Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton

I read this book over months and months, reading one or two entries a day.  T'was lovely.  It's a journal she kept for one year, sometime in the 70s I think.  She was a solitary writer, living alone in a house on the east coast.  She reminded me a lot of myself, in ways in which I did not necessarily want to be reminded!!!  But I liked the book a lot, and often was inspired to write after I read something she wrote.  208 pages.

Here are the books that Natalie has read!!!

“Ararat” by Louise Gluck
“The Clerk’s Tale” by Spencer Reece
“Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson
“Traveling in the Family” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
“ABCs of Reading” by Ezra Pound
“Crush” by Richard Siken
“Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Clarissa P. Estes
“A Room of One’s Own” by Viriginia Woolf
“A companion for Owls” by Maurice Manning
“Poems of George Trakl” tr by James Wright and Robert Bly
“The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros
“American Women Poets in the 21st Century” ed Claudia Rankine
“A History of the Only War” by Christopher Davis
“The Skin I’m In” by Sharon Flake
“Spacecraft Voyager I” by Alice Oswald
“Fragment of a Head of a Queen” by Cate Marvin
“We Weep for our Strangeness” by Dennis Schmitz
“No Greater Love” by Mother Teresa
“Eros the Bittersweet” by Anne Carson
“Here All Dwell Free” by Gertrude Mueller Nelson
“Dreamsongs” by John Berryman
“Snow Country” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Walking Across Boundaries” by Russell M Linden
“Cuttlefish Bones” by Eugenio Montale
“Embryos and Idiots” by Larissa Szporluk
“The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane”
“About Night” by Dennis Schmitz
“Learning Human” by Les Murray
“Lament for a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff
“Beauty and Sadness” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Steppenwolf” by Hermen Hesse
“They Are Sleeping” by Joanna Klink
“The Book of Nightmares” by Galway Kinnell
“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Certain Women” by Madeleine L’Engle
“The Solace of Fierce Landscapes” by Belden Lane
“The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver
“Til We Have Faces” by CS Lewis
Books 2-4 of the “Chronicles of Narnia”
“Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry”
“Homeric Hymns” tr by Charles Boer
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” by Victor Hugo
“Collected Poems and Prose” by Mallarme
“The Triggering Town” by Richard Hugo
“Noonday Demon” by Andrew Solomon
“As I Lay Dying” by W. Faulkner
“Decreation” by Anne Carson
“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman
“Radical Wisdom” by Beverly Lanzetta
“The Poetics of Space” by G. Bachelard
“The Seeker” by Nelly Sachs
“Collected Poems” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Portrait of a Lady” by Henry James
“News of the Universe” ed Robert Bly
“Monkey” by Wu Ch’Eng-En
“The Tree Pillars of Zen”
“Native Guard” by Natasha Tretheway
“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg
“Collected Poems” by Rimbaud
“Worshipful Company of Fletchers” by James Tate
“Journal of a Solitude” by May Sarton
“My Alexandria” by Mark Doty
“Complete Poems” by Marianne Moore
“The Flexible Lyric” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
“Ahab’s Wife” by Sena Jeter Naslund
“Walk with Jesus” by Henri Nouwen
“Mists of Avalon” by Marion Bradley

total pages: 15,547

Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer

This book certainly goes on the "Best Books I've Read" list. It's hilarious, gorgeously written, unflinchingly true. It's about....the Holocaust, if you had to just say one thing it's about....but within that, it's about friendship, love, betrayal, forgiveness, evil, death....I highly recommend it! 276 pages.

Tamie

Waking, by Matthew Sanford

This is a memoir of a man who was in a car accident at age 13 and became paralyzed from the chest down. At the age of 25, he started practicing yoga, and eventually became a yoga teacher! It's not the best-written book on the planet, but it sure is an interesting story, and was especially fascinating to me since I want to teach yoga. 253 pgs.

Tamie