September
104. "New Selected Poems of Steve Smith"-Stevie Smith. I'd picked this up in Fairfield, CT a couple of years ago after the Believer had an article about her. I read this en route to Philly, mostly, and enjoyed it a lot. Smith is an idiosyncratic poet, yes, but an immense one.
105. "Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason" -Jessica Warner. A book about the gin acts in the 18th century. Should've been a pretty juicy subject but Warner for the most part plays it pretty dry, focusing a lot on the political and economic causes rather than the sociological effects. Which is fine, in hindsight, although a little disappointing at the time. She avoid a lot of sensationalism and really places the gin craze in a solid context.
106. "Groundswell" -Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff. A book on Web 2.0 marketing or something that I had to read for work. Actually pretty good.
107. "The Hardship Post" -Jehanne Dubrow. Some poems Abby had to read for a class, which I started reading as well. The first half really didn't impress me-- seemed like a pretty blatant Sexton rip-off-- but either the book found its feet, or I found its feet too late, and by the end I was really into what Dubrow was doing.
108. "Diary of a Bad Year"- J.M. Coetzee. One of Coetzee's "this is a novel, but really, check out these essays" things. I can see why the guy from The Elegant Variations was so enthusiastic about this book, it was really lovely and did some nice formal flourishes.
109. "Strangely Marked Metal" -Kay Ryan. Ryan's first book, I think, but not too far off from her later poems. A quick read, don't remember too much of it.
110. "The Lives of Animals"- J.M. Coetzee. I read this, but shouldn't have, because...
111. "Elizabeth Costello" -J.M. Coetzee. ...about a week later I read this which includes the previous book in its entirety along with a bunch of other Costello stories. Well, that's not fair-- "The Lives of Animals" includes some responses from scholars and thinkers, but they were pretty toss-away I felt. Anyway. I didn't really like Elizabeth Costello as a character very much, and didn't feel like J.M. Coetzee gave any of her foils much to present compelling counterpoints.
112. "Spanish Poems of Love and Exile" -Kenneth Rexroth (trans.). A very tiny little City Lights pocket sized anthology. Read it in a park one afternoon, which was perfect for what it was. Interesting to read the author bios in the back-- when this was released apparently Pablo Neruda was not well-known in the states at all.
113. "Permit Me Voyage" -James Agee. I love, love, love "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" so I decided to check out Agee's poetry. Ehh. It is pretty bad, as it turns out.
114. "Waiting for the Barbarians" -J.M. Coetzee. More Coetzee. A much different world than the later stuff I read, but much more visceral and gut-punchy. Easy to see why this is where a lot of people start in on him.
115. "The Black Dahlia"- James Ellroy. Read so much praise for "Blood's A Rover" that I decided to try Ellroy for myself. This was the only thing available at the nearest library, so I started with it. Better as a character piece than as a mystery, and in fact I found a lot of the "plot twists" near the end a distraction from Ellroy's spot-on sense of mood and place. I was impressed enough to go out and buy "American Tabloid" but apparently not impressed enough to actually read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment