What I Read in 2009, Part 12

December! I remember very little of it. West Chester became unbearable, and so did the drive from it to Newtown. So I moved. I'm in Phoenixville now. I'm not illiterate yet. Life continues.

December

142. "The Alcoholic"- Jonathan Ames. People keep telling me I'd like "Bored to Death." Maybe. I liked this autobiographical little GN Ames wrote, so perhaps I'll give his show a shot.

143. "And Her Soul Out of Nothing"- Olena K. Davis. O.K. Davis is a great poet who told me she was going to stop writing for awhile. Apparently she has a new book coming out, which is great, I'm glad she's back. Anyway, some people prefer this, her first book, to her second. I'm not sure I do. This one is definitely more traditional, and don't get me wrong, it is very lovely and honest and ferociously energetic. I just like the other one a bit more.

144. "The Republic of Plato"- Plato. Another one that improves vastly upon rereading. This time, less as a set of philosophical points and more as a story. As a kind of weird bildungsroman for Glaucon, it holds up surprisingly well, and ends up subverting a lot of the more troubling passages. Chew on that Karl Popper.

145. "Days of Reading" -Marcel Proust. Fell off on my Proust habits in 2009. Oh well. I bought this little Penguin compilation of essays for a friend, left it in my car, and read the whole thing during a horrific traffic jam. Frustrating in that it contains selections of a long article about Saint-Beuve, which apparently isn't available anywhere in its entirety.

146. "The Book of Genesis"- R. Crumb. Did you know Crumb apparently had a band back in the 90's? What a fantastic guy. Well, this book is something else.

147. "Mind"- John R. Searle. I love Searle's enthusiasm, and his willingness to tackle a problem from the very bottom of it, but I had some qualms with this book. Some of his "conclusions," particularly his solution to the mind-body problem, ended up seeming more like rephrasings of the original question, and he did kind of a rush job on some of the classic objections to structuralism.

148. "The Actual"-Saul Bellow. Oh, a book by Saul Bellow, this will probably be goo-SYKE THIS NOVELLA IS TERRIBLE.

149. "The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV"- I love the Paris Review Interviews, and was surprised and delighted to see that they're still putting them out. Highlights in this one include Jack Kerouac (what is he even talking about) Wodehouse (almost tragic) and Ezra Pound. Murakami's is a little depressing.

150. "Too Cool To Be Forgotten"- Alex Robinson. I like Robinson a lot, but even I thought the premise of this sounded terrible. I gave it a shot anyway, and I didn't regret it. Doesn't top any of his earlier stuff, but its fun and has its moments.

151. "The Burial at Thebes"- Seamus Heaney. Heaney's lean, mean, translation of Antigone. I would love to see a production of this. 

What I Read in 2009, Part 11: Morrissey Songs

November was given over to a promotion and an office 60 miles away and tons of paperwork. No joy from November. 

November

128. "Sex at Noon Taxes"-Sally Van Doren. It's a palindrome, see? Ha ha. Like the title, these poems often favor cleverness over any kind of resonance or clarity, but there are a few that struck me. Recommended to me by Jehanne Dubrow for some reason, I don't know.

129. "Time and Materials" -Robert Hass. Finished the same day. A poet I admire a lot gave me his copy of this for free because he hated it so much. Weird, because I really liked it. Hass is not afraid to get his Adrienne Rich on and be loud and gauche about political engagement, which I sort of admire. Plus, nobody works food into poems like Hass.

130. "The Land of Green Plums" -Herta Muller. I guess I'm the only person alive who gave a shit at all about our latest Nobel Laureate. This was a strange read, lyric and fluid in terms of language but brutal and ugly in terms of subject matter. Reads like a kind of forced dream. I'd read more of hers.

131. "The Catcher in the Rye" -J.D. Salinger. I've always been a little embarrassed that I never read this. I read all of his other stuff, sure, but by that time I felt like I was a bit old to catch up with Holden Caulfield. I'm glad I did, he's a great character and anyone who can't remember why people love him in high-school isn't being honest with themselves about what being in high-school was like.

132. "Incognegro"- Mat Johnson. Nice little period piece about an undercover reporter in 1930's... South Carolina? Slighter than I expected going off of the subject matter, but decent.

133. "Laika"- Nick Abadzis. A book where the dog dies...

134. "A Month in the Country" -J.L. Carr. If I see an NYRB I haven't heard of, and its cheap, I usually grab it and give it a shot. This was another very quick read, and it felt like it was written a couple of decades before it actually was. There are several passages about a medieval wall painting that are really haunting and memorable, and Carr evokes a feeling of regretful nostalgia masterfully.

135. "The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All" -Marcel Dzama. A nice sketch-book/scrapbook thing by the acclaimed (I guess?) water-colorist. I'm not sure if I "get it" but I liked it.

136. "Asterios Poly"- David Mazzuchelli. Brilliant, one of the best investigations of the processes of art and criticism I've read this year. Smart, witty, heartbreaking, blah blah, go buy it.

137. "Sweeney Astray"- Seamus Heaney. I remembered the legend of Mad Sweeney from "At Swim Two-Birds," so it was nice to see Heaney's take on the source material. 

138. "Ulysses"- James Joyce. Always enjoy reading Ulysses, every time I come away with a different favorite part. This time I really fell in love with the whole cab shelter sequence.

139. "This Will Kill You"- H.P. Newquist. One of my exes gave me a book about all the different ways there are to die, which is maybe not the most fond and tender kind of gift. Pretty funny, definitely very light.

