customs duties, gain a military advantage, and police morality. Indeed, the idea of fencing the border came late. In the conclusion, St. John lays out her cards: she believes that the border fence is not the best solution to the challenges of illegal immigration, and that the U.S. and Mexico should work together, along with the transnational community, to come up with a more flexible method of policing the border. I also learned more than I ever knew about the Mexican Revolution. A well-written and thought-provoking book.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

I enjoyed this book, which is part memoir and part cultural history of the 1950s, immensely. There's a lot of Bryson's trademark humor, and while he doesn't shy away from the things we might critique about that decade today, his attitude is generally upbeat--you really feel his nostalgia for the era and his belief that he was growing up in the best time ever. The book gave me a new appreciation for Des Moines Iowa.

Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans

This book is fantastic. Homans faces a difficult task in describing the history of an art form which for much of its existence has been passed down from dancer to dancer instead of being recorded in some form of notation. She admits to these challenges from the beginning and meets them with style and grace. Homans theorizes that by tracking ballet's role in European cultural life, we can see larger political and cultural changes, and although she doesn't provide a grand theory explaining everything, she makes a great case for the relevance of ballet. Although she ends the book pessimistically, I think the effort she's put into telling ballet's story (and the apparent popular success) belie the point she makes at the end, namely that ballet's on its way out.

At Home by Bill Bryson

The idea behind this book--tracing the history of privacy and domesticity--through the rooms of a house is fascinating. Many of the anecdotes Bryson tells are intriguing and his style is commendable--authoritative with a touch of humor. However, as the book wore on, I found it difficult to discern the principles upon which it all hung together--in the end it felt like a hodgepodge of facts Bryson had found and stories he wanted to tell.

Sex, Class, and Culture by Lillian S. Robinson

This monograph comprises a collection of twelve essays, written over half a decade, that start by outlining a practice of feminist criticism (one which pays attention to history and does not ignore class) and then demonstrates how this criticism would work on a wide variety of cultural texts (A Room of One's Own, Pride and Prejudice, Renaissance epic poems, television, and more). I found the first part (the theoretical exposition) more even than the second part (though I thought the essay on why Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins to be nothing short of brilliant).

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de Las Casas

This book contains Las Casas's plea to the Spanish throne that they investigate and curtail the cruelties practiced by Spanish citizens on the native peoples of the Americas. Organized geographically first, and then chronologically, the book uses several rhetorical strategies to emphasize the mistakes, cruelties, and horrors the Spaniards have committed in the New World. The book at times details individual actions but denies its ability to recount all the horrors--it will either fall silent or say this example is but one of many. There's a point where Las Casas shows some of the natives' willingness to embrace the Christian religion when it isn't accompanied by violence and cruelty. Las Casas seems to attack these bad actions not only because they show the Spaniards to be more interested in gold than God (and thus leave Spain liable to divine retribution), but also because they are inhumane actions. At times, the book seemed a bit repetitive, but this repetition only drove home the horror of the conquest of the New World.

Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race edited by Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg

This collection contains nine chapters on various aspects of race in Poe's work. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is frequently discussed, as are "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug," and "Hop Frog." While the authors have many different views about how Poe works with race (Terence Whalen proposes that Poe espouses an "average racism" and avoid polemics in order to be popular with a large audience, whereas other readers find Poe to be deeply racist and to be taking stances on slavery through readings of stories and texts that aren't explicitly racialized), I found Whalen's, Rowe's (Poe and imperialism), and Kennedy's (Poe and Douglass) chapters to be the most persuasive. Many of the chapters have a strong cultural studies slant and are as much about the antebellum US as they are about Poe. Many chapters also respond to Morrison's Playing in the Dark and the challenges it makes to find the Africanist presence in Poe.

Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten by Gary Gallagher

This book presents an even-handed and entertaining account of the way the Civil War appears in Hollywood movies and visual art. Focusing most specifically on the last twenty years, Gallagher identifies four responses to the Civil War (Lost Cause, Unionist, Emancipation, and Reconciliation) and tracks Hollywood's increasingly Emancipationist films in contrast to Lost Cause visual art. He concludes that the most remarkable aspect of the nation's memory of the Civil War is its disregard of the strong Unionist sentiments of the North. Altogether a very enjoyable read.