I Can Haz Winner?

Tamie, man... being in Africa is no excuse. Winner. Me. Now.

Luvz n kizzes,

Phoenix

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

Whew -- Intense Stuff

Right Behind You by Gail Giles

Man, this was good. Young adult fiction about a teenager, who, when he was 9 yo, set another child on fire. He spends several years in a juvenile ward and then had to move to another state because of how angry the community was. Really really good stuff. How do you forgive yourself? How do you define a good/bad person? What is forgiveness/redemption? Yep. I liked it. 292 pages

Buffy

The End of the Year Approaches -- Where is everybody?

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir by Michael Greenberg
Very good memoir relating the author's (then) 15yo daughter suddenly starts showing bipolar behavior. Interesting to read a parent's perspective -- we so often try to figure out what we've done wrong. Also good to read the honest accounting of his relationship with his wife.
233 pages.

December by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Fiction about an 11yo girl who stops speaking. Good. Very interesting to read immediately after Hurry Down Sunshine.
239 pages.

The Little Book by Selden Edwards
Such good stuff. Wheeler Burden. living in 1988 San Francisco, suddenly & unexplicably finds himself in Vienna in 1897. Enter Freud, Mahler, and all kinds of other goodness. I liked it, if you couldn't tell. So many many intersections of people and events.

405 pages

The Black Tower
What really happened to Louis-Charles, the son of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI? Great first sentence: "I'm a man of a certain age -- old enough to have been every kind of fool -- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers." Lots of real historical characters in this one, too.

352 pages

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez
short. author from argentina, translated from spanish. i liked it. "a chilling crime story in which the line between reality and deception has been erased" 215 pages.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Whew. So intense. First in a new young adult series. Sadly it was just published -- I'm ready for the next installment. from the book flap:

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. But Prentisstown isn't like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts in an overwhelming, never-ending stream of Noise. There is no quiet, no privacy, no room for secrets. Or is there? Just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd and his dog, Manchee -- whose thoughts Todd can hear, too, whether he wants to or not-- stumble upon an area of complete silence. Which is impossible. Prentisstown has been hiding something form him, a secret so awful that Todd and Manchee are suddenly running for their lives. But how can you feel when your pursuers can hear your every thought? And where can you run when there's nowhere to go?

479 pages



Buffy