2013's book list

This year my goal was 150 books. I don't usually set the goal until I get about midway through the year when I feel like I can gauge the possibilities. The first half of 2013 started off slow, as I was in school. And then there were huge stretches where I was going through a bit of a valley emotionally and nothing seemed to stick as fabulous. For this reason, there are some things I will have to go back to.

For the first day of the year today I am reading Auden. For last, well, here it is, all 100 by women, 47 by men, 3 by both, 30 nonfiction, 28 fiction, 92 poetry:

1. Just Kids – Patti Smith
2. The World Doesn’t End – Charles Simic
3. Just Whisper: A Valentine – C.D. Wright
4. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeannette Winterson
5. The Game of Boxes – Catherine Barnett
6. Watching Lumia – Nick Admussen
7. Tip of the Iceberg – Laura Szumowski
8. The Art Lover – Carole Maso
9. Madness, Rack, and Honey – Mary Ruefle
10. –Collected Poems – Marianne Moore
11. Nomina – Karen Volkman
12. Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present – Ed. David Lehman
13. Time and Materials – Robert Hass
14. As If A Bird Flew By Me – Sara Greenslit
15. Translucent Salamander – CAConrad
16. How Literature Saved My Life – (David Shields)
17. News of the World – Philip Levine
18. Harm – Hillary Gravendyk
19. The Bruise – Magdalena Zurawski
20. --Rent Boy – Gary Indiana
21. Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse – Darcie Dennigan
22. Theophobia – Bruce Beasley
23. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama – Alison Bechdel
24. Shelter – Laura Jensen
25. If Not Metamorphic – Brenda Iijima
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
27. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
28. Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
29. Our Lady of the Ruins – Traci Brimhall
30. Carnival – Jason Bredle
31. Two Kinds of Decay – Sarah Manguso
32. –Readings in World Literature – Srikanth Reddy
33. The Monkey’s Mask – Dorothy Porter
34. Render / An Apocalypse – Rebecca Gayle Howell
35. The Lake Has No Saint – Stacey Waite
36. Baguette – Emily Kendal Frey
37. Quiet – Susan Cain
38. Begging for it – Alex Dimitrov
39. Full Catastrophe Living – Zach Savich
40. The Commandrine and Other Poems – Joyelle McSweeney
41. Small Porcelain Head – Allison Benis White
42. Fortino Samano (The Overflowing of the Poem) – Virginie Lalucq & Jean-Luc Nancy
43. Heavenly Questions - Gjertrud Schnackenberg
44. Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits – Bill Porter
45. Potential Strangers – Killarney Clary
46. Human Dark With Sugar – Brenda Shaughnessy
47. Video Tape – Andrew Zawacki
48. --Riva: A Chapter – Soham Patel
49. My Life and My Life in the Nineties – Lyn Hejiinian
50. Blood – Shane McCrae
51. The Craft of Translation – John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, eds.
52. Theories of Translation – Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds.
53. –F IN – Carol Guess
54. Snapshots – Alain Robbe-Grillet
55. Deepstep Come Shining – C.D. Wright
56. Drawing Water – Eva Heisler
57. Alphabet - Inger Christensen
58. On Sal Mal Lane – Ru Freeman
59. Open Winter – Rae Gouirand
60. Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith – Joanna Ruocco
61. The History of Anonymity – Jennifer Chang
62. –Say Goodnight – Timothy Liu
63. Poems in the Rough – Paul Valery
64. Body Toxic – Susanne Antonetta
65. Play – Liz Waldner
66. The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
67. O Holy Insurgency – Mary Biddinger
68. Beyond Heart Mountain – Lee Ann Roripaugh
69. Drought – Debra DiBlasi
70. The Orphan Conducts the Dovehouse Orchestra – Deborah Woodard
71. The Boss – Victoria Chang
72. Bough Down – Karen Green
73. Dreams of My Russian Summers – Andrei Makine
74. Notes of an Anatomist – F. Gonzalez-Crussi
75. Collected Poems (Ghost Money, Star Ledger, The Only World) – Lynda Hull
76. The Bridge – Hart Crane
77. A Meaningful Life – L.J. Davis
