Of course as seventeen year olds, we thought we were being quiet as the five of us grabbed the watermelons from the patch he had in his front yard. Giggling drunk and high, we stumbled over the rows to the panel van, juggling as many of the melons as we were able to carry each trip. Then the house lights blazed through the open windows, the screen door slammed open banging against the house, and he exploded onto the porch raging. We scattered like rats. “What the hell,” he screamed as if an evangelical preacher come Sunday morning condemning all sinners. Not waiting for the expected shot gun blast to rend the air, we leapt without grace over the rows of watermelons, scrambling into the van that idled nearby. Nate hit the gas before we were completely in. The van’s doors flapped open like mouths panting. We all screamed for our lives, as watermelons rolled out the back to thud like dead bodies onto the moonlit summer street.
I have seen a couple of people post what they read this year. So, being the follower that I am, I decided to post my list. I read constantly, some books I have been reading for years, and have never finished, but am still reading off and on. Some books I stop reading for various reasons: I lose interest, I lose the book in the house somewhere, the book gets shelved, I get bored, I know where it is going, the writing is just too pathetic to continue. Here is the list of books I finished (from beginning to end) this year. I stress finished, because this is not a complete list of what I have been reading. The pictures are current book piles around the house I am reading from.
Fantasyland—Kurt Anderson
Bestiary—Guillaume Apollinaire
Educated—Tara Westover
The Historians (twice)—Eavan Boland
Poetry as Insurgent Art— Ferlinghetti
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
At the Existentialist Cafe—-Sarah Blakewell
An Indigenous People’s’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Under the Dome: walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive
Norma Jean Baker of Troy by Anne Carson
The selected poems of Wendell Berry
Living Nations, Living Words edited and selected by Joy Harjo
An Unnecessary Woman—Rabid alameddine
Selected Poems of Guiseppe Ungaretti
Jimmy’s Blues by James Baldwin (selected poems)
How to be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Stone Lyre, poems by Rene Char
An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophocles, Euripides) translated by Anne Carson
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Finna by Nate Marshall (twice)
Debths by Susan Howe
Dark City by Charles Bernstein
The Essential Jim Harrison, by Jim Harrison
Four Hundred Souls by Ibram X Kendi and Keisha N Blain
The Big Seven by Jim Harrison
Goldenrod by Maggie Smith
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Glottal Stop by Paul Celan
Asylum by Jill Bialosky
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan
