I can think more easily of authors than of titles. I know I read oh so many books that broke my heart. I also know that if you spoke to me at all last year, had a single conversation with me longer than 30 seconds, there’s a strong chance that I declared my passionate love for Joan Didion. I read her novel Play It As It Lays at some point early in 2011. I fell in love with that book, and then fell further in love with Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I’d read a little Didion before and liked it, but I’d never read her the way I read her this year: intensely, voraciously, patiently. And impatiently. I read an advanced manuscript copy of her new memoir, Blue Nights before it was released this fall. I finished it in the middle of the night, reading with a flashlight, feeling stunned.

I dressed up the day that I worked our bookstore’s event with her. I was giddy about meeting her and hearing her speak. I told her so. She thanked me. I’m still a bit giddy. 

Joan Didion, from Steve Pyke

I think that Joan Didion is one of the best writers alive today. I think her work will be read for centuries. I had a conversation the other day about Sylvia Plath, and whether or not she should be called a minor, rather than a major poet. My friend said (I’m paraphrasing) that she thinks of Plath (on whom she wrote her dissertation) as a minor poet, mostly because she is so distinctly tied to her time, rather than being simultaneously timely and timeless. I think Didion is timely and timeless. I think that she is a writer for whom writing gets harder the better she gets at it. I think that she uses language like a knife, and the more adept she becomes, the thinner and sharper her blade and the more elusive her quarry. I cannot imagine a more terrifying blank page than the one that faces Joan Didion when she begins to write, and I think you can sense that in the deep, oceanic rhythm of her prose, so propulsive and beautiful, haunting and incisive, lyrical and fear-defying. I have trouble thinking of another writer who speaks to me as profoundly as Didion does.  

That being said, I did read a few other things this year. Mostly poetry. Well, that’s a lie — I read a lot of poetry, but I read many other things too. A breakdown by genre seems like a good idea, so…

Fiction: I loved Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov and Jennifer Egan’s  A Visit from the Goon Squad. I was swept away by Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, and entranced (and horrified, as usual) by Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good and The Bell. I think I owe a lot to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick, which I read early last winter and which cracked through a string of reading failures with tragic hilarity and misshapen affection. 

I reread Sarah Waters’ novel The Nightwatch, Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater! and Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.  I highly recommend reading The Phantom Tollbooth aloud to yourself whenever you’re in need of buoying up.

I also read a quite a few essays. I was enchanted by  Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, whose final line (“If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.”) tolled in my head throughout the past month and a half of struggling with graduate school applications. I wrote a staff recommendation for Anna Politkovskaya’s final collected writings, Is Journalism Worth Dying for?, perhaps the most important and most difficult book I read last year. I discovered the great pleasures of M.F.K Fisher and Wendell Berry.

I’ve never had a year where I’ve thought more about how I want to live my life, so it’s more than appropriate that one of my favorite books of the year was Sarah Bakewell’s biography, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. I also spent several weeks with Hermione Lee’s excellent biography of Virginia Woolf (by far the longest book I read this year) and weird and hilarious train ride with Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages.

This year was my introduction to graphic novels, and thanks to the hand-selected choices of a terrifically knowledgeable and generous friend, I’m probably hooked for life. Many of my favorite books this year have really important graphic elements. I had my heart broken by Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls and David Mazzucchelli’s gorgeous graphic novel Asterios Polyp. I had it repaired by Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty, by the fun I’ve had reading The Unwritten series, and by bathing it in oodles and oodles of poetry. Granted, I read some pretty heartbreaking poetry, but something about poetry repairs your heart even as it splits it open. 

I read more Szymborksa, discovered Bob Hicok and Jack Gilbert, returned to Frank O’Hara and A.R. Ammons, and stumbled across Katherine Larsen’s excellent Radial Symmetry, the poems of Nick Flynn, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Olena Kalytiak Davis.  