140. "A Very Bad Wizard" -Tamler Sommers. A terrific collection of interviews, many of them conducted for The Believer, about the neuroscience of ethics and other such topics. Really, really thought-provoking. Read a lot of this on Thanksgiving with some decent scotch. The amazing cover probably balances out the mediocre title.

141. "More Information Than You Require" -John Hodgman. Some people think John Hodgman is funny, some people don't, and I don't know how to convince the latter that he is. You probably already know if you'd enjoy this book or not.

What I Read in 2009, Part 10

My birthday happened, I bought myself an iPod touch and dabbled with ebooks or ereaders or fuck, whatever. Didn't stick because the Wordsworth freebie I downloaded was formatted badly and nothing good seemed to be free. OH WELL!

October

116. "From the Fever World" -Jehanne Dubrow. Much stronger second collection, much more cohesive and atmospheric. A wintery, sharp, prickling collection of poem with sudden unexpected gasps of Sappho and Swedenborg. Met Dubrow a couple of times since reading this, super nice lady.

117. "American Born Chinese" -Gene Luen Yang. Cute YA thing (I think?). Actually a bit unsure what demographic this is targeted. I think any early high-schooler who stumbled on it would be particularly well served, I guess.

118. "AIDS and Its Metaphors" -Susan Sontag. My love-hate relationship with follow-ups to Sontag classics. I feel like this suffers because it builds much more on her cancer material than her TB material, which I felt was much more strained. Still, some very strong material on the politicalization of AIDs scares in the 80's.

119. "Lunch Poems"- Frank O'Hara. O'Hara is one of my faves, and this is his him at his finest.

120. "Anna Karenina"-Leo Tolstoy. Finished this around noon on my birthday, listening to Beirut, pretty perfect moment.

121. "Chronicle, Volume One" -Bob Dylan. Really uneven, and he seems to have a special knack for skipping over the periods I want to read about the most. His stories about the early, struggling days of his career are much more compelling than "The adventures of Bob Dylan, wealthy curmedgeon."

122. "Amsterdam"- Ian McEwan. Unexpectedly funny and farcical. Characters definitely existed in broad, broad strokes, but I can forgive that.

123. "Nudge"- Richard H. Thaler. Another thing for work. Not really worthwhile for my purposes but who knows.

124. "On Photography"- Susan Sontag. Sontag at the peak of her powers. The first time I read this it really changed the way I thought about sight as a constant contextualizing and indexical force. Made me more conscious of the implicit assumptions of gaze than a thousand million icy bell hooks stares. Reading it again was just a lot of fun, because I could appreciate how finely wrought her arguments are beneath the first shock of them.

125. "The Good Person of Szechwan"- Bertolt Brecht. Reread this when I found out one of my brothers from school was directing a production of it. This edition also had a nice thick appendix covering Brecht's various revisions and rewrites, many of which were really, really fascinating, especially how he really made the protagonist's capitalism a lot more devious for American audiences, and his aborted plans to do a production of it set in Kingstown, Jamaica. Oh, its the Penguin classics edition, if you're interested.

126. "Regarding the Pain of Others" -Susan Sontag. Again, a follow-up that fails to live up to its predecessor. Still, pretty good. I thought the "Three Guineas" material never went anywhere, though.

127. "Wimbledon Green" -Seth. Seth is probably the best of his generation of cartoonists, and this little sketchbook novella shows that even at his most casual he knows how to block a story and set a tone like few others.

What I Read in 2009, Part 9

September mainly seemed to be dominated by Coetzee. Ok.

September

104. "New Selected Poems of Steve Smith"-Stevie Smith. I'd picked this up in Fairfield, CT a couple of years ago after the Believer had an article about her. I read this en route to Philly, mostly, and enjoyed it a lot. Smith is an idiosyncratic poet, yes, but an immense one.

105. "Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason" -Jessica Warner. A book about the gin acts in the 18th century. Should've been a pretty juicy subject but Warner for the most part plays it pretty dry, focusing a lot on the political and economic causes rather than the sociological effects. Which is fine, in hindsight, although a little disappointing at the time. She avoid a lot of sensationalism and really places the gin craze in a solid context. 

106. "Groundswell" -Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff. A book on Web 2.0 marketing or something that I had to read for work. Actually pretty good.

107. "The Hardship Post" -Jehanne Dubrow. Some poems Abby had to read for a class, which I started reading as well. The first half really didn't impress me-- seemed like a pretty blatant Sexton rip-off-- but either the book found its feet, or I found its feet too late, and by the end I was really into what Dubrow was doing.

108. "Diary of a Bad Year"- J.M. Coetzee. One of Coetzee's "this is a novel, but really, check out these essays" things. I can see why the guy from The Elegant Variations was so enthusiastic about this book, it was really lovely and did some nice formal flourishes.

109. "Strangely Marked Metal" -Kay Ryan. Ryan's first book, I think, but not too far off from her later poems. A quick read, don't remember too much of it.

110. "The Lives of Animals"- J.M. Coetzee. I read this, but shouldn't have, because...

111. "Elizabeth Costello" -J.M. Coetzee. ...about a week later I read this which includes the previous book in its entirety along with a bunch of other Costello stories. Well, that's not fair-- "The Lives of Animals" includes some responses from scholars and thinkers, but they were pretty toss-away I felt. Anyway. I didn't really like Elizabeth Costello as a character very much, and didn't feel like J.M. Coetzee gave any of her foils much to present compelling counterpoints. 

112. "Spanish Poems of Love and Exile" -Kenneth Rexroth (trans.). A very tiny little City Lights pocket sized anthology. Read it in a park one afternoon, which was perfect for what it was. Interesting to read the author bios in the back-- when this was released apparently Pablo Neruda was not well-known in the states at all.

113. "Permit Me Voyage" -James Agee. I love, love, love "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" so I decided to check out Agee's poetry. Ehh. It is pretty bad, as it turns out.

114. "Waiting for the Barbarians" -J.M. Coetzee. More Coetzee. A much different world than the later stuff I read, but much more visceral and gut-punchy. Easy to see why this is where a lot of people start in on him.

115. "The Black Dahlia"- James Ellroy. Read so much praise for "Blood's A Rover" that I decided to try Ellroy for myself. This was the only thing available at the nearest library, so I started with it. Better as a character piece than as a mystery, and in fact I found a lot of the "plot twists" near the end a distraction from Ellroy's spot-on sense of mood and place. I was impressed enough to go out and buy "American Tabloid" but apparently not impressed enough to actually read it. 

What I Read in 2009, Part 8

More reading in Maine. I started in on my current job somewhere around late July, early August, so that began to cut into my time a bit as well. Near the end  of the month, undergrad friends started filtering back into PA, so there was that, reconnecting with other people who gave a shit about poetry, things like that.

August

95. "HP and the Deathly Hallows" -J.K. Rowling. Overall, I went into Harry Potter for irony, left really enjoying the series. Really have no problem with kids being into this-- its good storytelling.

96. "Inherent Vice" -Thomas Pynchon. A little disappointing. On its own, fun novel, amusing, but I expect more from Pynchon. Not as bad as Vineland, but a let down nonetheless.

97. "To the Finland Station" -Edmund Wilson. Wilson's loving history of socialism, picked up from an anarchist bookstore of some kind in Brunswick. Great read marred by a few imperfections; namely, Wilson's available sources on the life of Lenin were definitely biased, and more importantly, Wilson mangles his interpretation of Hegel's Dialectic Materialism so badly that the surrounding 40 pages or so are just sucked into a black hole of misguidedness. However, it's all good-- if you read the Nabokov/Wilson letters this triggers a really good back and forth culminating with Nabokov summarizing the idea unbelievably concisely and elegantly.

98. "Embryoyo" -Dean Young. McSweeney's had a sale and I'd never read any Dean Young, so I picked this up. A little disappointed. There were some strong poems in here, but a lot of fluff, or foam, I don't know, some insubstantial noodling.

99. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"-Jonathan Safran Foer. Many, many people seem to like this book, and seemed to have found it weird that I hadn't read it, but I hated it. Foer seems to cheapen every heavy subject he touches on, and plays such tawdry manipulative tricks with his characters. Sorry everybody.

100. "ABBA ABBA" -Anthony Burgess. A little novella about Keats dying in Rome, with a lengthy appendix of sonnets by Guiseppe Belli. Both parts were really interesting.

101.  "Travesties" -Tom Stoppard. A play I like to reread every now and then. I just like it a lot. Wow.

102. "Shopgirl" -Steve Martin. Abby lent this to me, I really sort of disliked it. Martin's prose is decent, nothing special, but the amount of male-gaze going on made me really uncomfortable, especially when I found out that he wrote himself into the male lead for the film version. Gross.

103. "Don Quixote" -Cervantes. Took me a long time to read, mostly because Part 1 was kind of a slog. A shame, because most people I know who've tried to read this stopped there. Part 2 is a real surprise, though, much funnier and richer, with some genuinely awe-inspiring moments of real capital M Mystery in the spiritual sense. 

What I Read in 2009, Part 7

I'm surprised I read anything at all this month, since I spent so much of it driving back and forth between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Maine. Anyway, things begin to get shameful around here, so beware.

July

76. "Six Memos for the Next Millennium"-Italo Calvino. Such a great book. At the time it really made a profound impression on me but looking back, and I can't even really remember all six of his subjects. Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, umm... Visibility? And then I'm stuck. Damn.

77. "Epigrams"-Martial. The new Gary Wills translation. These were a lot of fun. In general I found dirty Roman satires really fascinating, but this goes  step further and actually works very jaunty rhythms and rhymes into the translation. Really does feel like the kind of stuff you'd find scrawled on a particularly erudite bathroom wall.

78. "Serendipities"-Umberto Eco. A slim book about the quixotic pursuit of a perfect language, more or less. Honestly the sense of unity in the collection didn't really strike me as convincing, but most of the individual essays were interesting and informative, so who am I to complain. Is there anything Umberto Eco doesn't know? I bet he even knows all his Pokemon.

79. "French Milk"- Lucy Knisley. Lucy Knisley is sort of famous cartoonist, younger than me actually, whose various blogs I'd followed for awhile. Anyway, recently she had a book put out by a big publisher, which is cool, and Abby had a copy of it at her apartment in Maine, so I figured why not read it? Unfortunately, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It does that cardinal sin of travelogues where it basically devolves into a list of "and then I bought this and then I bought that and quaint thing happened." Really touristy and objectifying and shallow. Plus, it made me resentful that nobody ever took me to Paris for fuck-all reason. 

80. "The Consolations of Philosophy"- Alain de Botton. Botton is funny because I've never really been impressed by what he writes, but I've always been comforted by it. Its like a little trip to Dairy Queen, if DQ served books about Proust and Schopenhauer. I read most of this book in an outstanding coffee place in Brunswick, Maine, and a bit of this in Cape Cod sitting on some rocks getting sea-spray all over the chapter on Seneca. Sorry Seneca.

81. "Hey, Wait"- Jason. A Norwegian cartoonist who makes really bleak novellas where everyone has dog heads or something. Maybe you've seen his cover of "The Dharma Bums," its the new Penguin one. 

82. "32 Stories"-Adrian Tomine. Tomine has a really sophisticated sense of line, I think, and is a pretty good hand at small private stories. See "Shortcomings." This is a collection of his very very earliest stuff, and it definitely starts out crude and amateurish. However, there's a really pleasing sense of development throughout, so that even if the latest material in it doesn't begin to compare with where he is now, you can still get a feel for his trajectory.

83. "Clumsy"-Jeffrey Brown. I don't know why I keep reading Jeffrey Brown. I guess if you really need to see a small ugly man get a handjob, you can read this book.

84. "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" -J.K. Rowling. I regret nothing.

85. "Why I Am So Wise"-Friedrich Nietzsche. So I found out later this isn't even a real collection Nietzsche put out, its some bizarre mishmash of material from other books. Why, Penguin Great Ideas? I enjoyed it anyway, as I often do with Nietzsche, who I think is probably a better prose poet than philosopher.

86. "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" -J.K. Rowling. 

87. "Time & Money"-William Matthews. This is Matthews' last collection of poetry before his death, and one of my favorite smallish collections. A lot of it deals with the death of his father, which is poignant because you can also see an old man attempting to reconcile himself with his own approaching death. But in the middle of all that, there is baseball and jazz.

88. "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" -J.K. Rowling

89. "From the Notebook: The Unfinished Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald" -Dave Eggers (ed.). Several writers flesh out fragments from Fitzgerald's notebooks. Better than it could have been, although the original fragments have stuck with me more than any of the stories.

90. "The State of Constraint. New Work by Oulipo." I am fond of Oulipo and there is some good stuff here, but some of it seems like a stretch. "Binary narratives" are, well, they're basically a more pretentious "Choose Your Own Adventure" and they took up way too much of this collection.

91. "HP and the Goblet of Fire" -J.K. Rowling

92. "HP and the Order of the Phoenix" -J.K. Rowling. This was the first one I actually had to wonder about buying a copy of, because I only had access to the first four from my brother's room. I really wasn't going to be thrilled with myself if I went into a store and bought Harry Potter, but at the same time I was honestly curious about what happened. So, Abby said she'd get me a copy if I read the whole thing in public. I don't know if it was worth it.

93. "HP and the Half-Blood Prince" -J.K. Rowling. Read on the beach, finished the day Abby and I went to see the movie.

94. "Angle of Yaw" -Ben Lerner. A book of poetry I still need to "deal" with. Whatever it is it is trying to do, it does it, and I was deeply impressed by it, but it also made me hate poetry for a little while. Still very confused about what I brought away with me. Maybe I should read this again soon, too.

What I Read in 2009, Part 6

It was June and life was available for whatever! I did a lot of reading on my parents' brick porch. I got a lot of flies in my tea. I read a lot of Melville on park benches. If these are idylls I don't know, I'm a little underwhelmed.

June

61. "Your Inner Fish,"-Neil Shubin. Picked up on a whim from the West Chester University bookstore. Pretty damn entertaining actually. As with A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Shubin does a lot of explaining things any moron should know that it turns out most people don't actually know. So, a good catch-up on evolutionary biology, and then some truly startling and lovely case studies. 

62. "The Romantic Dogs"-Roberto Bolano. Bolano's poetry! I bought this from Chester County Book Company, an independent store I used to go to as a kid. My first ever cup of coffee was from there, when I was eight, and I hated it. I guess the last time I'd gone before this summer was around 1999, or 2000, and it was mostly nostalgia that brought me back, but it turns out it is quite a nice shop. Apologies to the ghost of Bolano for kind of glossing over his actual book here. Just trust me, it is remarkable and you need to read it.

63. "Bodyworld" -Dash Shaw. Shaw is a young cartoonist whose "Bottomless Belly Button" you may have heard about. Bodyworld is a strange ode to I don't know what, a kind of Cronenberg take on Archie. But of course all of that doesn't do it justice. This is free for you to read online, so go along and do that.

64. "Distant Star" -Roberto Bolano. Big Bolano kick in June. This was a short one, one of his many wee little novels that keep showing up in their ominous numbers. Great.

65. "The Savage Detectives" -Roberto Bolano. I feel a little bad, because I think I would have liked this a lot more if I hadn't read 2666 first. Plus, possibly burnt out on Bolano by this point. I'll need to give it another shot. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but did I really "like-like" it?

66. "Ommateum with Doxology"- A.R. Ammons. A nice compilation of Ammons' first two books of poetry. To learn more go back a couple pages on this very blog.

67. "Infinite Jest" -David Foster Wallace. Believe it or not I read this in exactly six days. I think I ate nothing but DFW's magic words for a good 72 hours. You know what, I take it back, this was the best book I read this year. FOR SURE. Sorry 2666.

