Tag: reading list

Reading List 2011

Since 1996 I’ve been noting the author and title of each book I’ve read in a red book a little larger than A5 size, worn at the spine now, but with plenty of pages left as there were plenty of pages to begin with. Since 2005 I’ve been duplicating those entries here on Lapsus Linguae. Whether in book or digital form, the resulting document cannot properly be called a reading list. I’ve only ever listed books read, and only those read cover to cover. In the beginning this made sense because I mostly only read books and lots of them and almost all of them from cover to cover. I still read lots of books, but finish fewer of them.

So much of what I’m reading these days is research-related, parsed for the parts I need, those parts then heavily annotated, read and re-read. I read more online now that I used to, but not books – articles. I also spend a lot more time in libraries than I used to, but rarely for book-related reasons. Most of my time at the Bodleian Library this year has been spent with the Marconi Archive, sifting through boxes of loose sheets of papers. Though I’ve read more than a book’s worth of correspondence written in Marconi’s atrocious handwriting, that reading is not reflected here. At the British Library, much time has been spent leaning over large tables in the Maps and Manuscripts reading rooms. Perhaps Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres, The Atlantic Neptune should appear on this list. It is a book, a massive book, three volumes worth. Though it contains charts rather than chapters, I’ve read every page. Same goes for John Dee’s 1580 map of the world upon the back of which Dee outlines England’s claim to the America’s for Queen Elizabeth. It is only one page, or sheet of vellum rather, but it may be one of the most important documents in Canadian history. And then there are all the variations on Samuel de Champlain’s maps of Nouvelle-France I’ve pored over, and the vintage guide books I’ve not followed, and the stacks of post cards…

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[ desk stack 09/09/2011 ]

Over the past two years this habitually kept list of authors and titles of books read has become less and less and less representative of what I’m actually reading. Which makes it all the more interesting in certain ways. Map-related books figure prominently, as to voyages and travelogues and books on walking. Media theory, of course. And network communications. A number of books listed here are re-reads. I got most of the way through A Hacker Manifesto years ago, but had to return it to the library eventually, with fines owing. Foucault makes way more sense to me now than in 1998, when I first attempted the same battered copy of The Order of Things I have with me here in England. The Rings of Saturn is even more haunting now after having walked in Suffolk myself. We’ve all read bits and pieces of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville – it’s almost odd to read them together at last, all of a piece. Darwin is an elegant prose stylist, who knew? Why did it take me so long to stumble over Cha’s brilliant Dictee? The year’s reading began with the utterly original Riddley Walker and ended with its author Russell Hoban’s passing. So many quirky odd-ball intriguing wandering wonderful books browsed, borrowed, bought and begun in between. Other still on the go. Those finished, listed below:

  • McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto
  • W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
  • Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
  • Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
  • Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries
  • Gillian Cookson, The Cable
  • Courtney Rowe, Marconi at The Lizard: The story of communication systems at Housel Bay
  • J. G. Ballard, Concrete Island
  • Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project
  • William Gibson, Zero History
  • Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!
  • Roberto Simanowski, Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations
  • Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice
  • Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian, The Wide Road
  • Gertrude Stein, Lucy Church Amiably
  • Karen Russell, Swamplandia
  • McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
  • Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
  • Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
  • Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
  • Robert C. O’Brien, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
  • Lydia Davis, Cows
  • Adam Lebor, The Budapest Protocol
  • Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America
  • Charles Darwin, The Voyages of the Beagle
  • Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
  • Ben Marcus, The age of Wire And String
  • Steven Millhauser, In The Penny Arcade
  • Sandra Barry, Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia’s “Home-made” Poet
  • Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It
  • Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deluze and Language
  • Maya Merrick, Sextant
  • H.D., end to torment
  • Andrea di Robilant, Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North
  • Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
  • Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
  • Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  • Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will
  • Elisabeth Belliveau, Don’t Get Lonely Don’t Get Lost
  • Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes
  • Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print
  • Rita Raley, Tactical Media
  • Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
  • Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Reading List 2010

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

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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J. R. Carpenter
Lucksoap.com

Reading List 2008

I got a massive amount of writing done in 2008. That made it made it a strange year for reading. Early on in the year I appear to have had a ghosts and devils fixation. What was I thinking, reading Will Self, How the Dead Live and Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita back to back?

Between January and May I read and re-read a lot of chapters, articles and essays related to the texts I was working with in the Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams electronic literature project. Many books were harmed in the making of that work, some are pictured here, but few of those fragmentary readings are represented in the list below.

I had a great but short lived burst of short story reading in the spring while I was writing the postcard stories for the in absentia electronic literature project, but once that piece was launched I had to focus on finishing writing my first novel, Words the Dog Knows. It was a cold, wet summer, which was fine as I barely left my apartment. To get through the long days of writing toward impossibly short deadlines I soon realized that I couldn’t read anything even remotely resembling anything I would ever write. So it was a summer of long post-colonial novels written by American women.

I thought I’d get back to my regular reading habits once Words the Dog Knows went to the printer, but despite a brief window were I got to catch up on a few books written by friends, most of my fall reading was muddled by travel. Between book tours, conferences, lectures and meetings I was on the road non-stop from mid-October to mid-November. All I can say is, Gulliver’s Travels makes great sense on trains and airplanes.

My New Year’s reading resolution: to read Don Quixote in it’s entirety. Toward this end I have booked a one week vacation on a Cuban beach. The things I do for literature!

Here, from last to first, are books read in 2008:

  • Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
  • Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
  • Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
  • Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
  • Salman Rushdie, ed., Best American Short Stories 2008
  • Jonathan Lenthem, Girl in a Landscape
  • Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile
  • Paul D. Miller, Rhythm Science
  • Mariko & Jillian Tamaki, Skim
  • Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
  • Emily Holton, Dear Canada Council / Our Starland
  • Liane Keightly, Seven Openings of the head
  • Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
  • N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines
  • Joe Brainard, I Remember
  • Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
  • Cynthia Ozick, Trust
  • Maya Merrick, The Hole Show
  • Kate Pullinger, A Little Stranger
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
  • Leni Zumas, Farewell Navigator
  • Jason Camlot, The Debaucher
  • Keri Hulme, The Bone People
  • Ha Jin, Waiting
  • Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses
  • Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
  • Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
  • Claire Messud, The Hunters
  • Joy Williams, State of Grace
  • Julie Doucet, 365 Days
  • Barry Hannah, Geronimo Rex
  • Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
  • Steven Heighton, The Shadow Boxer
  • Michael Crummey, Flesh and Blood
  • Kerstin Ekman, Blackwater
  • Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
  • G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr
  • Michale Hoeullebecq, The Elementary Particles
  • Rick Moody, Demonology
  • Goethe, Faust
  • Christopher Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  • Jeff Parker, The Back of the Line
  • Etgar Keret, Missing Kissinger
  • Raymond Carver, Short Cuts
  • Lorrie Moore, Like Life
  • Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence
  • Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
  • Eva Figes, Light
  • Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979
  • Maureen Adams, Shaggy Muses
  • Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever
  • Valerie Joy Kalynchuk, All Day Breakfast
  • Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonders
  • Flan O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
  • Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
  • Anya Ulinich, Petropolis
  • David McGimpsey, Sitcom
  • Jeff Parker, Ovenman
  • Will Self, How the Dead Live
  • Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
  • Mark Amerika, META/DATA

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    J. R. Carpenter
    Lucksoap.com

    Reading List 2007

    Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote
    Peter Carey, My Life As A Fake
    N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
    Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
    Emily Holton, Little Lessons in Safety
    William Gibson, Neuromancer
    Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
    Andy Brown, The Mole Chronicles
    Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
    Lance Blomgren, Walkups
    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
    Gail Scott, My Paris
    Melissa A. Thompson, Dreadful Paris
    Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones
    Angela Carr, Ropewalk
    David Markson, Reader’s Block
    Jonathan Lethem, Men And Cartoons
    Ellen Ullman, The Bug
    James Salter, Dusk
    Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal
    Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry
    Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe
    Amiee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
    Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
    Margaret Atwood, Power Politics
    Corey Frost, My Own Devices (Airport Version)
    Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi
    Elizabeth Hay, Small Change
    Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
    Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno
    Martin Amis, The Information
    Gregory Maguire, Wicked
    Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
    Petronius, The Satyricon
    Machiavelli, The Prince
    Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing
    Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise
    Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
    Angela Hibbs, Passport
    Don DeLillo, End Zone
    Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own
    Shapard & Thomas, eds., Sudden Fiction International
    Paul Virilio, Ground Zero
    Sean Dixon, The Girls Who Saw Everything
    Elisabeth Billiveau, Something to Pet the Cat About
    Janet Kauffman, The Body in Four Parts
    Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
    Danzy Senna, Symptomatic
    Lynda Barry, Cruddy
    Virginia Woolf, The Waves
    Larissa Lai, Saltfish Girl
    Linn Ullmann, Stella Descending
    Tobias Wolff, Old School
    Nicole Brossard, Notebooks of Roses and Civilization
    Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
    Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
    Lorrie Moore, Self-Help
    Charles Baxter, A Relative Stranger
    Stanly Elkin, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles
    Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
    Christia Wolf, Cassandra
    Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
    Iris Murdoch, The Italian Girl
    Barry Yourgrau, Haunted Traveller
    Shulamis Yelin, Stories from A Montreal Childhood
    Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
    Mark Anthony Jarman, 19 Knives
    Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
    Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
    Heather O’Neill, Lullabies For Little Criminals
    Mary Gaitskil, Bad Behaviour
    Denis Johnson, Jesus’s Son
    Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
    Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
    Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
    John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
    Junot Diaz, Drown
    Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
    Eudora Weltly, The Wide Net
    Hortense Calisher, In the Absence of Angels
    Lynn Freed, The Curse of the Appropriate Man
    Truman Capote, A Tree of Night & Other Stories
    Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
    Jane Mayhall, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day
    Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa
    Hortense Calisher, Saratoga, Hot
    Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!
    Steven Heighton, Flight Paths of the Emperor
    Alan Gurganus, The Practical heart
    Joy Williams, Escapes
    Jay Rogoff, How We Came to Stand on That Shore
    Joy Williams, Taking Care
    Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple
    Steven Millhauser, Enchanted Night
    Alison Smith, Name All the Animals
    Joan Leegant, An Hour in Paradise
    Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
    Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
    Janet Frame, The Reservoir
    Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
    Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Vanished
    Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Wild Meat
    Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
    Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
    Mary Robison, Days
    Sylvia Plath, Ariel
    Merce Rodoreda, Camellia Street

    Reading List 2006 >>>

    Reading List 2005 >>>
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    J. R. Carpenter
    Lucksoap.com

    Reading List 2006

    2006 was a wonderful year for reading thanks in large part to the small but focused libraries of The Banff Centre and The Ucross Foundation and to S. W. Welch and The Word, my two favourite bookstores in Montreal.

    “In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read.” Cynthia Ozick

    Here’s a not quite chronological list of the books my nostrils and I read in 2006:

    Robert Allen, The Encantadas
    Samuel Beckett, Watt
    Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory
    Louise Steinman, The Souvenir
    Roy Parvin, The Longest Road in America
    W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
    Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories
    Annie Proulx, Heart Songs
    Donna Tartt, The Secret History
    George Saunders, Civil War Land in Bad Decline
    Alan Garganus, Plays Well With Others
    Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
    Stacey Richter, My Date With Satan
    Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
    Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt
    Ron Carlson, The Hotel Eden
    George Saunders, Pastoralia
    Mary Oliver, White Pine
    Honor Moore, Red Shoes
    Annie Proulx, Close Range
    Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
    Julian Barnes, The Lemon Table
    Gore Vidal, Burr
    André Gide, Lafcadio’s Adventures
    Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grace
    Catullus, The Poems of Catullus
    Tracy Emin, Strangeland
    Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
    Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
    John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
    Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
    Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
    H. M. van den Brink, On the Water
    Jonathan Garfinkel, Glass Psalms
    Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell
    Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
    Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
    William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
    Guy Davenport, The Death of Picasso
    Alexis O’Hara, (more than) Flithy Lies
    William Kennedy, Ironweed
    Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor
    Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
    Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
    Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
    Alain Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York
    Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First
    Michael Boyce, Monkey
    Ali Smith, Hotel World
    Tracy Chevalier, Girl WIth A Pearl Earing
    Victoria Glendinning, Electricity
    Iris Murdoch, A Word Child
    Zsuzsi Gartner, All the Anxious Girls on Earth
    David Bergen, The Time In Between
    Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
    Don McKay, Another Gravity
    Kunt Hamsun, Hunger
    Greg Hollingshead, The Roaring Girl
    Mavis Gallant, Home Truths
    Sharon Olds, Satan Says
    Joey Dubuc, Neither Either Nor Or
    Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
    Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
    Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup
    Carole Angier, Jean Rhys
    Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Lousie Bryant
    Djuna Barnes, New York
    Ali Smith, The Accidental
    Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories
    Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
    André Gide, Strait is the Gate
    Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of North American Martyrs
    Robert Allen, Standing Wave
    Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy
    Tennessee WIlliams, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
    Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
    Montaigne, Travel Journal
    Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
    Mary Robison, Believe Them
    Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
    Golda Fried, Nellcot is my Darling
    Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road
    Nicole Brossard, The Blue Books
    Todd Swift, ed., Future Welcome
    Lalumiére & Moser, eds, Lust for Life
    Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic
    Alister Macleod, No Great mischief
    Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
    Dorothea Straus, Virgins and Other Endangered Species
    Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
    Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

    Reading List 2005: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/2005/12/reading-list-2005.html
    . . . . .

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    J. R. Carpenter
    Lucksoap.com

    Reading List 2005

    More or less in chronological order, here’s what I was reading in 2005.

    • Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

    • Aristotle, Poetics

    • Julian Barnes, England, England

    • Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

    • Michel Tremblay, La Grosse Femme d’a cote est Enceinte

    • Mordecai Richler, The Street

    • Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

    • Hesiod, Works & Days

    • Theocritus, Idylls

    • Virgil, Eclogues & Georgics

    • Martialis, Epigrams

    • Virginia Woolf, Orlando

    • Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

    • Vita Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell

    • Irving Layton, Waiting for the Messiah

    • Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero

    • Lise Tremblay, Mile End (La Danse Juive)

    • Mavis Gallant, Accross the Bridge

    • Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

    • Francis Bacon, Essays & Aphorisms

    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

    • Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker

    • Monique Troung, The Book of Salt

    • Lydia Davis, Almost no Memory

    • Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew

    • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

    • Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro

    • Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land:
      The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey

    • Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi

    • Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero

    • Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

    • Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

    • James Joyce, Dubliners

    • Nula O’Foalain, Are YOu Somebody?

    • Knut Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil

    • David Mamet, The Village

    • Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

    • Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

    • Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

    • Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

    • John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg

    • Joy Williams, Honoured Guest

    • Sherwin Tjia, The World is a Hearbreaker

    • Grace Paley, Just as I Thought

    • Barry Yourgrau, Wearing Dad’s Head

    • Lawerence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

    • Sheila Heti, Ticknor

    • Bohuml Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

    • Josip Novakovich, Salvation and Other Disasters

    • Derrida, Writting and Difference

    • OVID, Tristia & Ex Ponto

    • Alice McDermott, Child of My Heary

    • Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell

    • Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte

    • V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival

    • Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant

    • Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: Illustrated Letters

    • Marci Denesiuk, The Far Away Home

    • Djuna Barns, Nightwood

    • Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living

    • Mark Richard, Charity

    • Jon Paul Fiorentino,Asthmatica

    • Gogol, The Overcoat

    • Roland Barthes, Mythologies

    • Anne-Marie MacDonald, As the Crow Flies

    • Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage

    • OVID, The Metamorphoses

    • Zadie Smith White Teeth

    • Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

    • Margurette Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands

    • Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

    . . . . .

    . . . . .
    J. R. Carpenter
    Lucksoap.com