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.