So, in summary, 2011′s Absolute Best: Joan Didion, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Asterios Polyp, Bob Hicok, and A.R. Ammons. Absolute, absolute best? Didion and Hicok. I’ll leave you with this:

Some things that come together in coming apart

How stuck am I on the polar ice caps
now that they’re not so much there as historical
novels people pretend to have read
but really, who has the time? Like it’s haveable,
time, like we can stop driving ourselves
to the market and crazy soon enough
to have anything left to claim for England. Melting things
on that scale beats the yo-yo I stoved to goo
and a spanking, someone
needs to come along and send us to bed
without supper. In our defense
we’re stupid, gullible, smelly, we’re not
stupid, that was mean and categorical,
we’re wired and emblazoned and impressed
by the singing of birds who are merely
shuttling air from one spot to another, holding it
as we do each other in a waltz
to let it go further on, where it must fend
for itself. These bits of song-air
and dance are changed forever, everything
is changed forever all the time, I’m not here,
I’m up ahead, running with my arms thrown back
to embrace how mild life seemed
when I first noticed light coming to rest
on my mother’s face. Creatures
who generally have trouble with story problems
may not be the organisms one should ask
to anticipate global warming. A car
about to to be started in Poughkeepsie
is the tipping point, after that, all is fire
and water, all is lost: do you
shoot the driver, learn the backstroke,
enjoy long walks into the high ground?
I keep returning to the ice caps,
their vast calvings in my mind, TV stars
of our dissolution, my head
thunderous and cold and too small
for their wounds but well-suited
to my hair. The debate as I understand it:
it’s too late, it’s not too late. Smart people
agree we’re not that smart. Here are clouds again,
telling me they make this up as they go.
If we don’t owe it to ourselves to fix
what we’ve broken, we owe it to ponies.
That was manipulative, but I love ponies,
how they let our children
ride them in circles with helmets on in case
the circles fall.

~ Bob Hicok

Here are the most recent ones:

Words for Empty and Words for Full by Bob Hicok

I can’t really claim responsibility for this recommendation. I want to, because I love this book, but I can’t. I’ve been polling customers about their favorite contemporary poets and I’d never heard of Bob Hicok before someone recommended him to me a few weeks ago.

I’m a bit giddy about this guy’s poems. I haven’t fallen this hard for a poet since I met e.e. cummings in 9th grade. Not that Hicok and cummings have too much in common – - it’s just they give me the same kind of feeling. A take-out-all-his-books-from-the-library, I-hope-he’s-written-a-poem-about-everything kind of feeling.

It’s a good feeling. I recommend it (and this book) to you.

Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison by Ted Kooser

When Ted Kooser was recovering from cancer, his doctor told him to stay out of the sun. He walked every morning before dawn, and then wrote a poem about each walk, put them down on postcards and mailed them off to his friend, the writer Jim Harrison.

This book is 100 of those poems, organized chronologically. Reading through them is like traveling through the darkest months of the year with someone so warm and observant that you don’t remember to miss the sun. Kooser writes the kind of poems that revel in the ordinary as extraordinary, a feat he accomplishes quietly and simply, just through the elegance of his descriptions and the beauty of his metaphors.

I cannot think of a better book to carry around with you for a winter’s worth of walks.

420 Characters by Lou BeachThis might be the world’s easiest book to recommend. Here goes: Pick up the book. Open to any page. Read the story. Pick a new page. Read another story.

My work is done here.

Or it would be, if you were in the store.

But you aren’t. So – I’ll turn to a page for you

(it’s the first one I read):

THE ELEVATOR IS BROKEN. I lug a bag of groceries up the metal stairs to the eighth floor. Half-way there the soggy bottom of the bag breaks, releases a fusillade of cat food cans that go clanking and bouncing below. I sigh and sit, feel as empty as the bag. I stare at the white curdles of cottage cheese from the burst container, now on my shoes, and think this is what angel vomit must look like.

