Reading List 2012
Well, August was the month for chapbooks and poetry collections, apparently.
January:
1. Charlaine Harris - Dead as a Doornail
2. Dave Eggers - The Wild Things
3. Anne McCaffrey - If Wishes Were Horses
4 Jose Saramago - Death with Interruptions
5. Farley Mowat - Never Cry Wolf
6. Anne Bishop - The Invisible Ring
7. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
8. Stephen R Lawhead - Tuck
9. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry - Peter and the Starcatchers
February:
10. Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
11. Chuck Palahniuk - Damned
12. Michael Cunningham - The Hours,
13. Lewis Carrol - Through the Looking-Glass
14. Matthew Cody - Powerless
15. Charlaine Harris - Definitely Dead
16. W. B. Yeats - Collected Poems
17. Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
March:
18. Margaret Atwood - Lady Oracle
19. Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love
20. Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book
21. Julia Glass - Three Junes
22. T. S. Eliot - Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats
23. Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
24. M.T. Anderson - The Feed
25. Barry Lopez - Of Wolves and Men
April:
26. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
27. Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
28. George R. R. Martin - Game of Thrones
29. Nancy Farmer - The House of the Scorpion
30. John C. Hull - On Sight and Insight
31. Robert Gibb - Sheet Music
May:
32. Mary Crockett Hill - A Theory of Everything
33. Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
34. Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues
35. Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
36. Judith Vollmer - The Water Books
37. Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife
June:
38. Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman
39. M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1 The Pox Party
40. Robert Busch - The Wolf Almanac
41. Gailmarie Pahmeier - Shake It and It Snows
42. Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
43. Matt Terhune - Bathhouse Betty
44. Gigi Marks - Shelter
45. Joanne Greenberg - Of Such Small Differences
46. Thomas More - Utopia
47. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
July:
48. Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
49. Sophocles - Antigone
50. Shirley Ann Grau - Keepers of the House
51. Robert Kurson - Crashing Through
52. Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic
53. Peter Blair - Farang
54. Charlaine Harris - All Together Dead
55. Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
56. Eric Boyd - Whiskey Sour: Short Stories
August:
57. Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
It took me about a year to the week to read this! It was over 700 pages. I went into the challenge thinking I could read 10 pages a night and get it done within a few months, but that didn't happen! Emily Dickinson is far more morbid and depressing than I gave her credit. Some of them were nice, and I probably have over 100 small dog ears on specific poems I liked. She also seems to be sexually repressed, and when Mike started reading aloud a few poems (a year ago...) and put pauses at the punctuation, he sounded just like William Shatner.
58. Susan Sontag - In America
This was promising. It won a National Book Award and the language was strong and precise. But then there was a big shift in perspective, and we went from a person overhearing everything to the overall group of which that initial person was not part. It's like she disappeared and our attention remained on the group she spied upon. And yes, it revealed the hard life of immigrants who are used to finer things, and it portrayed a strong female character, but I was ready for the story to end about 75% of the way through. It's just about this famed actress from Poland who takes her immediate family and friends (and lover) to America with her to begin a commune and live off the land, and then she returns to the stage anyway in America and becomes beloved nationwide. Aaaand that's about it, because it's just about their lives.
59. Yann Martel - Life of Pi
This was surprisingly fascinating! I had heard good things about it, but the beginning never kept my attention. It takes a few chapters to realize (after the POV switches) that the main narrator is telling a story to a journalist. And each POV is in first person, and there's no metadata outside of the natural story that would provide information for the readers; we just have to follow the story and deduce. I liked that. The beginning chapters established the main character's religious upbrining and beliefs. He is Hindu, Chrisitan, and Muslim, all at once. He was even baptized in each one, through various means. He grew up on a zoo, and so knew a lot about animals. This had to be known before we get to the main plot point of the family moving to Canada from India and the ship sinking, leaving the main character shipwrecked on a fully stocked lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a tiger. The whole thing is about survival, co-dependency, and the love of God. And in the end, the author gives us a twist that makes readers wonder which version of the story is true.
60. Annie Dillard - Teaching a Stone to Talk
Annie Dillard might be my favorite Nature Writer. I love her use of language and sentence structure. Her descriptions are profound and always make me stop mid-sentence and meditate on what she suggested. This book is very thin, but it still took me about two weeks to read it. I've never been fast with nonfiction. This contains essays about the solar eclipse she saw, meeting a weasel, and various other thing. I ended up reading the solar eclipse one to Mike because of her descriptions and analogy, but he fell asleep halfway in...
