--The Nebuly Coat (1903), by the forgotten but fascinating John Meade Falkner. I ran across the name recently when reading around about Charles' Palliser's The Unburied, which is no Quincunx, but which was a pretty fun murder mystery set in a late Victorian cathedral town. One reviewer noted that Palliser is indebted to Falkner's The Nebuly Coat--and I said, "the nebuly what?" Turns out he's one of those great Victorian-Edwardian novelists that no one remembers anymore, a turn-of-the-century thriller-writer who owed a lot to Collins and Trollope, and gave Hardy, Stevenson, and Le Fanu a run for their money. Even more fun: the novel-writing got done in the margins; Falkner's day job was as chief of Britain's biggest munitions factory. Fun fact: one day in 1915, Lady Violet Bonham Carter took a tour of the factory, and engaged its head executive in conversation about books. She urged him to read one book in particular: "I cannot tell you why, because its quality is indescribable," she is said to have said. "It is called The Nebuly Coat." To which he answered, "I wrote it."

--Michael Slater's massive new biography of Dickens. I've read a bunch of Dickens biographies, and am a huge fan of Peter Ackroyd's doorstop, Dickens. But there are always new things to say -- plus Slater has access to new material. You can never know too much and one of the best ways to get to know someone who is long gone is to get to know the many ways their stories have been told.

--Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. If you are obsessed with the Irish landscape, and have walked it obsessively with minute attention to ordnance maps past and present, and have traced the morphing of place names, Brian Friel-style, from Gaelic to bowdlerized English and, sometimes, back again, and have pulled old accumulated turf up off ruined chapel floors to read the gravestone paving buried below, and have trespassed on farmers' fields because you simply must examine the abandoned stone cottage sitting amid acres of sheep shite, then this is a book for you. Robinson is a cartographer-historian-geographer who has made a minute examination of the landscape of Arainn, the largest of the Aran Islands just off the coast of Galway. Most of my obsessive wanderings and trespassings have taken place in east Donegal--but I spent a perfectly amazing day on Arainn a few years ago, just walking. It's the narrowest, rockiest, unlikeliest little spit of a thing, and it's just amazing how much human history it has. Robinson brings it to life, inch by inch, crag by crag.