68. "Nazi Literature in the Americas" -Roberto Bolano. My last Bolano of 2009. A good note to end on, since it has a lot of cheeky allusions and little literary jokes but not a ton of twists and not a lot of substance. Bolano light, if you will, which of course still implies neo-nazis murder and terrifying new poetic revolutions.

69. "Take It"-Joshua Beckman. Probably my favorite new poetry of the year, in a year of good new poetry. Really can't say enough good things about this book, and its really late so I won't actually say any.

70. "Lud Heat"-Iain Sinclair. Reread this to get brushed up for a guest post on The Devil Accountant. This is Iain Sinclair's Masonic-tinged love note to London and Nicholas Hawksmoor, a really disorienting and occasionally tedious book, but truly more than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately its out of print, so fuck you, you can't read it sucker.

71. "North & South"-Elizabeth Bishop. Cracked open the Library of America Elizabeth Bishop thing and decided to read some chunks of it all the way through. It was a disheartening experience in the end, because as much as I love Bishop I have to admit this is a really, really uneven collection. Some of her absolute best is in this collection, her first, but so is some poetry that is not just bad for Bishop but simply bad for anyone. Kind of bummed me out, at first, but now I see it as somewhat encouraging. Even the great ones start somewhere.

72. "The Canon"-Natalie Angier. Not sure why I read this-- people kept telling me that it wasn't all that great, but maybe I found it cheap somewhere. I spent a lot of time this summer poking around the science sections of bookstores trying to learn some new things, and maybe its telling that really all I wound up finishing was this and the Bryson, two very "so you want to not be a mental child about things" texts that don't really demand much from the reader. Regardless, I learned some things from this book, pondered some big facts, and enjoyed Angier's style except for some sporadic excesses, so in final consideration it wasn't all that much of a wash.

73. "The Happy Failure: Stories"-Herman Melville I think at this point I own 90% of Melville's short stories and novellas in like, three different versions each. I definitely have a huge idol-crush on Melville, but it still seems a little much. This was one of those new Harper Perennial deals, a very attractive little paperback with some nice design work going on. Read about the paradise of bachelors under a tree outside of a library, read about the Tartarus of maids waiting for somebody to show up at a coffee place. Cannot, as hard as I try, recall what the last three or four stories in here were.

74. "The Varieties of Scientific Experience"-Carl Sagan. A nice edition with a bunch of color photos and things. Sagan at his best in a lot of ways, just a fascinated guy saying fascinating things. A lot of things covered in Demon Haunted World are also discussed here, in what felt like a bit more detail with a lot more conviction. Really it wasn't until I read this that I started feeling more ambiguous about the DHW. 

75. "This Is Water"-David Foster Wallace. Moving from feeling ambiguous to the DHW to feeling ambiguous about DFW: I like this lecture, I think its good, but the book is a total sham. Do another printing of Consider the Lobster and put this in it. Maybe even find enough material for a third essay collection to toss it in, who knows? But the way this was packaged, marketed, and sold just made me queasy. I don't think Wallace would have approved.

What I Read in 2009, Part 5: In Which I Never Read A Book Again Because College Is Over

Just kidding, I'm not enough of a functional human being to do that.

May

49. "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark"- Carl Sagan. I love Sagan and I respect what he's doing here, but it all feels, well, a little obvious. I mean yeah, yes, of course, many people would disagree, but I doubt they're reading Carl Sagan books.

50. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." -David Foster Wallace. A little less enthralling than "Consider the Lobster" but still a bench-mark for creative non-fiction. 

51. "Houses Are Fields"- Taije Silverman. My mentor wrote these poems, she's brilliant and these poems are all beautiful and situated at the exact mid-point between melancholy and universal infatuation that you need to appreciation when you're a week away from leaving your undergraduate career behind.

52. "Death in Venice"- Thomas Mann. I figured it was about time I read this, so I did. It was no Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks, I'll say that much. Legitimately curious if this is the go-to for Mann just because its the shortest?

53. "Omega the Unknown"-Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem decided to do a super-hero comic. What's odd is that it is equal parts rip-off of Gerber's original Omega, and rehash of Fortress of Solitude, but it still held together and said something new. Weird arithmetic. 

54. "Heart of a Dog"- Mikhail Bulgakov. Not too pleased with this. Maybe "The Master and Margarita" set the Bulgakov bar too high for me. It all just seemed really heavy-handed.

55. "Monster"- Naoki Urasawa. In which I closed the blinds and locked the door and read a Japanese manga comic. Actually, it was really good in an "I'm Graham Greene and I need to put food on the table" kind of way. Tightly paced and plotted, solid characterization, very impressive cartooning. As far as thrillers go, I'd recommend it.

56. "Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini"-Alda Merini. As I understand it, she kind of fulfills the same poetic archetype in Italy as Plath does here, except she lived much longer. I liked this collection, but I'll admit a lot of that might actually be due to the translation, which is nice and crisp and minimal. The actual imagery and ideas felt a little blah to me on occasion. Saw her speak at... Princeton? Princeton or U Penn, I think. She died a few months later and I could tell that even moreso than usual, nobody cared about another dead writer. Never stops making me depressed when it happens. The last book I read at Ursinus, as a student. Sad.

57. "The Partly Cloudy Patriot"-Sarah Vowell. Sarah Vowell gets to join David Sedaris in the club of people I like on This American Life but do not like reading books by.

58. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" -Oliver Sacks. I read "An Anthropologist on Mars" a few years ago and was iffy about it, but I did like this. I feel like he does less talking down to his audience, and less patronizing lionizing of his subjects. Just a more honest-feeling book overall, I suppose.

