Goals and Results, 2007

1. marathon training / "run from Canada to Mexico" (1381 miles)

While not exactly a New Year's resolution, considering I started back seriously running/thinking about a marathon in fall of 2006, I did set myself a yearlong goal of running 1381 miles, the distance I-5 runs from border to border. This goal was slowed in the summer, due to injury/problems with my hips. Now, to see my dance moves, etc, one would say, "hey, you don't have any hip problems." However, the screaming pain I would experience for days after one run (compounded by daily running) begged to differ. A stretching regimen helped, but did not solve. Having missed the marathon in early October, by the end of October I had mostly given up on my task of running border to border. I continue to run, but certainly not the 5-7 days a week I was doing.

Goal: 1381
Actual: 653

Nearly halfway, I at least made it into California by about 80 miles.

-

2. read 150 books in one year

Goal: 150 books
Actual: 156 books

I did almost completely neglect my magazine and journal subscriptions though. While I read about half of each of The Nation that came to my door, I barely touched the Smithsonians. Most other journals sat around for a month or two looking pretty before being recycled.

The count of 156 includes several chapbooks (6 or 7), which I allowed because the count does not include the books I started and am still reading (because I like them so much, 7) or the books I read more than once (because I like them so much, 2 novels/4 or 5 books of poetry).

The List:

1. Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris
2. The Long Emergency - James Howard Kunstler
3. Midnight all Day - Hanif Kureishi
4. No Sweeter Fat - Nancy Pagh
5. Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby, Jr.
6. Dog & Me - Kary Wayson
7. Mayflower Madam - Sydney Biddle Barrows
8. Conversations with Edward Said - Tariq Ali
9. Love is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire - Carol Guess
10. Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
11. Spot in the Dark - Beth Gylys
12. Writing in the Margins - Truong Tran
13. The End of Alice - A.M. Homes
14. State of Denial - Bob Woodward
15. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
16. Naphtalene - Alia Mamdouh
17. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
18. The Straight Mind - Monique Wittig
19. My Cocaine Museum - Michael Taussig
20. The Golden Fruits - Nathalie Sarraute
21. And I'm not Jenny - Tara Rebele
22. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines - Janna Levin
23. Esthetique du Mal - Wallace Stevens
24. The Red Coal - Gerald Stern
25. Growing Darkness, Growing Light - Jean Valentine
26. Was She Pretty? - Leanne Shapton
27. The Empire Writes Back - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin
28. The Endless Short Story - Ronald Sukenick
29. The Child - Sarah Schulman
30. The Beautifully Worthless - Ali Liebegott
31. On Looking: Essays - Lia Purpura
32. Vaquita - Edith Pearlman
33. Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen
34. The Collected Stories - Amy Hempel
35. Sleeping with the Dictionary - Harryette Mullen
36. The Poetry Chains of Dominic Luxford
37. Girls in Their Drinking Dresses - Heather Sellers
38. Fun Home - Alison Bechtel
39. Ava - Carole Maso
40. Dust and Conscience - Truong Tran
41. The Engagement - Georges Simenon
42. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed and Fail - Jared Diamond
43. Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities - Olena Kalytiak Davis
44. Rise Up - Matthew Rohrer
45. The Mistress's Daughter - A.M. Homes
46. Adult Video - Margaret Christakos
47. The IHOP Papers - Ali Liebegott
48. Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture - Leslie Heywood
49. Piercing - Ryu Murikami
50. We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs - Nasrin Alavi
51. In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing - Olivia Dresher (ed.)
52. The Pajamaist - Matthew Zapruder
53. Geri - Geri Jewell
54. Forgiveness - Jim Grimsley
55. Don't Let Me Be Lonely - Claudia Rankine
56. Wind in a Box - Terrance Hayes
57. Gone to New York - Ian Frazier
58. Home in three days. Don't wash. - Linda Smukler
59. My Lives - Edmund Wilson
60. Covering - Kenji Yoshino
61. Stick Out Your Tongue - Ma Jian
62. And Her Soul Out of Nothing - Olena Kalytiak Davis
63. Sorry, Tree - Eileen Myles
64. Journals, Vol. 1 - Andre Gide
65. Perfect Affection - Robin Becker
66. Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet
67. Ismailia Eclipse - Khaled Mattawa
68. Dancer from the Dance - Andrew Holleran
69. In Praise of the Stepmother - Mario Vargas Llosa
70. Luminous Mysteries - John Holman
71. Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge - Harryette Mullen
72. The Folding Star - Alan Hollinghurst
73. Perishable: A Memoir - Dirk Jamison
74. Nothing Doing - Cid Corman
75. Vulgarity in Literature - Aldous Huxley
76. So, You Want to Be Canadian - Kerry Colburn & Rob Sorensen
77. On Writing - Stephen King
78. City of Glass - Douglas Coupland
79. On the Ice - Gretchen Legler
80. Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
81. The Sky is a Well - Claudia Smith
82. Rare and Commonplace Flowers - Carmen L. Oliveira
83. Under the Jaguar Sun - Italo Calvino
84. The Other Woman - Colette
85. You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression - Matthew Rothschild
86. Michael Martone - Michael Martone
87. Kwaidan - Lafcadio Hearn
88. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute - Grace Paley
89. Transmetropolitan: the cure - Warren Ellis
90. Strait as the Gate - Andre Gide
91. Nonsense and Happiness - Peter Hamke
92. Living Room - Geoff Bouvier
93. In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters - Robert Coover
94. Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Italo Calvino
95. Volpone - Ben Johnson
96. War Stories - Howard Nemerov
97. I Call This Flirting - Sherrie Flick
98. Theory of Orange - Rachel M. Simon
99. Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke
100. The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
101. Sugar Bush & other stories - Jenn Farrell
102. Mercy, Mercy Me - Elena Georgiou
103. Sophie Calle, M'as-tu Vue - ed. Christine Macel
104. An Ideal Husband - Oscar Wilde
105. The Gangster We Are All Looking For - le thi diem thuy
106. Pink Institution - Selah Saterstrom
107. The Bathroom - Jean-Philippe Toussant
108. The Book of Hours - Rainer Maria Rilke
109. The Meat and Spirit Plan - Selah Saterstrom
110. The Man Suit - Zachary Schomburg
111. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
112. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak - Ed. Eric Falkoff
113. Hornito: My Lie Life - Mike Albo
114. Fresh Kills - David Breskin
115. Mythologies - Roland Barthes
116. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself - Young ha Kim
117. Next Life - Rae Armantrout
118. Intimacy - Hanif Kureishi
119. Guantanamo - Dorothea Dieckmann
120. The Bird is a Raven - Benjamin Lebert
121. The Day the Leader was Killed - Naguib Mahfouz
122. Citizen Of - Christian Hawkey
123. In the Box Called Pleasure - Kim Addonizio
124. The End of Youth - Rebecca Brown
125. Poetry as Insurgent Art - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
126. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
127. At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches - Susan Sontag
128. Spinning into Butter - Rebecca Gilman
129. We Are On Our Own - Miriam Katin
130. Clear Cut Future - Anthology
131. The Ghost in the Mirror - Alain Robbe-Grillet
132. I Am America (and So Can You) - Stephen Colbert
133. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
134. Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's - Marijane Meaker
135. Texts for Nothing - Samuel Beckett
136. Sad Little Breathing Machine - Matthea Harvey
137. One Love Affair - Jenny Boully
138. Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth - Israel Chalfen
139. Swann's Way- Marcel Proust
140. A Sketch of My Life - Thomas Mann
141. The Stranger - Albert Camus
142. The Book of Perceptions - Truong Tran (poetry) and Chung Hoang Chuong (photography)
143. My Shining Archipelago - Talvikki Ansel
144. The Artist and the Mathematician: the story of Nicolas Bourbaki the genius mathematician who never existed - Amir D. Aczel
145. The Cheese Monkeys - Chip Kidd
146. Konfidenz - Ariel Dorfman
147. Nocturnes - Thomas Mann
148. More than Anything - Hiram Larew
149. Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss
150. Bare - Elisabeth Eaves
151. Petitioner - Suzanne Paola
152. The Kimnama - Kim Roberts
153. Brown: The Last Discovery of America - Richard Rodriguez
154. How Many of You Are You? - Philip Jenks
155. Sky Lounge - Mark Bibbins
156. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass