What & how I read this year

1. I read it – the whole thing – either in print or through an audio performance:

Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Confucius, The Analects (abridged, translated by Wing-tsit Chan)

The Doctrine of the Mean (translated by Wing-tsit Chan)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (second read)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (second read)

William Faulkner, The Hamlet (second read)

The Gospel of John (for the umpteenth time)

The Great Learning (translated by Wing-tsit Chan)

Homer, The Iliad (Robert Fagels)

Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

The Book of Mencius (abridged, translated by Wing-tsit Chan)

Patrick O’Brian, Blue at the Mizzen (third read)

Patrick O’Brian, The Hundred Days (third read)

Patrick O’Brian, 21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (third read)

Patrick O’Brian, The Yellow Admiral (third read)

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Terry Pratchett, Dodger

The Book of Ruth (umpteenth time)

James Salter, Light Years

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (umpteenth time)

Sol Stein, Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Tao-te ching, translated by Wing-tsit Chan

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (twice)

Joseph Wheelan, Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (second read)

2. Reading currently, with an aim to finishing:

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

William Faulkner, The Town (second read)

Everett Fox, Give Us a King! (translation of I and II Samuel)

A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China

Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (third read)

Davie Johnson, John Randolph of Roanoke

Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (second read)

3. Read a lot of it before giving it a rest, though I liked what I read:

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Jorges Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Jorges Luis Borges, Collected Nonfictions

Lucy Calkins, et al., Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement

Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy

C. K. Chesterton, Essential Writings

Paul Revere Frothingham, Edward Everett: Orator and Statesman

Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism

Leviticus (third read)

Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

E. M. Standing, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work

4. Skimmed, bought, and hope to read next year:

Allan Bloom, Shakespeare’s Politics

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Peter Elbow, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing

William Faulkner, The Mansion

Harvey C. Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul

Martin Palmer, Elizabeth Breuilly (Eds.), The Book of Chuang Tzu (Penguin Classics)

Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion

I’m not counting three other categories. They include (5) books I returned to for inspiration, reference, pleasure, or for a page or two’s read before conking out and (6) books I started but gave up on. I couldn’t keep track of books from either of these two categories anyway. (The former category is my favorite reading; the latter is my least favorite.) Of course, there are (7) non-books – mostly the Internet, print periodicals, and student essays – which probably made up a plurality of my reading.

“Reading newspaper” by Kheng Cheng Toh. Used by permission.

Categories

Passages

Refund Requested

4 May 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

You think the package is a gift but it encloses a violence, a rupture that took place even before your awareness of it. A carelessness, tossed from one overseer to another; which then delivers bits of broken glass to puncture the flesh on the tip of your finger— That's all it takes to set the blood loose: your own undoing, they'll say, as you open the box to see if you can finally claim what it was you thought you purchased. You wince at the momentary pain before pressing a dish towel or bandage strip across the wound— No matter how familiar to the tired of disappointment, disappointment keeps showing up like a history that keeps repeating itself. [Read more...]

Punk rock

3 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

Betimes I to Alderman Backewell, and with him to my Lord Ashly’s, where did a little business about Tangier, and to talk about the business of certificates, wherein, contrary to what could be believed, the King and Duke of York themselves, in my absence, did call for some of the Commissioners of the Treasury, and give them directions about the business, which I, despairing to do any thing on a Sunday, and not thinking that they would think of it themselves, did rest satisfied, and stayed at home all yesterday, leaving it to do something in this day; but I find that the King and Duke of York had been so pressing in it, that my Lord Ashly was more forward with the doing of it this day, than I could have been. And so I to White Hall with Alderman Backewell in his coach, with Mr. Blany; my Lord’s Secretary: and there did draw up a rough draught of what order I would have, and did carry it in, and had it read twice… [Read more...]

Machado, Roses, Back Pain, and Covid

3 May 2021 - Dale

Another Machado poem, "Tal vez la mano, en sueños…":in dreams maybe the hand of the sower of stars sounds the forgotten music a note on an immense lyre and that humble wave comes to our lips in a few truthful words ---The climbing yellow roses make their serpentine, parasitic way through the laurel, and dangle from the eaves. They're not really roses and the laurel is not really a laurel, I'm told; they both have odd polysyllabic names in clumsily grafted classical tongues. But I'll call them roses and laurel. It's my damn hedge. The roses are gorgeous this year: apparently this ominously dry April suited them.---The back? It's no longer giving me pain, if I'm careful. I don't want to be careful, is the thing. And I most particularly want to do what my back least wants me to do: go for long walks. So I'm perpetually peeved.Nevertheless, my energy returns, and that's welcome. Continual pain, even if it's low-level, easily managed pain, does weird, unwelcome things to my spirit. It shrinks suspiciously from contact: it contracts, and wrinkles.… [Read more...]

