Tag: books

This is not a best-of list. This is just a list. This may be the least amount of books I’ve read in one year in many a year. The list of reasons why this list is so short may be longer than this list. The sad fact remains that most of my books remain in storage in Montreal, whereas I, happily, remain in England. Though my books stubbornly remain in one place I have been travelling a lot. Destinations this year — for work, pleasure, and most often both — included: Banff, Ottawa, Leicester, Oxford (twice), Vienna (twice), Montreal (twice), Vermont (twice), New York (just the once, alas), and back and forth between London, Bristol, Bath and Falmouth too many times each to count.

I wrote a book this year, which took up a bit of time. More about that here. I made a massive new work of electronic literature. More about that here. And I started a practice-led PhD research degree in the fall. My days of reading for pleasure are over for the foreseeable future. Though I do take pleasure in most of what I’m reading now, the reading itself is slower, heavily annotated, highly fragmented and ever so much more deliberate than reading led purely by the pleasure of leaping from one book to the next. That said, in addition to my own university library card, I now also have reader’s card’s for the British Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford — two of the greatest libraries in the world — where I intend to spend as much time as possible reading bits and piece archival material, maps, manuscripts and extremely old books, none of which may appear on next year’s book list. Oh well.

The thing about lists is, they don’t show what’s not on them. I’ve read the equivalent of many more books than the ones listed bellow in parts and portions. I have a stack of at least ten books open and in heavy use, none of which I intend to read in full. Much of the reading I’ve done over the past few months has not been from books at all. I have been spending a lot of time in the British Library Maps collection. I am pleased as punch with my subscription to Cabinet Magazine, for example. And remain an avid consumer, collector, creator of zines. As a newly minted sort of semi academic, application forms, rules and regulations, conference proceedings, journal articles and web archives have taken over a sizable portion of my reading life. And then, there’s my crippling addiction to online Scrabble. But let’s not get into that.

Scanning this list of the books read in full this year, a few come flooding back so vividly they are worthy of special mention, though to reiterate, this is not a best-of list. Just an an aide-mémoire. I think about Alice Oswald’s Dart everyday because it’s about the River Dart, which runs right outside my window, which used to be Alice’s window (she used to live where I know live and now lives down the road). I remembered just how much I love Larissa Lai’s chapbook Eggs in the Basement when I used it recently to teach an MA seminar on computational poetry. Though, or perhaps because, Eggs in the Basement is not computer generated, it offers a fantastic entry into computational poetics without all that pesky computation getting in the way. Bits and pieces of Cynthia Ozick’s The Cannibal Galaxy keep coming back to me, for being-an-immigrant reasons too complex to explain herein, and for similar reasons Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin chilled me to the bone. I re-read Shakespeare’s The Tempest on impulse over the summer and cannot believe how absolutely central to my thesis it is becoming. Likewise, I am so glad I never read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe until this fall as now I come to it with a completely different set of preoccupations than I would have when much younger, resulting in a startlingly different reading than that which all previous commentary had led me to suppose the book was about.

Despite my quip about my days of reading for pleasure being over, I am looking forward to many of the books my research is leading me into. Especially since the PhD comes with a studentship, which is more commonly called a fellowship in North America, though I think of it more generally as a book buying budget, with mad money left over for train travel to libraries London and Oxford and anywhere else the reading leads.

Happy reading.

• Tom McCarthy, C
• Michael Boyce, Anderson
• Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography
• Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting
• Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi
• Michel Tournier, Friday
• J. M. Cotzee, Foe
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• Mary Butts, Ashe of Rings
• Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
• Henry David Thoreau, Walking
• Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country
• Hans Fallada, Alone in Berlin
• Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines
• Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel
• Cynthia Ozick, Dictation
• Mavis Gallant, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
• Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
• Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray, The Decadent Gardener
• Shakespeare, The Tempest
• Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air
• Alistair MacLeod, Island
• Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
• Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy
• N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
• Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod
• Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Spinoza of Market Street
• Andy Diggle & Jock, The Losers
• Merce Rodoreda, My Christina & Other Stories
• Larissa Lai, Eggs in the Basement
• Vladimir Nabakov, Nabakov’s Dozen
• Lance Olsen, Anxious Pleasures
• Iain Sinclair, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report
• W. G. Sebald, Vertigo
• Jean Webster, Daddy Long legs
• Mavis Gallant, In Transit
• Alexandra Leggat, Animal
• Ron Carlson, Five Skies
• Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the World
• Arther Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Alice Oswald, Dart

• READING LIST 2009 >>>

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• READING LIST 2006 >>>

• READING LIST 2005 >>>