59. "On the Pleasure of Hating"- William Hazlitt. Hazlitt is a great stylist, and some of his essays on boxing are really funny. Anyway, this was for the first blog post on here. Back when I updated it.

60. "2666"- Roberto Bolano. I read the first 300 or so pages of this slowly, in the midst of some other books, but blazed through the nightmarish middle section and sublime ending in three or four days including a camping trip in New Hampshire in which no given person was sober for more than maybe 15 seconds, which is not a pleasant state of mind for all those crimes, but is an effectively mimetic one, or something. My book of the year, I think, one that is still lodged in there just as unshakably as it was over half a year ago.

What I Read in 2009, Part 4: April is the gjdfhgdj Month

April

38. "Code of the Woosters"- P.G. Wodehouse. Just felt a strong urge to read a bunch of Wodehouse, so it was this and about half a book of short stories. I think an audiobook of the one where Jeeves gets rented out was involved too.

39. "The Awful End of Prince William the Silent"- Lisa Jardine. Jardine is one of my favorite history writers putting out non-scholarly books. However, I feel like this book could have stood to be a lot longer. As it was, you have a more or less perfunctory account of William of Orange and Catholic/Protestant intrigues, and a rather abbreviated look at gun culture in the 16th century. Good book, but I just wanted more of both. Also, led me to the startling discover that I own two other books about William the Silent. No idea.

40. "Snark"- David Denby. I guess the general consensus is that in 2009 David Denby wrote a shitty book that ruined everybody's spring. Listen-- its not a perfect book, and it gets really muddled and mealy-mouthed by the end, but I think it raised some good points and overall had a thesis I would find it hard to argue with. We can't ALL by Anthony Lane, ok?

41. "Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Mass Media Populism" -Umberto Eco. Eco is always engaging and I like it when he comes out of the library and talks about the modern world a bit. All the same, I often felt a little lost when reading this, just because so much of it is explicitly in-the-moment commentary on the Italian political situation in the early aughts. Whatever, though, the rest was terrific and I wound up having to look up many things about Italy's political climate and wound up less of an ignoramus.

42. "That Little Something"- Charles Simic. Simic in an unusually tender register. I think I read most of this in a hospital waiting room as well, and just finished off the last 20 pages or so in April.

43. "Sonata Mulattica"- Rita Dove. Really extraordinary book, for a lot of reasons. A sequence of narrative persona poems about 18th century Afro-Polish violin protege George Bridgetower, which feels so fresh and gave me such a hard "THIS IS WHERE POEMS SHOULD BE GOING" vibe. Sold me on Rita Dove after years of mixed feelings.

44. "Ingenious Pursuits: Inventing the Scientific Revolution"- Lisa Jardine. Another for Florka, and an incredibly compelling and accessible history of the greedy stumblings towards a method that took place way back when. I love Jardine.

45. "The Enchiridion"- Epictetus. Not impressed. I guess if I get stuck back in time in the 60's and have to go on a long hike I'll be able to keep up with the conversation, at least.

46. "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" -Victor Pelevin. Ugh. Low-point of senior sem, and possibly of entire English undergrad curriculum. Too many Final Fantasy 8 references for me to handle.

47. "Quantum Lyrics" -A. Van Jordan. Reread this after reading an interview with Jordan. Some impressive poems about Heisenberg and The Flash and a great sequence about Einstein's love life that I didn't give enough credit to the first time around.

48. "A Brief History of Nearly Everything"- Bill Bryson. The only Bryson book I've ever really, really enjoyed. Written with an overwhelming amount of charm and enthusiasm, and I certainly felt like less of an idiot when I was done with it.

What I Read in 2009, Part 3

I don't even remember what I did in March.

27. "Illness as Metaphor"- Susan Sontag. Read in a nice mid-70's hardcover with a dust-jacket upon which a hunch-backed and pudgy Hercules waves his arms around at a garden snake with two heads. I felt like her arguments vis a vis tuberculosis were much, much stronger than the cancer material.

28. "The Boy Detective Fails"- Joe Menos. Finally read after many, many recommendations. Maybe a little cutesy, stylistically, but you know, he had the good taste to keep a lot of the overly tweet formal experiments peripheral and really, when you think about it, entirely optional. Underneath all the hit or miss trickiness, there's a pretty solid and surprisingly tight story here.

29. "The Sun Also Rises"- Ernest Hemingway. Reread to settle a point that had been nagging at me for awhile, ever since I heard that at least two people I know consider this as a kind of... rival piece, I guess you'd say, to Gatsby. Not convinced after the reread but definitely glad I took the time to revisit such a perfect book.

30. "Exercises in Style"- Raymond Queneau. Babby's first Queneau. Yeah, I know.

31. "The Werewolf of Paris"- Guy Endore. Another for senior seminar, and an interesting choice because on many levels its an extremely blatant dime pulp, full of what must have passed for gratuitous sex and violence in 1932. Still, it grew on me not only as a fascinating historical artifact but also as a considerably better novel than I gave it credit for. Don't go in expecting Stendhal with fur and fangs or anything, but as an ur-text of a major contemporary monster trope its at least way better than anything Bram Stoker ever pooped out.

