Friday, January 05, 2007

BOOKS READ IN 2006

As I'm sure some of you do, I keep track of what I read -- books, and, arbitrary as that is, even page numbers (here I get to flex a rarely exercised statistical muscle in my brain). The books I read in 2006 amounted to 5,905 pages (I don't include blank pages at the beginnings of books) -- a pretty strong year of reading for me. Actually I've been keeping track since about 1988 -- it's interesting go over those old lists! I include complete books -- but don't include say individual poems in collections or stories or articles read on the internet (a large bulk of my reading, actually). If I read what came out as an individual book within a Collected, I'm kind to myself and count that as a completed book. (I rarely can make my way through a whole Collected.) Here's an edited list. Hyperlinks are to reviews or quotes or commentary made earlier this last year on this blog. Clearly, I don't get around to writing on this blog about everything I read, including some of the reading highlights of my year. Peter, I intend to write about your book one of these days, and Bill, yours, and Steven, yours. Don't know what happened a the end of the list -- it went invisible, so I turned it yellow; now I can't change it from yellow, or the last part from a large white font.

POETRY (Complete books)
Theodore Roethke (from the Collected): Praise to the End
Hart Crane: The Bridge
Ilya Kaminsky: Dancing in Odessa
Vladimir Mayakovsky: The Bedbug & Selected Poetry
Anne Simpson: Loop
Don Coles: from How We All Swiftly (The First Six Books):
Sometimes All Over, Anniversaries
William Carlos Williams, Selected
Bill Knott (Saint Geraud): The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans
Li-Young Lee: Rose
Steven Michael Berzensky (Mick Burrs): The Names Leave the Stones: Poems New & Selected
Peter Pereira: Saying the World
Francisco Santos: Undressing the Night (reread in the process of editing)
CHAPBOOKS:
Stephen Michael Berzensky: Among the Discards
Jean-Pierre Pelletier: L’Amnésique (Vols 1 & 2) (French)
Allen Sutterfield (Adze): Rain Moth
Vincent Tinguely: parc ave. poems
Nina Bruck: Here I Am (Working Title: read in the process of selecting/editing
NOVELS
Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code
Nicole Brossard (trans. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood): Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon
Ivan Klíma, A Summer Affair
NON-FICTION
David Kline & Dan Burstein: Blog! how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business & culture
Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubmer: Freakonomics
Janet Frame: An Angel at my Table, (Autobiography Vol. 2)
Joseph Epstein: Ambition: The Secret Passion
Peter Singer and Jim Mason: The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Moira Farr: After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale.
Pat Capponi: The War at Home: An Intimate Portrait of Canada’s Poor
Kay Redfield Jamison: An Unquiet Mind (also here and here)
Jack Henry Abbot: In the Belly of the Beast
The Quotable Nichiren: Words for Daily Living
Deepak Chopra: The Book of Secrets
Joseph Campbell: Myths To Live By
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Jumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies
Ivan Klíma: My Merry Mornings
Guy de Maupassant: Contes Choisis de Guy de Maupassant (in French)
BOOKS PARTIALLY READ:
Frederick K. Goodwin & Kay Redfield Jamison: Manic Depressive Illness
Dennis Lee, Body Music (two essays: Poetry of Al Purdy, Body Music)
BOOKS UNFINISHED (& intend to complete)
Jack Myers & Don C. Wukasch: Dictionary of Poetic Terms (now I'm up to the end of letter M)
Beth Powning:
Edge Seasons

Robert Pack and Jay Parini, ed.
Introspections: American Poets on their Own Poems

Nick Flynn:
Some Ether

Daisaku Ikeda:
For Today & Tomorrow

Hafiz trans. Daniel Ladinsky:
The Gift

The Dalai Lama’s Book of Wisdom

Jack Kornfield:
After the Ecstasy, The Laundry

Mark Strand & Eavan Boland, editors:
The Making of a Poem: A Norton
Anthology of Forms
The Essential Rilke
(trans. Galway Kinnel, Hanna Liebman)
Sharon Olds:
Strike Sparks
Maureen Seaton: Little Ice Age

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