As I said last year, I keep track -- even of page numbers (subtracting blank pages at beginnings of books to come up with my totals.) It's a little game for me. This year, my grand total is a record breaker since I started keeping track around 1990: 7,536 pages, about 20.6 a day if you average it out. (Of course, font sizes vary, but I like to think these cancel each other out, sorta.) Not included are individual poems or articles read on the internet, in magazines, anthologies and collections -- that would augment the total considerably, but keeping track of those would be too obsessive, no fun anymore. Audiobook page numbers I calculated by looking up the print editions on Amazon. These are books read (or listened to) last year from cover to cover (a few were begun the previous year). Hyperlinks are to posts about these books on this blog:
POETRY
Sharon Olds: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002
Angela Leuck: Flower Heart
Artie Gold: The Beautiful Chemical Waltz
Nancy R. Lange: Femelle Faucon (French)
Theodore Roethke: The Waking
Elizabeth Glenny: A Periodic Sentence
Mark Strand: Blizzard of One
Gwendolyn MacEwen: The T.E. Lawrence Poems
Hafiz (trans. Daniel Ladinsky): The Gift
Pablo Neruda: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (trans. W.S. Merwin) (reread)
CHAPBOOKS
Eric Folsom: Northeastern Anti-Ghazals
Pris Campbell: Abrasions
Nina Bruck: Still Light at Five O’Clock
POETRY/CRITICISM or ESSAYS
Jack Myers & Don C. Wukasch: Dictionary of Poetic Terms
Robert Pack and Jay Parini, ed. Introspections: American Poets on their Own Poems
Michèle Lalonde: Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose
et poemes
FICTION
Don DeLillo: The Body Artist. (Audiobook)
Stephen Mitchell’s adaptation of Gilgamesh. (Audiobook)
Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia. (Audiobook)
Frank McCourt: Angela’s Ashes (Audiobook)
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces.
Heather O’Neill: Lullabies for Little Criminals.
Don DeLillo: White Noise.
Emmanuèle Bernheim: Sa Femme. (French)
Sara Sheard : Almost Japanese
NON-FICTION
Clotaire Rapaille: The Culture Code.
The Dalai Lama’s Book of Wisdom
Richard Hughes Seager: Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism
SGI: Ordinary Heroes
Edward de Bono : de Bono’s Thinking Course
Piero Ferrucci: The Power of Kindness
Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bullshit
Naomi Wolf: The Beauty Myth.
Daniel G. Amen: Making a Good Brain Great
Alan Watts: The Book
Naomi Klein: No Logo
LITERARY JOURNALS
Saranac Review, #3 (Summer, 2007)
I include this, because its the one journal I read from cover to cover. It's as big as a fair-sized book.
Here are the books I have yet to finish, with the number of pages read this year:
The Practice of Poetry: 64 p. (inc. introduction)
Primo Levy: The Periodic Table: 126 p.
Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: 380 p.
Jon Franklin: Writing for Story: 174 p.
Theodore Roethke: Words for the Wind: 24 p.
Robert Creeley: Selected Poems: 267 p.
The Classic Hundred Poems (Audiobook) 190 p.
Sherwin B Nuland: How We Die 23 p.
Ko Un: The Three Way Tavern (trans. Clare You and Richard Silberg): 34 p.
OK, so call me an egghead! But I'm sure many of you out there would leave me in the dust (or rather, frying pan).
Next year, I'd like to read a lot more poetry. Say, 25 books at least.
4 comments:
Dictionary of Poetic Terms
drew my attention.
-
aababcbcc is a stanza rhyme scheme
I first used when I was 19 for an
intro to a term paper - five years
later I used it at length - I am
not sure I was the first (& only)
person to have used it, but maybe
I am.
-
In October of 1966 I invented a
four-stanza poetic form I called a
quadrunelle. I used it for a set
of six poems.
-
I know this is of little or no
import, but I've been wanting to
pass it along to someone. If you
search the rhyme scheme or the
poetic form, links to entries in
my AOL journal come up/ where you
can find out more.
-
I'm going to see if I can get the
book from the library here.
-
This comment is more for you than
it is for your blog.
Brian Salchert
Thanks!
Is it a good idea to drink prune juice to write a good quadrunelle?
I don't think so. Given that I
revised for years the quadrunelles
I wrote, I would now say it's best
to avoid trying to write one. As
for the prune juice or a serving
(6) of small prunes, doing so is
good for one's bones besides what
else. The other day after eating
a serving, an hour or two later I
almost/ didn't make it. If prunes
made nearly impossible rhyme
schemes pass through one's brain
more easily, then maybe. Of
course there are prunes and tunes
and Saskatoons and loons with
balloons. Then again, perhaps not.
Well, you could write a prunelle.
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