61. Israel Centeno - Bamboo City
This is one of the chapbooks from Independent Literary Publishing. The words are... Portuguese, I think. One side has the native language and the opposite page has the English translation. Israel Centeno is one of the City of Asylum writers and was recently interviewed about this chapbook. It was... interesting. No punctuation for dialogue and hard to follow (I'm wondering if that's a Hispanic-esque writing style), and I didn't understand most of it or most of what happened.
62. Luis Alberto Urrea - Sonoran Desert Sutras
Yet another ILP chapbook. This is a collection of short poetry. This author was a recent judge for 3-Minute Fiction on NPR. Each poem contained a feeling and a vision, like.... something the author saw that inspired the poem, instead of just a goal. The collection was quick and decent.
63. Jan Beatty - Ravage
Another ILP chapbook. Jan Beatty is a professor at Chatham University. Her poetry is incredibly sexual but also very strong. I can see why people say her name with awe.
64. Katherine Ayers - One-eyed Cat
Another ILP chapbook. This collection of poems actually had a forward by my thesis director. The author is a Chatham professor as well, who apparently experienced a bout of vision loss. She is friends with my thesis director and references her in a few poems. I almost wish I had read this collection as thesis research because of the great first-hand perspective of becoming blind.
65. Chauna Craig - Eden Way
Another ILP chapbook. This had a few decent stories in it surrounding a cabin in the woods but otherwise ... meh.
66. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Another award winner. I was not expecting the twist of cloning and organ harvesting. But... it's so subtle. This would be magical realism in the sci-fi spectrum. It just follows these kids through their lives and discusses friendship and love. It's so ordinary. The fact that they become "carers" before becoming "donors" in order to give "donations," i.e. their organs, is just another everyday activity to them. It's just what one does in the world. There's nothing spectacular in the story and any ethical dilemmas are discussed (and disregarded) toward the very end over a cup of tea.
67. Samuel Hazo - Song of the Horse
Here is an Autumn House Press poetry collection. One of the few times when my Amazon review does not withhold criticism: "Samuel Hazo is what you think of when you imagine "poet." Every line must be pondered first before the overall poem can make sense. Each line is a metaphor for something, and each word draws you into Hazo's world that is filled with symbols and meaning, where you know that if you were inside his head, you would understand. But being inside your own, you can only speculate, infer, decipher, and enjoy. There is a gist to each poem, but lines within those poems suggest something else, some reference that is elusive but one that you know is important. In this collection, the titles don't just summarize the poems, they complement each piece. This is a traveling book. Hazo's poetry compels readers to spread it to friends and family, all the while hoping to one day see the book returned. The poems contain various degrees of philosophy and religious significance. Although the reader may not be religious, Hazo's words still resonate. They are not forceful but instead convey a quiet dignity, a statement of fact that does not care whether the reader agrees or disagrees because, in the end, it doesn't matter. It is the meaning that counts."
68. Liane Ellison Norman - Roundtrip
Another ILP chapbook. There isn't much to say about this one. Nothing stood out. I don't remember what it was about. Poetry, that's about it.
69. Thom Dawkins - After Alluvium
Another ILP chapbook. The poems were a bit over my head again and, again, nothing stood out. Meh.
September:
70. Clamp - Chobits
This one needs a little explaining. This is a manga series that is comprised of about eight books, each of which is about 180 pages long. Initially, I did not intend to count this. However, it took an entire weekend to read (in fact, Mike and I both lounged on the couch together, shooting through each book. He even finished before me because I wanted to watch the recent Doctor Who episode) and it was unexpectedly deep. The topics it contained were profound: love, souls, what it is to be alive, perception, AI. It's about a boy who finds a girl on a trash heap and discovers that she's a Persocom (personal computer/humanoid robot). She starts her up (by finding her on switch in her vagina) and learns that she has "no data" and he must teach her everything. She is adorable. Turns out she's actually AI, and the whole series begins to revolve around questions about whether machines can be alive, whether they have souls, whether they have emotions or if they're just responding along the parameters of their programs, whether it is possible or acceptable to love one, and then the concept of finding "someone just for you," which is basically true love that requires a person to accept everything about you (what you can and cannot do, what you can and cannot give) and loving you for who you are and not what you are. Because it took so long and the near literary nature of the story, I'm counting all eight as one entry.
