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.
No comments:
Post a Comment