So I was an idiot and didn’t record all the books I read since January of this year. The most unfortunate part of this negligence is not being able to record all the books I read in my last semester of school. But maybe that’s unfortunate, as putting all my thesis reading on display might not be the wisest move!
So on with the post-college reading list for 2008! I used my Goodreads account to record most of the books I read since the summer. So what follows is an incomplete list, to say the least, with about one line to summarize my experience with that book (it keeps the memory digging to a minimum).
The books are loosely in a chronological order:
Vladimir Mayakovsky: Listen! Early Poems
This incredible and required book of verse from Russia’s own Soviet/Avant Guard poet can be read over and over again, which is what’s happening, even now.
D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
This archaic book is the key to the more important works by D. H. Lawrence, providing a nice, pre-modern look at woman’s action, sexual expression, and rough working-class life.
Juliana Spahr: Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another
Spahr weaves her lines around and around in such an organic process that the most I got out of this book was the sheer daunting potential of verse.
CAConrad: Deviant Propulsion: Poems
Conrad’s first major work of poetry is 21st century rebellion under the mystical influences of gay sexuality, Philadelphia regionalism, and the powers of history.
Vladimir Nabokov: Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
This classic collection has unfortunately fallen to my poor memory–I do recommend it, however, but not for the title story, which was too abstract to keep with other, stronger works by Nabokov.
David Foster Wallace: Oblivion
The late, great DFW uses novella-length short stories to convey how the errors of relationships, insight, and the viral mentality in groups of people will not necessarily destroy or decay, but will transform all aspects of life in the world. The best part is that the reader will probably be shunned away from easy access to just how the world is working–a brilliant self-defense mechanism.
Franz Kafka: The Trial
Perhaps Kafka’s greatest or most-renowned story second only to the Metamorphosis, this book was a great influence on my work-life depression for over a month.
Denis Johnson: Tree of Smoke
An epic yet still overrated story on a psychological operations unit in Vietnam during the war, which found its best qualities in the gritty/realistic everyday life of not only the Americans but the Vietnamese, British, and Canadian–this book best taught me that Vietnam was a combination of being lost–on a war level but also on a personal level.
Tom Pickard: The Dark Months of May
After being influenced to buy this over Pickard’s more recent book, I read through it several times falling in love with the anti-heros dominating the verse. The songs here are both short and direct, while remaining the utter potency of sexually empowered beings living in a dark world of loneliness and individuality.
Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans: Ready-To-Eat Individual
Though I only read through this once, when I should have read through it several times as I found many parallels between it and my older writing, this book of verse, chronicling post-Katrina New Orleans life on the street, with the people, combines abstract hyper-thoughts, poems that are both spontaneously abstract but hold dominant images, with the vernacular speech of the individuals the poets were writing around.
CAConrad: (Soma)tic Midge
The opener was a dedication to Jonathan Williams, and the only disappointing part of this book was the size–too short, too short! Each alternating colored poem is a wonderful weave of the poet as scientist, as mystic, as traveler, as being completely united with the universe.
Natasha Trethewey: Native Guard
Documenting the South both in the present and during the Civil War, Tretheway finds her voice in crisp though hardened, disconnected poems, leaving for the reader the fragility of images, the sterility of time, and a bogus level of quiet in a usually-loud environment.
Pam Brown: True Thoughts
Being the book of poetry that has taken up many of my months this past autumn, I have found love in the abstractions, the disconnect of lines and thoughts, philosophy and image and experience documented–all qualities that make the poems light, carefree, and at the same time present the conflicts of art and philosophy.
John Steinbeck: The Pearl
Though a bit simplistic in its language and style, Steinbeck’s short story/novella is as allegorically important as his novels, bridging the East and West while presenting the difficulties of both.
Arthur Phillips: Prague
This was my most recent “for fun” novel, and it was fun, though at times it didn’t seem like Phillips actually lived in Budapest, and could only describe fictional lives of expats based on his experiences with being a tourist.
John Steinbeck: The Red Pony
As more traditional Steinbeck, this novel takes a boy’s life in four segments and teaches lessons respectively, though it would have been nice if the book as a whole was more connected and secure.
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces
I was surprised to have not read this sooner since it was recommended to me about four years ago; however, now that I have read it, I cannot figure out how its importance was not proclaimed more frequently to me in all my own past adventures.
A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems
This nature poet first found himself in my life randomly, after hearing about him through Bill Corbett’s poetry. Now I read with fervor and have taken a graceful appreciation of a more profound, normal-human-being-approach to nature poetry; the fact that Ammons can take on philosophy from a scientific approach is also quite attractive.
Charles Simic: The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected and New Poems
Randomly discovering Simic as well, I have found more parallels between his work and my own than any other previous poet I’ve taken a liking to–the poems in this collection are hit in miss, though, some striking me more as important, dark, brooding past-time poetry while others try to hard to please, and noticeably fail.
Books taking me to 2009:
D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow
Charles Reznikoff: The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918 – 1975
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