Those Darn Empids

3 May 2021 - Marcia Bonta

Keen birders are aware that the best time to identify the five small, look-alike Empidonax flycatchers that breed in Pennsylvania is in May when they are singing and calling during migration. Easier to identify by their voices than by their appearance, all empids, as birders call them, have gray heads, backs, wings, and tails, white wing-bars, light eye-rings, and whitish breasts and bellies with beige edges. A willow flycatcher (Photo by Mark Bonta) Over the nearly five decades we’ve lived on our Ridge and Valley mountain, I’ve heard four of the five empids, but I was thrilled last May 17, when our son, Mark, found a willow flycatcher singing from the old apple tree beside our driveway. I rushed out to see and hear the bird as it flew into the top of a yard black walnut tree and sang—“fitz-bew,” “fitz-bew.” A half hour later it was in our backyard, where it clung to a tall grass and poked into our forsythia hedge, still singing. It stayed another day and then was gone. Until 1972… [Read more...]

Refill

3 May 2021 - rbarenblat@gmail.com (Velveteen Rabbi)

Herbs in the rain. What replenishes you? The term "self-care" has come to feel almost meaningless: it's so ubiquitous, and so often misused. (A quick google search for the term yields returns like "How To Make Shopping A Healthy Self-Care Practice." Hello, capitalism.) But we all need to replenish our inner reserves. That's true even when there isn't a global pandemic. Taking Shabbat off from working -- and from the to-do lists, the news headlines, workday consciousness -- replenishes me. My son and I were watching Adam Ruins Everything recently, and in the episode about work, Adam proposes that we have "labor unions and the Jewish people" to thank for the fact of Saturdays off. Indeed we do. As the weather warms, signs of spring replenish me. The chives in the window-box on my mirpesset winter over each year, and they are one of the first things to green up when spring arrives. I just added a little sage plant and a little rosemary plant to that box. Their scent grounds and delights me, and… [Read more...]

Horned Grebes

3 May 2021 - Loren

Lots of birds, like the Dunlin’s I posted on the previous entry, change plumage dramatically from Winter to Spring, but, perhaps because I see the changes appear up-close-and-personal, none intrigue me more than those of the Horned Grebe. Here’s a shot of Horned Grebe in winter plumage and another Horned Grebe that has nearly completed the change to its bright Spring garb. Although the change takes place in a relatively short time, it’s slow enough that you can photograph its evolution. When I first saw this grebe in the Port Orchard Marina I actually thought it was in breeding colors. Back at Port Orchard nearly a week later, this bird looked like it was in full breeding plumage until I was greeted by this one just as I was leaving the marina. I knew that this must truly what Horned Grebes look like in full breeding colors because when I returned the next week there wasn’t a Horned Grebe in sight, and, traditionally, they all leave when they all have breeding plumage. [Read more...]

The Poem Underneath the Poem

3 May 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

Don't apologize, said the dark-haired poet who is no longer in this world. She meant the rooms are not too small or cramped; the roof doesn't leak right now. There's something to offer the unexpected guest: a hot meal, a spare room, a pillow for her head before she goes back on the road. You remember her words at the most unexpected times. Light passes through the narrow necks of glass jars on the kitchen sill. You choose from the drawer a knife that will slice a tomato into even wheels and cut a sandwich into neat triangles. At night, you slide a prayer with your finger down the long, graceful bone crossing from one shoulder to the other of your beloved before you both fall asleep. [Read more...]

Poetry Blog Digest 2021, Week 17

3 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: hearts, mothers, birthdays, uniquely poetic dilemmas and much more as another Poetry Month came to an end… but the pandemic, sadly, proved to be far from over. Certain variations of alone have served us well.But in other situations, if you spell that word backwards, it becomes the first name of the aircraft to drop an atom bomb during times of war.In other words, you can love the rain but not to the point you become it, where you flood the streets, spill into gutters, and are swept out to sea.If there was something I said you don’t fully understand, hold these words up to a mirror.Perhaps they’ll make better sense.Rich Ferguson, Enola / Alone It’s been a catastrophic April in India, with Covid-19 ravaging the country and causing bottomless suffering. I’ve tried to write micro-poetry through it all (on instagram – @tp_poetry), only to realize… [Read more...]

Vicarious

3 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

(Lord’s day). Up, and to my chamber, and there to the writing fair some of my late musique notions, and so to church, where I have not been a good while, and thence home, and dined at home, with W. Hewer with me; and after dinner, he and I a great deal of good talk touching this Office, how it is spoiled by having so many persons in it, and so much work that is not made the work of any one man, but of all, and so is never done; and that the best way to have it well done, were to have the whole trust in one, as myself, to set whom I pleased to work in the several businesses of the Office, and me to be accountable for the whole, and that would do it, as I would find instruments: but this is not to be compassed; but something I am resolved to do about Sir J. Minnes before it be long. Then to my chamber again, to my musique, and so… [Read more...]

TEN OLD MONK POEMS (13)

3 May 2021 - Tom

DON'T MAKE ITThe old monk saysdon't make it soundlike I know something.I don't.~IF YOU KEEPIf you keep doing nothing,the old monk says,pretty soon you'll be done.~I CAN'T SAYI can't saywhat what I sayis worth,the old monk said.I just wanta bowl of soup.~EVEN AFTEREven after arguing,the old monk says,a friend comes back.~UPSIDE DOWNUpside down and backwards,the old monk says,the only way some things make sense.~IF I COULD WRITEIf I could writelike Shakespeare,the old monk said,would I be holdingthis beggar bowl?~I CAN LOOKThe old monk says,I can look at meand can look at youand can see the devillooking at us.~WHAT YOU HAVEThe old monk says,Sometimes what you haveis all you get.Even the starsknow this.~COUNT LIKECount like a poet,the old monk says.It's easy math.~HOW FARHow fardo I want to go?the old monk said.All the way tothe gate and back.~The Middlewesterner [Read more...]

Pith

2 May 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

You know how to pretend you have no heart. It's dangerous to wear it, bright red and soft yellow, out in the furrowed plots of your green flesh. Sometimes the one who cuts you open twists each half of you in opposite directions, then strikes a knife into that woody globe, trying to lift it out clean. But you never want to be so easily taken, to be scooped up, rind scoured, put whole into the mouth. You hold out sometimes. Long enough to spurn the blade so it twitches, lodges in another's skin. [Read more...]

Protest and survive

1 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up betimes, and by coach towards White Hall, and took Aldgate Street in my way, and there called upon one Hayward, that makes virginalls, and did there like of a little espinette, and will have him finish it for me; for I had a mind to a small harpsichon, but this takes up less room, and will do my business as to finding out of chords, and I am very well pleased that I have found it. Thence to White Hall, and after long waiting did get a small running Committee of Tangier, where I staid but little, and little done but the correcting two or three egregious faults in the Charter for Tangier after it had so long lain before the Council and been passed there and drawn up by the Atturney Generall, so slightly are all things in this age done. Thence home to the office by water, where we sat till noon, and then I moved we might go to the Duke of York and the King presently to get out their… [Read more...]

Occupatio

1 May 2021 - Dale

A rhetorical device (also known under the Greek name paralipsis) by which a speaker emphasizes something by pretending to pass over it: 'I will not mention the time when…' The device was favoured by Chaucer, who uses it frequently in his Canterbury Tales. --The Oxford Dictionary of Literary TermsI am reading Samuel Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon. A strange ship has come to the Ulvayn Islands -- a ship captained by a large black man and crewed by some forty blowsy female hands -- and the locals, outraged by this crew's attempt to recruit some of their daughters to their company, swim out to the ship by night and burn it. It is all to me rather obscure -- I am confused about both what this ship is and why the locals are outraged. But Delany is apparently anxious that he is telling a story so conventional that his sophisticated readers will be contemptuous, because he announces that "certain storytelling conventions would have us here... insert some fictive encounter between the girl [the protagonist] and one… [Read more...]

Poem with Lottery Tickets and a Quick Shoe-shine

1 May 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

There's always still a row of shoe- shine boys next to the lottery ticket counter at the market, which your classmate Mario's father used to own. Mario drowned in a swimming accident. Perhaps he's buried in an ocean region where yellow boxfish are holding a secret Yayoi Kusama exhibit, since the afterlife is only another room in a largely unexplored museum. Perhaps his fortune is to look at the moon behind a blue veil of water without being charged the standard entry fee, while we spend all our lonely coins on the dream of a future without chains or jails or for- profit insurance. The shoe-shine boys sit you on a high wooden stool and hand you a copy of the day's newspaper, but you fall asleep. They'll slick the tops of your boots with wax and brush them to a glossy shine while humming salidummay. When you open your eyes, all the windows along the avenue are lit as if with fire. Don't worry, it's only the ancestors brandishing their torches at the apocalypse. [Read more...]

Night from the inside (5)

1 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

To go for a walk in the woods during the day is to participate in a fantasy of knowing through seeing. The mysterious unknown is pushed back, engendering the desire to keep walking just to see what’s around the next bend. At night, all such illusions fall away. The forest we’ve just walked through retains its essential unknowability. Without darkness, the very possibility of the wild becomes endangered. * From off in the darkness, the sound of a porcupine clacking its teeth. Against what threat, I wonder? It goes on and on. Somebody doesn’t have much sense. * I sit on a bench in the moonlight, put down my hand, and find the pen I didn’t know I’d lost. A small moment of grace, like so many over the years that have allowed me to see myself as deeply fortunate, despite the fact that I’m broke. * The absolute silence of an owl’s flight. If I hadn’t been gazing in the right direction, I wouldn’t have known it was there. Even the moonlight makes more… [Read more...]

A penny saved

1 May 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up, and Captain Perryman come to me to tell me how Tatnell told him that this day one How is to charge me before the Commissioners of Prizes to the value of 8000l. in prizes, which I was troubled to hear, so fearful I am, though I know that there is not a penny to be laid to my charge that I dare not own, or that I have not owned under my hand, but upon recollection it signifies nothing to me, and so I value it not, being sure that I can have nothing in the world to my hurt known from the business. So to the office, where all the morning to despatch business, and so home to dinner with my clerks, whose company is of great pleasure to me for their good discourse in any thing of the navy I have a mind to talk of. After dinner by water from the Tower to White Hall, there to attend the Duke of York as usual, and particularly in a fresh complaint the… [Read more...]

Terra Firma

30 April 2021 - Luisa A. Igloria

It took years to acknowledge I didn't want to stay. But not in the way you think you understand. To do that took all of the last gifts I'd been given. Now my world is the constant re-assemblage of before and after. What's left over: a kind of moss I use to pad the bottom of this terrarium. Everything I've ever had to prove of worth, gnawed through to the core by river rats that came into the house at night until they became familiar. [Read more...]

Lit

30 April 2021 - Dave Bonta

Up, after much pleasant talk with my wife, and upon some alterations I will make in my house in her absence, and I do intend to lay out some money thereon. So she and I up, and she got her ready to be gone, and by and by comes Betty Turner and her mother, and W. Batelier, and they and Deb., to whom I did give 10s. this morning, to oblige her to please her mistress (and ego did baiser her mouche), and also Jane, and so in two coaches set out about eight o’clock towards the carrier, there for to take coach for my father’s, that is to say, my wife and Betty Turner, Deb., and Jane; but I meeting my Lord Anglesey going to the Office, was forced to ’light in Cheapside, and there took my leave of them (not baisado Deb., which je had a great mind to), left them to go to their coach, and I to the office, where all the morning busy, and so at noon with my other… [Read more...]

Chimeras

29 April 2021 - Dale

The numbers you get at the end of a fast are chimeras, of course: they're mostly about lost water, not about lost fat. I knew they would bounce back, and they have; and they may not yet be done rebounding. Still, it was agreeable to see two long-awaited numbers heave in sight: the 32" waist, and the waist-hip ratio of 0.900. The 32" waist is not a serious goal: I don't really care what my standalone waist measurement is, so long as it's under 34". But it has long been the purely theoretic number that lodged in my head as the size my waist ought to be: I think it may have been my waist measurement when I was a teenager. Or I may have thought it was: possibly it was the size of my Levis, which would have been total non-information. Who knows. I didn't learn to measure and record with real discipline until decades later. So it's not really what I'm aiming at -- just as 160 lbs wasn't ever really what I was… [Read more...]

SOMETIMES RAIN

29 April 2021 - Tom

Sometimes rain is like graceon the dry fields.Sometimes rain is like rain.Not even the weathermanknows when you'll get which.The Middlewesterner [Read more...]