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.