2009, A Good Year For Reading

What I read last year:

1. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity – Slavoj Zizek
2. The Capital of Solitude – Gregory Orfalea
3. The Automatic Message, the Magnetic Fields, the Immaculate Conception (Atlas Anti-Classics) – Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard
4. Bad Alchemy – Dionisio Martinez
5. Singing from the Well – Reinaldo Arenas
6. Dreamtigers (El Hacedor) – Jorge Luis Borges
7. Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object – Kathleen Rooney
8. Only This Blue – Betsy Warland
9. In the Devil’s Territory – Kyle Minor
10. The End of Rude Handles – Jen Tynes
11. Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolano
12. Earth in the Attic – Fady Joudah
13. --------FEB---------Too Close to the Falls – Christine Gildenour
14. The Art of the Poetic Line – James Longenbach
15. Names on the Land – George Stewart
16. A Humument – Tom Phillips
17. In the Land of the Free – Geoffrey Forsyth
18. Bloodroot – Betsy Warland
19. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
20. --------MARCH--------The Bride Minaret – Heather Derr-Smith
21. Blessing of the Animals – Brenda Miller
22. Meteoric Flowers – Elizabeth Willis
23. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
24. The Massacre at El Mozote – Mark Danner
25. Becoming Abigail – Chris Abani
26. Airport – Emily Kendal Frey
27. The Doorbells of Florence – Andrew Losowsky
28. This In Which – George Oppen
29. Pain Fantasy – Jason Bredle
30. Eva Hesse Drawing – Catherin de Zegher, ed.
31. Falsework – Gary Geddes
32. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: a life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin – Lawrence Weschler
33. Areas of Fog – Joseph Massey
34. Travel – Yuichi Yokoyama
35. ----------APRIL----------Nada – Carman Laforet
36. In the Mode of Disappearance – Jonathan Weinert
37. Dark Thirty – Santee Frazier
38. Blood Dazzler – Patricia Smith
39. Quadrifariam – Frank Samperi
40. The Man Without Qualities (Part One) – Robert Musil
41. Undersleep – Julie Doxsee
42. The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
43. ---------MAY---------Wetlands – Charlotte Roche
44. Annie John – Jamaica Kincaid
45. Voice of Ice – Atla Ifland
46. All the Day’s Sad Stories – Tina May Hall
47. The Boy with the Thorn in his Side: A Memoir – Keith Fleming
48. We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 – Tram Nguyen
49. Antidotes for an Alibi – Amy King
50. Dark Blue Suit – Peter Bacho
51. Fox – Adrienne Rich
52. Recycle Suburbia – Dan Nowak
53. Carnage in the Love Trees – Richard Greenfield
54. Denny Smith – Robert Gluck
55. Remnants of Hannah – Dara Weir
56. Body Language – Mark Cunningham
57. ---------JUNE---------In a Bear’s Eye – Yannick Murphy
58. Women as Lovers – Elfriede Jelinek
59. Don Juan in the Village – Jane DeLynn
60. Helene Cixous Live Theory – Ian Blyth & Susan Sellers
61. This is Water – David Foster Wallace
62. After – Nancy Pagh
63. Signed, Mata Hari – Yannick Murphy
64. The Devil’s Highway – Luis Alberto Urrea
65. The Letters of Allen Ginsberg – ed. Bill Morgan
66. ----------JULY----------Black Leapt In – Chris Forhan
67. Milestones – Marina Tsvetaeva
68. Prairie Fever – Mary Biddinger
69. Nets – Jen Bervin
70. Dutch Painting – R.H. Fuchs
71. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: the French May Events of 1968 – Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman
72. Heironymus Bosch – Walter S. Gibson
73. Some of the Dead are Still Breathing – Charles Bowden
74. Stone – Osip Mandelstam
75. Self-Portrait with Crayon – Allison Benis White
76. The All-Purpose Magical Tent – Lytton Smith
77. ----------AUGUST----------The Passion of Michel Foucault – James Miller
78. Self-Portrait – Brian Johnson
79. Ohio Violence – Alison Stine
80. Finding Water, Holding Stone – Jim Bertolino
81. The Air Lost in Breathing – Simone Muench
82. Legend of Light – Bob Hicok
83. The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano
84. Bardo – Suzanne Paola
85. A Personal Anthology – Jorge Luis Borges
86. Belligerence – Andrei Codrescu
87. The End is the Beginning – Matt Briggs
88. ---------SEPTEMBER---------Torch Lake – Brian Johnson
89. Auspices – Cid Corman
90. Names Above Houses – Oliver de la Paz
91. Plight – Cid Corman
92. Livingdying – Cid Corman
93. The Heart that Lies Outside the Body – Stephanie Lenox
94. Scary, No Scary – Zachary Schomburg
95. The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski
96. Crush – Richard Siken
97. Furious Lullaby – Oliver de la Paz
98. Fup: A Modern Fable – Jim Dodge
99. Madonna anno domini – Joshua Clover
100. The Feminine and the Sacred – Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva
101. How Some People Like Their Eggs – Sean Lovelace
102. Lust & Cashmere – A.E. Simms
103. Almond Blossoms and Beyond – Mahmoud Darwish
104. The Continental Caper – Sally Alatalo
105. A Beginning on the Short Story: Notes – William Carlos Williams
106. The Bomb – Makodo Oda
107. “A” 1-12 – Louis Zukofsky
108.------------OCTOBER------------Conspiracy – Anthony Summers
109.Quiet Days in Clichy – Henry Miller
110. The Pinch Runner Memorandum – Kenzaburo Oe
111. Internal West – Priscilla Becker
112. Amulet – Roberto Bolano
113. Ties That Bind – Sarah Schulman
114. Say You’re One of Them – Uwem Akpan
115. 40 Watts – C.D. Wright
116. Boris by the Sea – Matvei Yankelevich
117. Transgender History – Susan Stryker
118. Lamp of Letters – Katharine Whitcomb
119. Stars of the Night Commute – Ana Bozicevic
120. Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants – Elena Georgiou
121. To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design – Henry Petroski
122. ----------NOVEMBER----------By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart
123. In the Architecture of Bone – Alan Semerdjian
124. Winter Season – Toni Bentley
125. The Anthologist – Nicholson Baker
126. American Husband – Kary Wayson
127. Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson
128. Timbuktu – Paul Auster
129. American Romances: Essays – Rebecca Brown
130. Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers – Arundhati Roy
131. Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel – Edmund White
132. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me – Brent Goodman
133. The Bitter Withy – Donald Revell
134. The Bomb: A New History – Stephen M. Younger
135. Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America – Linda Lawrence Hunt
136. Take It – Joshua Beckman
137. Where I Stay – Andrew Zornoza
138. ----------DECEMBER----------Anthem – Ayn Rand
139. Parabola – Lily Hoang
140. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? – Lorrie Moore
141. Lost Alphabet – Lisa Olstein
142. For You, For You I am Trilling These Songs – Kathleen Rooney
143. Summer Crossing – Truman Capote
144. Dark Would (missing person) – Liz Waldner
145. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life – Herve Guibert
146. Household Words – Joan Silber
147. Golden Days – Carolyn See
148. Source – Mark Doty
149. The Curtain of Trees – Alberto Rios
150. Radio Crackling, Radio Gone – Lisa Olstein

