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.