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.
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