January seems to have flown by, with Hilary Term now well underway. If the hectic start of term has meant you haven’t kept abreast of all the new books arriving at the library this month, don’t worry – you can find them all on LibraryThing or just catch up with the highlights in this blog post!

This month over 70 new books have arrived, covering subjects from medieval studies to explorations of the modern city, as well as literature and fiction old and new. But did you know we regularly get new films as well? You can browse our latest DVDs and Blu-rays on LibraryThing. And if your laptop doesn’t have a disc drive, all is not lost – we have portable DVD players you can borrow from the enquiry desk.

David Pearson, Book Ownership in Stuart England (2021).

This fascinating study explores who owned books in seventeenth-century England, and which books were in their possession. It’s based on the 2018 Lyell Lectures which Pearson delivered in Oxford, and which you can read about on the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book blog.

Pearson makes clear from the outset that he’s not interested in what people read, much less what they might have thought about what they were reading. Instead, he focuses on the book as object, seeking to establish ‘what books people owned, but also why they owned them‘. One of Pearson’s key arguments is that the evidence for book ownership is much broader than many historians lament, including evidence for women and non-elite individuals owning substantial numbers of books.

To borrow Pearson’s phrasing, this study takes ‘the parachutist, rather than the truffle-hunting, methodology’ (p.7). What that means is, instead of looking at one or two individuals and their books, Pearson takes an incredibly broad view, compiling evidence of book ownership across all levels of society. That breadth is what makes this such an interesting and invaluable book.

Also available as an ebook.

Also by Pearson at the EFL: Provenance research in book history: A handbook (1994); Oxford bookbinding 1500-1640 (2000); English bookbinding styles, 1450-1800: A handbook (2005); Books as history: The importance of books beyond their texts (2008).

Lauren Elkin, Flaneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2017).

The flâneur emerged in nineteenth century cities, especially the Paris of Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac. He was – and substantively remains – a male creation who enjoys a degree of urban freedom that, even today, women can struggle to lay claim to. That’s partly what leads Elkin to champion the radical potential of the flâneuse.

Elkin’s narrative interweaves the flâneuserie, as she terms it, of women writers who have walked the city – from Virginia Woolf to Martha Gellhorn – with her own personal experiences of urban walking. For all of Elkin’s flâneuses, herself included, taking to the streets on foot is a liberating act, enabling women to shift ‘from being looked at to looking‘. 

Ultimately, flânerie for Elkin is about freedom, disruption, and the joy found by walking through the city streets. Through her discussions and reflections, flâneuserie becomes ‘not just a means of traversing the city but a way of life and even a form of ethics‘. As Elkin puts it, in a world where the flâneur is becoming subsumed by the commercialisation and industrialisation he first took to the street in protest against, ‘the flâneuse is the more radical idea’. 

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2021). 

As the subtitle suggests, Lose Your Mother is a journey, in more ways than one. Hartman travelled to Ghana as an academic, researching the slave trade from the other side of the Atlantic. But what started as a scholarly exercise became deeply personal as she searched for her ancestors’ voices, with her narratives morphing into a meditation on identity, loss, and grief.

Hartman’s writing is haunted by the unknown and the unknowable. She has described the book as being ‘about those losses that haunt us, those ancestors we know but can’t name’. She considers the ‘irreparable violence’ of the slave trade, those who have disappeared from the archives – if they were ever there – and the consequences of that loss for their descendants in the United States as well as those who remain in Africa.

It’s undeniable that Hartman’s moving account demands ‘significant emotional expenditure‘ from its readers. But it is above all an intimate and accessible narrative that unites the academic and the personal in its search for the past.

Also by Hartman at the EFL: Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America (1997); Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals (2021) – also new at the EFL this month!

Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2018).

Li’s Dear Friend is a memoir with a difference. In it, we learn very little of Li’s life, either in China or in America, and she expresses her discomfort with the word ‘I’. (If you saw the December new books blog post, you may remember that Christine Brooke-Rose’s Remake is another new-to-the-EFL memoir which avoids that particular pronoun.)

Instead of narrating the events of Li’s life, Dear Friend is at heart a profoundly thoughtful book. It discusses language at length, including Li’s decision to abandon her native Chinese, not only writing but thinking exclusively in English. Her ruminations on language sit alongside a series of meditations on both reading and writing, as Li reflects on the importance of literature in the wake of her hospitalisations following suicide attempts. Reading was her means of survival, and ‘literature offer[ed] her both recovery and discovery‘.

Above all, Dear Friend is beautifully written – it’s been described as ‘calm, but not soothing, matter-of-fact, yet dreamlike‘. It is a moving exploration of the possibilities and limits of language, and how to cope with the point at which thinking ends and feeling begins.

Also by Li at the EFL: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2006); Where Reasons End: A Novel (2019).

Brian Dillon, Objects in This Mirror (2014). 

This collection brings together essays written and published over a decade. Together, the essays explore a huge range of subjects as Dillon seeks to make the most of what the essay form can be and the possibilities it contains.

There’s no real theme that underpins the collected essays; featured topics range from hypochondria and taste to the Dewey decimal system and slapstick. Instead, ‘Dillon’s wide-ranging curiosity is the unifying force‘. As another reviewer said, few writers are ‘more consistently interesting on as wide a range of subjects‘ as Dillon is revealed to be in this collection.

Perhaps the other unifying element is the importance Dillon places on the essay form itself. In interviews, he’s described the ‘conjunction between unlikely topics or unlikely narratives‘ that is uniquely possible in an essay. He has also expressed admiration for, and his desire to continue, the tradition of essay-writing as it’s developed since the seventeenth century. What motivates him – and what is clear from this collection – is ‘a sense that in the essay you can write about absolutely anything‘.

Also by Dillon at the EFL: Essayism (2017); Suppose a Sentence (2021).

Toni Morrison, Recitatif (2022). 

Originally published in 1983, Recitatif is Morrison’s only short story, and appears in this edition with a new introduction by Zadie Smith. The story follows two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who become inseparable as children at St. Bonaventure’s orphanage, but as fate throws them together as adults differences and tensions emerge between them.

Race and the perception of it are key to the story. One girl is black, and the other is white – but Morrison never tells us which is which. The effect is to shift the story’s focus from the characters’ race to the reader’s perception of racial difference. Smith draws out the implications of this in her introduction, which is well worth reading.

But it’s not just race that separates the two girls as adults. There are socio-economic differences between them, as well as the dividing line of memory. There was a disabled worker at the orphanage, Maggie, and while differing memories of her fate divide Twyla and Roberta as adults, her story can become lost in the reader’s efforts to solve the mystery of racial identity. This is undoubtedly a story that benefits from being read, reread, and reread again.

Many of Morrison’s works are available at the EFL. Find them on SOLO.