2008 Roundup

Everyone has been writing lists of books from 2008. I've decided to jump in and make a list of some great books I read this year -- most of which were not published in 2008. Like my father likes to say -- I go in and out of them. I've read all of some of them and some of all of them.

Fiction:

Paul Auster: Timbuku, New York Trilogy, Leviathan, Music of Change.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum 

Poetry: Howl, Before the War (Duncan), Patterson (WCW), Your Ten Favorite Words (Reb Livingston), Most of Frank O'hara's collected poems, Midwinters Day (Mayer), Night Scenes (Jarnot), Book of Ocean (Larkin), Elegy (Bang), Modern Life (Harvey), The Introduction to My Vocabulary Did This to Me (Spicer), The House that Jack Built (Spicer) --note this was the most important book I read this year --What's Your Idea of a Good Time (Mayer and Berkson), parts of Utopia (Mayer), Transformations (Spahr), Horace (Tim Aikens), Black Dog Songs (Jarnot), Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (Tarn).

Non-fiction:

Copious New York Times articles, far too many first-year English papers, enough Peter Singer discourse to make me vomit, Harriet McBryde Johnson's autobiography, many feminist books (in an attempt to find disabled women-- which I didn't), Of Woman Born (Rich), Women Poets on Mentorship (Greenberg and Zucker), the Children's Bible, The I Ching.

The best things that happened to me this year: visiting Yahauts, Oregon with my family, spending time with my mother and sister in California, my one day trip to visit Rachel in San Francisco, getting poems into New American Writing, my literature class last semester, watching 'Milk,' 'Short Bus,' and 'Man on a Wire,' reading with my father in Los Alamos, being in Lisa Jarnot's poetry class, my friend returning from Africa, seeing Equis, coffee with Andrea, spending a weekend in the Poconos (that was a big one), spending most of the summer with my in-laws in Oregon, the Jess show at Reed College, driving in Portland with MaryRose Larkin and her father, swimming lessons, my birthday at Temple Bar, the PRESS conference in Olympia, and listening to Rufus Wainwright. 

The hardest things (since I am a fatalist) were my son's behavior problems, fighting with my mother over gay marriage, making a recommitment to Catholicism (not sad, happy, just complacated), my grandfather Beyer's death, my neighbor's dog's death, not receiving the NEA, not even getting an interview for a poetry job at my own school, driving from Oregon to California with only me driving and the boys bitching all the way, anxiety, not being able to grow anything in my garden, and spending six weeks away from my husband.