--

2008 reading list

Listed last read to first, as in The Humument was the last book I finished... yesterday. A lot of these books were amazing, this was probably the best book-reading year I've had in my 32 years. Some were downright awful. When keeping records for myself I have a 5-star system, but have removed that here. My stars are not on the empirical goodness of a book, but a combination of my enjoyment of it and its goodness for what it is, if that makes any sense. As in, I would probably never value a graphic novel over a regular novel unless the regular novel was awful, because I like the form more of a regular novel, but the graphic novels on this list (there are three or four, I believe) often got higher marks. If you're curious about any of these, let me know. Probably the best of all of these was Tom Phillips's The Humument. I should note that what I read was the 1995 edition of the book, as I believe there are 5 editions and some are entirely different than others, and the ones that aren't entirely different are mostly different. Google it, you'll see what I mean. I think you can read the most recent one (released 2005...?) online. This book has done more for my writing in the past month than I think anything has. And I've started one of my own - The Oil Rat, a treatment of Rousseau's The Social Contract.

I should also list my favorites of these... not in order of greatest love:
2. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
20. The Book of Chameleons – Jose Eduardo Agualusa
43. Zubaida’s Window (A Novel of Iraqi Exile) – Iqbal Al-Qazwini
47. Half a Life – V.S. Naipaul
59. The Wasteland, Four Quartets, and Other Poems – T.S. Eliot
66. Days With Diam - Svend Age Madsen
72. In the Skin of a Lion – Michael Ondaatje
85. Memory for Forgetfulness – Mahmoud Darwish
104. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories – Pamela Ryder
114. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
119. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
124. Beauty and Sadness – Yasunari Kawabata
129. Some Prefer Nettles – Junichiro Tanizaki

Also, I did not list in the above favorites those books written by people I know. Not even my girlfriend's. Because those are always the most enjoyable read. I would always choose to read something by someone I know before anything else. There's something so intrusive and satisfying, yes, sorry, that delights more than anything. They are also phenomenal writers all.