January:
1. Charlaine Harris - Dead as a Doornail
2. Dave Eggers - The Wild Things
3. Anne McCaffrey - If Wishes Were Horses
4 Jose Saramago - Death with Interruptions
5. Farley Mowat - Never Cry Wolf
6. Anne Bishop - The Invisible Ring
7. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
8. Stephen R Lawhead - Tuck
9. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry - Peter and the Starcatchers
February:
10. Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
11. Chuck Palahniuk - Damned
12. Michael Cunningham - The Hours,
13. Lewis Carrol - Through the Looking-Glass
14. Matthew Cody - Powerless
15. Charlaine Harris - Definitely Dead
16. W. B. Yeats - Collected Poems
17. Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows
March:
18. Margaret Atwood - Lady Oracle
19. Elizabeth Gilbert - Eat, Pray, Love
20. Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book
21. Julia Glass - Three Junes
22. T. S. Eliot - Old Possom's Book of Practical Cats
23. Frances Hodgson Burnett - A Little Princess
24. M.T. Anderson - The Feed
25. Barry Lopez - Of Wolves and Men
April:
26. Michael Morpurgo - War Horse
27. Cherie Priest - Boneshaker
28. George R. R. Martin - Game of Thrones
29. Nancy Farmer - The House of the Scorpion
30. John C. Hull - On Sight and Insight
31. Robert Gibb - Sheet Music
May:
32. Mary Crockett Hill - A Theory of Everything
33. Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
34. Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues
35. Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
36. Judith Vollmer - The Water Books
37. Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife
June:
38. Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman
39. M. T. Anderson - The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, #1 The Pox Party
40. Robert Busch - The Wolf Almanac
41. Gailmarie Pahmeier - Shake It and It Snows
42. Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending
43. Matt Terhune - Bathhouse Betty
44. Gigi Marks - Shelter
45. Joanne Greenberg - Of Such Small Differences
46. Thomas More - Utopia
47. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
July:
48. Sophocles - Oedipus at Colonus
49. Sophocles - Antigone
50. Shirley Ann Grau - Keepers of the House
51. Robert Kurson - Crashing Through
52. Julie Otsuka - The Buddha in the Attic
53. Peter Blair - Farang
54. Charlaine Harris - All Together Dead
55. Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games
56. Eric Boyd - Whiskey Sour: Short Stories
August:
57. Emily Dickinson - The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
It took me about a year to the week to read this! It was over 700 pages. I went into the challenge thinking I could read 10 pages a night and get it done within a few months, but that didn't happen! Emily Dickinson is far more morbid and depressing than I gave her credit. Some of them were nice, and I probably have over 100 small dog ears on specific poems I liked. She also seems to be sexually repressed, and when Mike started reading aloud a few poems (a year ago...) and put pauses at the punctuation, he sounded just like William Shatner.
58. Susan Sontag - In America
This was promising. It won a National Book Award and the language was strong and precise. But then there was a big shift in perspective, and we went from a person overhearing everything to the overall group of which that initial person was not part. It's like she disappeared and our attention remained on the group she spied upon. And yes, it revealed the hard life of immigrants who are used to finer things, and it portrayed a strong female character, but I was ready for the story to end about 75% of the way through. It's just about this famed actress from Poland who takes her immediate family and friends (and lover) to America with her to begin a commune and live off the land, and then she returns to the stage anyway in America and becomes beloved nationwide. Aaaand that's about it, because it's just about their lives.
59. Yann Martel - Life of Pi
This was surprisingly fascinating! I had heard good things about it, but the beginning never kept my attention. It takes a few chapters to realize (after the POV switches) that the main narrator is telling a story to a journalist. And each POV is in first person, and there's no metadata outside of the natural story that would provide information for the readers; we just have to follow the story and deduce. I liked that. The beginning chapters established the main character's religious upbrining and beliefs. He is Hindu, Chrisitan, and Muslim, all at once. He was even baptized in each one, through various means. He grew up on a zoo, and so knew a lot about animals. This had to be known before we get to the main plot point of the family moving to Canada from India and the ship sinking, leaving the main character shipwrecked on a fully stocked lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a tiger. The whole thing is about survival, co-dependency, and the love of God. And in the end, the author gives us a twist that makes readers wonder which version of the story is true.
60. Annie Dillard - Teaching a Stone to Talk
Annie Dillard might be my favorite Nature Writer. I love her use of language and sentence structure. Her descriptions are profound and always make me stop mid-sentence and meditate on what she suggested. This book is very thin, but it still took me about two weeks to read it. I've never been fast with nonfiction. This contains essays about the solar eclipse she saw, meeting a weasel, and various other thing. I ended up reading the solar eclipse one to Mike because of her descriptions and analogy, but he fell asleep halfway in...
61. Israel Centeno - Bamboo City
This is one of the chapbooks from Independent Literary Publishing. The words are... Portuguese, I think. One side has the native language and the opposite page has the English translation. Israel Centeno is one of the City of Asylum writers and was recently interviewed about this chapbook. It was... interesting. No punctuation for dialogue and hard to follow (I'm wondering if that's a Hispanic-esque writing style), and I didn't understand most of it or most of what happened.
62. Luis Alberto Urrea - Sonoran Desert Sutras
Yet another ILP chapbook. This is a collection of short poetry. This author was a recent judge for 3-Minute Fiction on NPR. Each poem contained a feeling and a vision, like.... something the author saw that inspired the poem, instead of just a goal. The collection was quick and decent.
63. Jan Beatty - Ravage
Another ILP chapbook. Jan Beatty is a professor at Chatham University. Her poetry is incredibly sexual but also very strong. I can see why people say her name with awe.
64. Katherine Ayers - One-eyed Cat
Another ILP chapbook. This collection of poems actually had a forward by my thesis director. The author is a Chatham professor as well, who apparently experienced a bout of vision loss. She is friends with my thesis director and references her in a few poems. I almost wish I had read this collection as thesis research because of the great first-hand perspective of becoming blind.
65. Chauna Craig - Eden Way
Another ILP chapbook. This had a few decent stories in it surrounding a cabin in the woods but otherwise ... meh.
66. Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Another award winner. I was not expecting the twist of cloning and organ harvesting. But... it's so subtle. This would be magical realism in the sci-fi spectrum. It just follows these kids through their lives and discusses friendship and love. It's so ordinary. The fact that they become "carers" before becoming "donors" in order to give "donations," i.e. their organs, is just another everyday activity to them. It's just what one does in the world. There's nothing spectacular in the story and any ethical dilemmas are discussed (and disregarded) toward the very end over a cup of tea.
67. Samuel Hazo - Song of the Horse
Here is an Autumn House Press poetry collection. One of the few times when my Amazon review does not withhold criticism: "Samuel Hazo is what you think of when you imagine "poet." Every line must be pondered first before the overall poem can make sense. Each line is a metaphor for something, and each word draws you into Hazo's world that is filled with symbols and meaning, where you know that if you were inside his head, you would understand. But being inside your own, you can only speculate, infer, decipher, and enjoy. There is a gist to each poem, but lines within those poems suggest something else, some reference that is elusive but one that you know is important. In this collection, the titles don't just summarize the poems, they complement each piece. This is a traveling book. Hazo's poetry compels readers to spread it to friends and family, all the while hoping to one day see the book returned. The poems contain various degrees of philosophy and religious significance. Although the reader may not be religious, Hazo's words still resonate. They are not forceful but instead convey a quiet dignity, a statement of fact that does not care whether the reader agrees or disagrees because, in the end, it doesn't matter. It is the meaning that counts."
68. Liane Ellison Norman - Roundtrip
Another ILP chapbook. There isn't much to say about this one. Nothing stood out. I don't remember what it was about. Poetry, that's about it.
69. Thom Dawkins - After Alluvium
Another ILP chapbook. The poems were a bit over my head again and, again, nothing stood out. Meh.
September:
70. Clamp - Chobits
This one needs a little explaining. This is a manga series that is comprised of about eight books, each of which is about 180 pages long. Initially, I did not intend to count this. However, it took an entire weekend to read (in fact, Mike and I both lounged on the couch together, shooting through each book. He even finished before me because I wanted to watch the recent Doctor Who episode) and it was unexpectedly deep. The topics it contained were profound: love, souls, what it is to be alive, perception, AI. It's about a boy who finds a girl on a trash heap and discovers that she's a Persocom (personal computer/humanoid robot). She starts her up (by finding her on switch in her vagina) and learns that she has "no data" and he must teach her everything. She is adorable. Turns out she's actually AI, and the whole series begins to revolve around questions about whether machines can be alive, whether they have souls, whether they have emotions or if they're just responding along the parameters of their programs, whether it is possible or acceptable to love one, and then the concept of finding "someone just for you," which is basically true love that requires a person to accept everything about you (what you can and cannot do, what you can and cannot give) and loving you for who you are and not what you are. Because it took so long and the near literary nature of the story, I'm counting all eight as one entry.