32. "Gravity's Rainbow"- Thomas Pynchon. I'd owned this book for at least six years, and every so often would pick it up, read about 60 pages, and set it back down in confusion and fear. You know what? The trick is to just roll with it. Pynchon knows what he's doing. Get into his scary stranger van and just let him do the driving.

33. "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion"- Steven C. Weisenburger. Probably the best of this kind of thing I've read, probably a worthwhile read even if you haven't and never plan to read GR, honestly. Lots of fascinating little things to be found.

34. "The Posthuman Dada Guide" -Andrei Codrescu. Bafflingly organized, and a little too infatuated with its own cleverness, but Codrescu writes here with an irresistible rhetorical heteroglossia. What's his point here? Who knows, he makes like 15 contradictory ones every three pages, but he makes them with such lunatic glee that you have to just drink it all in and think it all over and sort it out for yourself.

35. "Invisible Cities"- Italo Calvino. In late March my father was rushed to the emergency room, with pessimistic expectations. It was a really terrible couple of days, and when I got in the car to get to the hospital I just grabbed the nearest thing at hand for the whole waiting room experience. Thankfully, I wound up with a book I didn't appreciate enough the first time through. Of course, it would be stupid to suggest that you need to read this in a crisis to get more than a cool aesthetic appreciation, but maybe it helps. 

36. "Orlando"- Virginia Woolf. The fact that this novel is so stylistically dissimilar to the classic Woolf routine just adds another layer to the wonderful and startlingly lucid strangeness of the whole thing. Another for senior seminar.

37. "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture"- Juliet B. Schor. I'm not sure why this was in my car, but it was the only thing to read in a freezing airport waiting for my girlfriend's delayed flight to land. Interesting and hackle-raising investigation of marketing practices.

What I Read in 2009, Part 2: My Studious Valentine

Sorry for that title, ugh. Anyway.

February

15. "On the Shortness of Life"- Seneca. Jesus, I had such an unbearable little stoic phase after this. Sorry to everyone who had to deal with it, probably. Anyway, lent this to an ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and never got it back, after saying I'd lend it to another ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and forgetting too. I guess what I learned from Seneca is that I'm a pretty wretched person. This was the darling little Penguin Great Ideas version, incidentally, which came in a small red box and was the object of much aesthetic attention around the apartment for a few days. 

16. "Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. Much more sombre than the rest of O'Malley's stuff. Surprisingly so. 

17. "Netherland"- Joseph O'Neill. Not as into this as much of the book blogosphere was, but still deeply moved and impressed. This was kind of my turning point, sadly, for realizing that barely anyone at Ursinus read the school paper and even fewer read the book column. Kind of disheartening but after that realization I started cursing in it more. The small victories.

18. "How Fiction Works." -James Wood. For better or worse, I really like James Wood. That being said, I found at least two or three things I vehemently disagreed with on pretty much every page of this thing. Still, what's important is that I disagreed with gusto and a big excited grin. Wood is firm in his points in the kind of way that invites rebuttal, so I had a great time finding fault with this little firecracker (lame last sentence).

19. "She's Not There" -Jennifer Finney Boylan. In late January I was invited by the head of Ursinus' creative writing department to a dinner with Jennifer Finney Boylan in between a small Q&A and a school reading. This was exciting, except I hadn't read any of hers at any point ever. When this book came in the mail I tore through it in an evening sitting on the outside stairs of my apartment, with my fingers numb by around page 150 from the cold. Even as I write this I feel like it's a contradiction to say something is both "page-turning" and deeply thoughtful, but here I am writing it. I have my bones of contention with modern memoir, but this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand anything about the medium of memoir, or about storytelling in general, or god dammit even about being a good human being.

20. "Three Men in a Boat"- Jerome K. Jerome. Had always heard this touted as one of the funniest novels of all time, honestly I suppose I must be missing something because it was a huge letdown. Funniest bit came at the beginning with the hypochondriac catalogue, but otherwise it was everything dated about early 20th century British humor that Wodehouse and Waugh managed to transcend (or apotheosize, I don't know) with some truly embarrassing lapses into Housman-style dapply pastoral saccharine.

21. "The Gold Cell"- Sharon Olds. Sharon Olds is a marvel.

22. "A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes" -Witold Gombrowicz. I love Gombrowicz, and I'd like to think I know enough about philosophy to say I like it, but I'm still a little puzzled about the point of this. Its so fragmentary that occasionally it feels like another post-humous cash-in (spoiler: didn't read "The Original of Laura") but here and there everything great about Gombrowicz will burst out in a perfect fragment or snatch of words. 

23. "Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. You know what, everything I wrote about O'Malley above might actually apply to this one instead. Honestly I don't know, and I totally forgot that I read two of these things last year.

24. "The Book of Dead Philosophers"- Simon Critchley. Amazing book, part primer, part meditation, part satire, part history, part guhguhreh just so good. Plus, almost certainly the best conclusion of any book actually written in 2009.

25. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"- Robert Louise Stevenson. Another one for senior seminar. I guess this was one of those stories so ingrained in the popular imagination that I didn't realize I'd never read it until I actually got around to reading it. 

26. "Kepler"- John Banville. Read for the redoubtable Dr. Roger Florka's course on early Scientific Methodology (I guess? I forget the actual name of the course). Banville's novels in contemporary settings never really grabbed me, but Kepler really resonated in some way. Banville brings his usual muted poetry to the book, but creates a much more complex protagonist than I'd expected based on his other stuff. 