78. Starts with O – Olga Broumas
79. Human Nature – Alice Anderson
80. Medieval Scenes – Robert Duncan
81. –Veronica – Mary Gaitskill
82. By Night in Chile – Roberto Bolano
83. All My Pretty Ones – Anne Sexton
84. The Mansion of Happiness – Robin Ekiss
85. The Terrible Stories – Lucille Clifton
86. At the Bottom of the River – Jamaica Kincaid
87. The Girl with Brown Fur – Stacey Levine
88. Blue Nights – Joan Didion
89. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
90. My Brother – Jamaica Kincaid
91. The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard
92. Have You Seen Me? – Sandra Cisneros
93. Burial – Claire Donato
94. Barf: A Manifesto – Dodie Bellamy
95. +|’me’S-pace – Chr|st|ne Werthe|m
96. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 – Lucille Clifton
97. Death Centos – Diana Arterian
98. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
99. Afterpastures – Claire Hero
100. –--Fierce Attachments – Vivian Gornick
101. Love, Like Pronouns – Rosmarie Waldrop
102. Musca Domestica – Christine Hume
103. The Situation and What Crosses It – Amy Schrader
104. Concentricity – Sheila Murphy
105. An Alphabet for Gourmets – MFK Fisher
106. Archer Avenue – Kristy Bowen
107. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys – D. A. Powell
108. Eulogies – Elizabeth Soto
109. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
110. Darkness Visible – William Styron
111. Break the Glass – Jean Valentine
112. Destroyer and Preserver – Matthew Rohrer
113. Abstraktion und Einfühlung – Percival Everett
114. Prayers of an Accidental Nature – Debra Di Blasi
115. Strangeland – Tracey Emin
116. The Orchard – Brigit Pegeen Kelly
117. 50 American Plays – the Dickman twins
118. Holy Land – Rauan Klassnik
119. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Marukami
120. The Universe War – Guy Benjamin Brookshire
121. My Mother: Demonology – Kathy Acker
122. --I Was There For Your Somniloquy – Kelli Anne Noftle
123. The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories – Don Delillo
124. Poems & Prose – Gerard Manley Hopkins
125. Self and Simulacra – Liz Waldner
126. Liliane’s Balcony: A Novella of Fallingwater – Kelcey Parker
127. 67 Mixed Messages – Ed Allen
128. The Fortieth Day – Kazim Ali
129. Vulgar Remedies – Anna Journey
130. Black Dog Songs – Lisa Jarnot
131. This Connection of Everyone With Lungs – Juliana Spahr
132. Theories of Falling – Sandra Beasley
133. –I was the Jukebox – Sandra Beasley
134. Tender Buttons – Gertrude Stein
135. Life on Mars – Tracy K. Smith
136. Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems – Thomas Sayers Ellis
137. Revolver – Robyn Schiff
138. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil – C.D. Wright
139. Negro League Baseball – Harmony Holiday
140. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning – Maggie Nelson
141. Garbage – A.R. Ammons
142. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic – Eva Heisler
143. One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses – Lucy Corin
144. The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting: The Life of Lee Harvey Oswald – Abner Smith
145. Bright Power, Dark Peace – Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito
146. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar – Cheryl Strayed
147. Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and other Off and Back Handed Importunities – Olena Kalytiak Davis
148. A Magic Book – Sasha Steensen
149. Aliens & Anorexia – Chris Kraus
150. Flowering Mall – Brandon Brown

And while I hate to play favorites, some that I really loved (of those I was reading for the first time) include Mary Ruefle's Madness Rack and Honey, Allison Benis White's Small Porcelain Head, Bruce Beasley's Theophobia, Andrew Zawaki's Video Tape, C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, Jennifer Chang's The History of Anonymity, Brandon Brown's Flowering Mall, and Lucy Corin's One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses.