Shandy
asked
Theodora Goss:
I'm absolutely inhaling The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and am thrilled to hear there will be a sequel! In the meantime, can you recommend any particularly enjoyable nonfiction works that you encountered in your doctoral research? (Best dissertation topic ever, in my opinion!)
Theodora Goss
I'm so glad you like it. :) I do have some recommendations, although honestly, most of what I read for the dissertation was literary criticism, which isn't exactly fun reading. But I really liked Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, which is a really interesting book for any reader, not just a geeky grad student. More technical is George Stocking's Victorian Anthropology, which is dense but very well-written. And then, not for the dissertation but for the book, I liked Liza Picard's Victorian London, which is about London 18-40-1870, just before the period I was studying, and a really fun, smart book is How to be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life by Ruth Goodman. The Goodman and Asma are the most fun and accessible, but they're all interesting. Happy reading! :)
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