Reading List 2009

2009 was a year of reading interrupted. It started with an eviction notice. An amazing number of books can accumulate in 11 years. My bookcases and I had a long talk and we decided that a few hundred of our friends would have to go. Many were sold, many more were given away. The rest fit into 32 boxes. Finding a home for those boxes was hell. Two weeks after finally signing a lease on a new apartment, my marriage ended suddenly. As a reader, I didn't see it coming. There was no foreshadowing or anything. As a writer, I would have done things differently.

My books moved without me. My suitcases and I spent the summer living out of other people's bookshelves. It turns out that a friend close enough to put you up in a time of need can also be counted on to have a book collection close enough to your own to make you and your suitcases feel at home without a home. It turns out there are lots of books in the world. We merely move amongst them. Friends, on the other hand, are one-of-a-kind and impossible to replace.

My books and their cases are now housed in a storage locker in Montreal. I miss them very much. Especially the ones written by friends. There are many friends' book in this photo of one of my Saint-Urbain Street bookcases before its dismantling:



On the up side, my suitcases and I are now ensconced in an 18th century Palladian country house situated on a promontory in a bend in the River Dart in South Devon. We're catching up on our England reading. I am glad I saved Wuthering Heights until after visiting a moor, even though it's set on a different moor than the one I went too, and Waterland until after visiting Somerset, even though it's set on the Fens. Next up, Dart, by my new neighbour Alice Oswald, about my new neighbour The River Dart.

Here, in reverse chronological order, are the books I read in 2009:

• Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
• Graham Swift, Waterland
• Sutherland and Nicolson, Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels
• Jerome Fletcher, Alfreda Abbot's Lost Voice
• Charles Bernstein, Dark City
• Nicolas Evans, The Divide
• Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm
• Philippe Soupault, Last Nights in Paris
• Stacey May Fowles, Fear of Fighting
• Lisa Moore, Degrees of Nakedness
• Medlar Lucan & Durian Grey, The Decadent Traveler
• Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses
• Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
• Roddy Doyle, Paula Spenser
• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet
• Jerome Fletcher, Degringolade
• Kate Pullinger, The Mistress of Nothing
• Edna O'Brein, The Country Girls
• Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the SUperheroes
• Steven Ross Smith, Lures
• Anne Simpson, Quick
• Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Oana Avasilichioaei, Feria: a poempark
• Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
• Agota Kristof, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie
• Nigel Peake, Maps: Fields, Paths, Forests, Blocks, Places and Surroundings
• John Berger, About Looking
• Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory
• William Gibson, Spook Country
• Mary-Ann Ray, Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice and Midgets
• Jerome Fletcher, Escape from the Temple of Laughter
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic
• David Gutterson, East of the Mountains
• A.S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
• Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
• Merce Rodoreda, The Time of the Doves
• Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way
• Daniel Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
• Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters
• Arjun Basu, Squishy
• Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation
• Chandra Mayor, All the Pretty Girls
• Harold Hoefle, The Mountain Clinic
• Beryl Bainbridge, Another Part of the World
• Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
• Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics?
• Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
• Nell Freudenberger, Lucky Girls
• Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity

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