Late Fees?

A couple of days after arriving at York, I went with Brad and John to the public library. The only necessity of our trip was to procure a library card for local discounts and such, but of course we also managed to pick up a truckload of books. Now, I'm pretty proud that I've managed to actually finish more than half of them, and have spent a little time with each and ever one. That's pretty good for me. But, the due date is already past and thus I am forced to return them before I would like. Here's a record of their life with me, though, before they're returned to the shelves. Who knows if anyone else will spend time with them or love them ever again?

C.K. Stead - "The New Poetic"
- an analysis of British poetry from early Yeats through the Georgians and War Poets up to Eliot's "Four Quartets," this influential book/essay uses a very potent model for tracking the relationships between poet, audience, and subject matter and ends up arriving at the central discussion of what poetry is and does

Czeslaw Milosz - "Facing the River"
- I finally found an actual collection of Milosz's poems and was greatly rewarded; I would highly recommend this dark but fertile revelation of Milosz's mind and life, one of his last

Billy Collins - "Nine Horses" and "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"
- more clever, quirky, occasionally moving, but above all casual poetry from this laid-back master of easy-going poems

Samuel Beckett - "For To End Yet Again and Other Fizzles"
- inciting mind/word-play akin to James Joyce; an intriguing experimental form (or poetry?) but not sustainable beyond the few pages of each individual fizzle

Seamus Heaney - "District and Circle"
- I enjoyed his direct engagement with other writers and his impressive lexicon--an expansive mix of local-feeling Anglo-Saxon words littered like rocks or peat amongst international landscape of bamboo and Italian architecture--but overall, I had trouble engaging the poems

Ezra Pound - "Poems selected by Thom Gunn"
- I read Gunn's brief introduction and a few excerpts--I'm still not sure what I think of Pound, beyond the obligatory nod for his midwifery role in Modernist poetry

Luigi Pirandello - "Collected Plays"
- again, the introduction was informative, but I didn't have time to actually read any of the actual plays

Deitrich Bonhoffer - "Ethics"
- I glanced over the section on Vocation and on Government, only to be slightly disappointed. maybe someday I'll be able to engage the whole book, since he himself considered it such an important undertaking

Summer 2007 Reading List

Robert Inchausti - "Subervsive Orthodoxy"
J.D. Salinger - "Nine Stories"
Wendell Berry - "Sabbaths"
James Tate - "Collected Poems", "The Lost Pilot", "Absences", "The Oblivion Ha-Ha", "Memoir of the Hawk", "Shroud of the Gnome"
Mary Oliver - "New and Selected Poems"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
Soren Kierkegaard - "The Sickness Unto Death", "Fear and Trembling"
Jean-Paul Sartre - "No Exit and Three Other Plays"
Frederick Buechner - "The Alphabet of Grace", "The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days"
Annie Dillard - "The Writing Life", "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
Italo Calvino - "The Baron in the Trees"
Kurt Vonnegut - "Slapstick"
Art Spiegelman - "Maus I & II"
Franz Kafka - "The Metamorphosis and other Stories"
Malcom X, George Breitman - "Malcom X Speaks"
Rose Levy Beranbaum - "The Bread Bible"