1. The Humument – Tom Phillips
2. The Book of Evidence – John Banville
3. The Tether – Carl Phillips
4. The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus – Joshua Kendall
5. Oneiromance (an epithalamion) – Kathleen Rooney
6. The Curtain – Milan Kundera
7. Saturday – Ian McEwan
8. Picasso: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Norman Mailer
9. Ideas of Heaven: a ring of stories – Joan Silber
10. God Hates Fags – Michael Cobb
11. Factory – Antler
12. The Beauty of the Husband – Anne Carson
13. Our Lady of the Artichokes – Katherine Vaz
14. Pastoral – Carl Phillips
15. Parenthetical Ontology – Deborah Poe
16. On Photography – Susan Sontag
17. Elimination Dance – Michael Ondaatje
18. Cortege – Carl Phillips
19. The Mystery Guest – Gregoire Bouillier
20. The Book of Chameleons – Jose Eduardo Agualusa
21. The O. Henry Stories 2007 – Ed. Joanne Furman (liked two stories, Joan Silber and Yannick Murphy)
22. Red Bird – Mary Oliver
23. What I Think About When I Think About Running – Haruki Murakami
24. Theory of Light and Matter – Andrew Porter
25. After the Quake: Stories – Haruki Murakami
26. The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese – Arthur Sze
27. Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare Book Dealer, The Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus – Gregory Gibson
28. The Name of the World – Denis Johnson
29. Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West – Benazir Bhutto
30. Anxious Pleasures: a novel after Kafka – Lance Olsen
31. Botchan – Natsume Soseki
32. Unfortunately, It was Paradise – Mahmoud Darwish
33. Inside and other short fiction: Japanese women by Japanese women – Diado, Shimamoto, Muroi, Uchida, Fujino, Yamada, Hasegawa, Takagi
34. Chicken with Plums – Marjane Satrapi
35. Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman – Sharon Rudahl
36. 3x10 – Ernest Hemingway
37. Three Chinese Poets (Translations of Wang Wei, Li Bai (Li Po), and Du Fu) – Vikram Seth
38. Louis Riel – Chester Brown
39. Son for Night – Chris Abani
40. Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr’s life, discoveries, and the century he shaped – Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis
41. Body Language – Kelly Magee
42. Windows – Robert Creeley
43. Zubaida’s Window (A Novel of Iraqi Exile) – Iqbal Al-Qazwini
44. The Ghost Soldiers – James Tate (liked it as fiction, not poetry, long prose poems, three pages)
45. Brief Encounters with Che Guevera – Ben Fountain (last story, 11 fingers )
46. Our Former Lives in Art – Jennifer S. Davis
47. Half a Life – V.S. Naipaul
48. After Dark – Haruki Murakami
49. Cultivating Bonsai – V. Ditri
50. Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonard Tsypkin
51. Love is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire – Carol Guess
52. The Milk of Inquiry – Wayne Koestenbaum
53. WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program – Pete Earley and Gerald Shur
54. The Wavering Knife – Brian Evenson
55. NIghtwood – Djuna Barnes
56. Narrow Road to the Interior – Matsuo Basho
57. Safe Sex – Harvey Fierstein
58. Addicted to War – Joel Andreas
59. The Wasteland, Four Quartets, and Other Poems – T.S. Eliot
60. Texas School Book Depository – Cathryn Hankla
61. The Politics of Truth – Ambassador Joseph Wilson
62. Master Harold and the Boys – Athol Fugard
63. Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
64. Lawnboy – Paul Lisicky
65. American Linden – Matthew Zapruder
66. Days With Diam - Svend Age Madsen
67. Fake Math – Ryan Fitzpatrick
68. Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch – Hollis Gillespie
69. I Never Liked You – Chester Brown
70. A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short Short Fiction by Four Women – Clark, Ellen, Fish, Smith
71. Travels in the Scriptorium – Paul Auster
72. In the Skin of a Lion – Michael Ondaatje
73. Father of Lies – Brian Evenson
74. King Baby – Lia Purpura
75. The Stone Gods – Jeannette Winterson
76. Lunch Poems – Frank O’Hara
77. Family Bible – Melissa J. Delbridge
78. The Sleep of Four Cities – Jen Currin
79. Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
80. Hiding Out – Jonathan Messinger
81. Road-side Dog - Czeslaw Milosz
82. Girl Factory – Jim Krusoe
83. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
84. You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train – Howard Zinn
85. The Little Earth Book – James Bruges
86. Memory for Forgetfulness – Mahmoud Darwish
87. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
88. Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity – Hal Niedzviecki
89. Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife – Mary Roach
90. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
91. Talk Shows – Monica de la Torre
92. Tinderbox Lawn – Carol Guess
93. I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual – Pierre Seel
94. Out of Light – Joseph Massey
95. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
96. Final Girl – Daphne Gottlieb
97. The Romance of Happy Workers – Anne Boyer
98. Real to Reel – Lidia Yuknavitch
99. Brevity & Echo – Eds. Abigail Becker & Kathleen Rooney
100. Hagiography – Jen Currin
101. City Life – Donald Barthelme
102. Road of Five Churches – Stephanie Dickinson
103. American Husband – Kary Wayson
104. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories – Pamela Ryder
105. Modern Times – Matthea Harvey
106. Now the Day is Over – Joan Fiset
107. Lucy – Jamaica Kincaid
108. The Vicinity – David O’Meara
109. Nine Humorous Stories – Anton Chekov
110. Summer Rain – Marguerite Duras
111. Planet News – Allen Ginsberg
112. The Smell of Apples – Mark Behr
113. The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq – John Crawford
114. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
115. Beloved Infidel – Dean Young
116. War Trash – Ha Jin
117. Attempts at a Life – Danielle Dutton
118. Underwater City – Kelle Groom
119. In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
120. Gazelle – Rikki Ducornet
121. Be the Pack Leader - Cesar Millan
122. My Untimely Death – Adam Peterson
123. What Narcissism Means to Me – Tony Hoagland
124. Beauty and Sadness – Yasunari Kawabata
125. The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation – Barbara Rossing
126. Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography – Andrew Morton
127. The Triumph of Achilles – Louise Gluck
128. Two Lives Gertrude and Alice – Janet Malcolm
129. Some Prefer Nettles – Junichiro Tanizaki
130. The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves – Curtis White
131. Figures for a Darkroom Voice – Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