What I Read in 2009, Part 1: January, Robert Lowell's Electric Chair

2009 was a long year, it was a bad year, the weather repeatedly cracked its knuckles and got down to business, and people all over the world gave more of a shit about the Shamwow guy dying than about W.D. Snodgrass. Fortunately I had so many books I could just sit in my home and curl up in a compact fetal crescent and read them instead of engaging with our awful end-times.

Here they are, what they were and how they were.

January

1. "The Devil in the White City"- Erik Larsen. I read this book at my girlfriend's house in Vermont. She doesn't have a shower there, rather one of those grotesque majesties of a bathtub with the griffon feet and everything. Anyway, I read a great deal of this book sitting in that thing getting so pruny I probably looked like I'd attended the 1893 World's Fair.

 On New Year's Eve I was all up in everyone's faces about this book, going on and on about the national debut of PBR, and the ferris wheel, and the serial killer, and Colonel Zufelt, and so much more, and finished it as my flight descended on Philadelphia. What an incredible book. Pop history can be shallow and superficial, but at its best it can speak to such a panorama of experience, submerged and flourescent alike. God I wish I'd been at that 1893 World's Fair.

2. "I Am Going To Be Small"- Jeffrey Brown. Jeffrey Brown, if you don't know, is a kind of auteur of small-press autobiographical comics. Lots of candid little novels about his miserable sex life and such. This was a collection of some of his lighter, goofier stuff, which was a nice change of pace from his usual thing but also not that remarkable. Sorry J. Brown.

3. "The Moviegoer"- Walker Percy. Walker Percy can put together some fucking phenomenal sentences, if you can accommodate his pace. His best novel, as far as I'm concerned, but not a lot of moviegoing as such gets done. Too bad "The Searchers" is taken.

4. "Underwater"- Chester Brown. Luminous GN about early childhood, and guilt, and beauty. I have a hard time actually recommending it though, because it is unfinished. Brown lost interest, I guess, about 200 pages in, so it exists in this weird kind of limbo where you can tell its a masterpiece but can't quite muster up the nerve to call it one.

5. "Nabokov's Dozen"- Vladimir Nabokov. Why on earth would anybody read this instead of one of the more comprehensive collections of his short stories? Because it was cheap, I guess, and had nice yellowed pages and that 60's paperback smell. A nice collection but I wish I'd sprung for the whole set of stories. 

6. "The Principles of Uncertainty"- Maira Kalman. A collection of Maira Kalman's wry and gorgeous water-color diary journalism blog whatevers that she did for the New York Times awhile ago. 

7. "Hermit in Paris"- Italo Calvino. Basically a big catch-all of Calvino's autobiographical writings. Pretty uneven, if only because a large portion of the book is devoted to journalistic interviews, which tend to cover a lot of the same ground. Can't fault the guy for consistency, but the editors could have pruned a little bit to prevent having to hear the same parental background six times. The history of Mussolini portraiture is brilliant, though.

8. "The Prestige"- Christopher Priest. Round one of my intermittent attempts to get into science fiction in 2009. Entertaining enough, good twists and all that, but not as trim and elegant as the movie. And points off for not including Bowie.

9. "Love is a Mix Tape"- Rob Sheffield. Agonized over picking this up for so long, because I kept hearing good things but it looked so, so corny. I suppose I'm glad I read it, the style's comparable to a more vulnerable and wide-eyed Chuck Klosterman I guess, with a lot less acidity and a lot more (maybe warranted) sentimentality. Not great, but a quick read with some good humor and some touching moments.

10. "Native Guard"- Natasha Trethewey. Boy oh boy, a Pulitzer prize winner. As a writer I tend to have a little distaste for overtly confessional poetry, and a tentative fear of form, so when I read a collection that engages with either I do so with some reserves and some muted awe, respectively. As a collection that gets its hands deep into the viscera of both of those things, Native Guard is an intimidating beast. I remember being very impressed, more so with the integration of form into personal narrative than by that narrative itself. 

11. "110 Per$"- Tony Consiglio. Kind of an Alex Robinson type thing, a bit reminiscent of "Tricked" really, with some subtle nods to it. Sort of slight, but with some surprisingly nuanced characterization here and there. 

12. "Let It Be"- Colin Meloy. In general, those 33 1/3 books have been kind of a disappointment. I was sick in the middle of January, and was lent this book by my girlfriend, a big Decemberists/Colin Meloy fan. I like The Replacements enough, I guess, so I gave it a shot. 

Well-- it was better than some of the books in this little line I've read, especially the ones that just read like Brent Dicrescenzio trying for a pay-bump, and I do appreciate the titles that lean more towards memoir than straight history, but it still felt pretty self indulgent. Which is a shame, because the story of the album is a pretty interesting one, definitely more interesting than what Colin Meloy did when he was seven.

13. "The Golden Ass"- Apuleius. Probably better at capturing the feeling of Fellini's "Satyricon" than the actual "Satyricon." A totally fascinating late-Roman novel of low comedy and high mysticism, required reading for anybody who wants to know a thing about anything.

14. "Saga of the Volsungs." An important Icelandic Saga, good to have read if you're interested in the whole narrative genealogy or whatever of Wagner's Nibelungen (although possibly the Nibelungenleid would be the MORE crucial source, I guess, who knows). Interesting but honestly the almost total alienness of the value system makes it tough to fathom, let alone enjoy per se. In the interest of full disclosure (har) I should say that this book and the last one were read for my senior seminar. 

And that caps off January.