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

The Anxiety of Deadlines

In the house, Carol and I have set things up so that we don't get in each other's way. She has what I call her "suite" upstairs, and with the white noise machine on she can block out almost everything. Everything except what I call the Real White Noise Machine:

When Rainer speaks, he will always be heard. And, blind and startled frequently, he is heard a lot.

My office is downstairs. I initially had the idea, after a year of substantially cluttering up one small room in our other house, of having nothing but a desk and a chair. With, of course, the madness of my bulletin board and the yellow moons of post-it notes that surround. The small Basquiat calendar remains on October. It regularly falls to the floor, but the prevailing month lets me know it's been at least three weeks since this has happened. I started with the desk and chair. The 1950s couch, given to me by my good friend Don moved in:

then the bookshelf. The bookshelf is small, three shelves only. The idea behind this is to recycle books: read them, then sell them back to Henderson's (current credit on my account is somewhere near $120, something that makes me feel safe the way my parents never did), then buy books only as I have time to read them. I refuse to get another shelf. This is a system that Should work.

There's only one pile of books on the floor. Granted it reaches the full three or so feet in heigth that the shelf does, it is only one stack. The other stack on TOP of the bookshelf is probably only two feet high. And we won't go into the conversion the room's closet took on. One day there's wood on my floor, the next day there are shelves in the closet and the books have again multiplied. Then there's the chair I bought at the Catholic yard sale. I felt good about talking them down. Thirty dollars was way too much for a chair that who knows who has sat in. Regardless, the other dog likes to sit in it and watch me read on the couch.


All of this was the setup for what? Today as I read Allen Ginsberg's _Planet News_ a bird flew into the window. From this I got a new title. I keep a list for things that don't readily title themselves. I looked up just in time to see the bird. It flew away, shaken. I was reminded of the week Natalie repeatedly saw birds flying into windows, I wrote down the title, I returned to my book. Three or so stanzas down in the poem I was on (Waking in New York) I read this: "Oh New York, oh Now our bird / flying past glass window Chirp", which reminded me of the post on death I'd been meaning to write.

Last week an experienced kayaking doctor got blown off course in the bay and was found facedown in the water three hours later. He was 40. I have little orange bottles in my bathroom with his name on them.

Five years ago tomorrow my grandmother died. She was my favorite person in the world. Once she realized I had no relationship with my mother she took over in the ways that she could. She wasn't the baking cookies kind of grandmother, she didn't coddle, but she loved me.

A friend of a friend (a girl in her 20s) died last week, a blood vessel rupturing in her head.

All of this reminds me I could die anytime.

I have things to do. I've never been happier. I've found the girl of my dreams. Somehow happiness has brought terror though. I'd never given a thought about mortality until I found I had everything to live for.