And here’s one more:

“LET ME IN!” The failed artist from around the corner, 6 ft. 4 in. of canned ham, and his wee wife, 5 ft. 1, a regular pill bug, was banging on my door. A bird had just shit on his head, an avian comment on his life. Drug-riddled and depressed, he was making lots of money in the video game industry, “What should I do?” he asked. I thought he should shoot himself, but didn’t say so. I handed him towel.

So many good books!

Describe the Lathe.

Identify the parts of the Engine Lathe and its role.

Describe the importance of a lathe setup and the principle operations of

Straight and Taper:

turning, facing, boring, threading, grooving, knurling, and form cutting.

Describe the common measuring rules,

How they are adjusted and the

Proper way they are used.

Describe how to read a part drawing and its tolerances.

Instill, every day,

Shop Safety to every student.

I have a confession to make: I only picked up this book because I had a slew of things I didn’t want to do and I wanted a distraction. Little did I know I’d stumbled onto an ode to procrastination written by an evident master of the craft.

It Chooses You is a funny, heartfelt commiseration about being creative, distractible and in a funk. Struggling to finish a screenplay, Miranda July starts poring over items for sale in the PennySaver. She starts calling up the sellers and then interviewing them in their homes, photographer in tow.

As a storyteller, July is touchingly concerned with the non-electronic. Most of her interviewees don’t own computers, and the real tangible things they are selling are invested with the sorts of stories only physical objects can contain, stories that end when the object is destroyed or thrown away or simply when the last person aware of its meaning disappears.

Miranda July knows you procrastinate, and so do I. If you do it with this book, you won’t be wasting your time.

6/10

After waiting so many months
Skyward Sword Zelda, after
reading so many articles,
see movies and read
rumors, even I
would give this game
 
10/10.
 
Then he came out,
I bought and tried and
it is at this point that came
the disappointment.
 
I quickly realized that
so much praise, so many high scores
were just advertising.

 
 
I am an expert player of Zelda,
 
I played three times
and finished
Zelda Twilight Princess and I would have expected much more
from Skyward Sword.
 
Grainy graphics, controller goes
crazy when you look off the field, the controller
is not precise, enemies in spite of
the above
the new Motion Plus controller,
are killed simply shaking the controller.
 
And then the most important thing,
 
the story,
missing the magic,
 
the soul is lacking,
 
there is no involvement, few dialogues.
 
It looks like a game
made in a hurry
to go to meet
business needs, putting together
the pieces of the previous Zelda,
 
yet they have had 5 years of time.
 
I’ve played now for 20 hours
since
I hope that
going forward
 
you change something.

A Monster Calls

A monster is calling Conor O’Malley. This monster comes at night, as monsters do, and demands from Conor the most terrible, terrifying thing of all: the truth. Conor’s truth.

Conor isn’t afraid of monsters (except for the one in his nightmare, the nightmare he can’t bring himself to speak about) and why should he be? His waking life is frightening enough. His mother is sick and the treatments aren’t working. He’s done his best to alienate his only friend. He’s the loneliest boy in the world. Until the monster comes walking.

A Monster Calls is a book about a boy whose mother is dying, a book about loneliness, anger and loss and about the stories we tell ourselves about all these things, sometimes to deceive, sometimes to make things true. It is a book that knows that the monsters inside us aren’t always the worst parts of us at all.  Patrick Ness is a spare and exquisite storyteller and Jim Kay’s gorgeous, haunting black and white illustrations add power and pathos to a tale that is mesmerizing, lyrical, and deeply intelligent.

Rarely has a book come to mean so much to me so quickly. Let this monster call you too.

Play

Nothing is going to become of anyone
except death:
  therefore: it’s okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &

ruin’s not
compromised by magnificence:

that cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
   pick a perch—
apple branch for example in
      bloom—
tune up
and

drill imagination right through
       necessity:
it’s all right:
it’s been taken care of:

is allowed, considering 

~ A.R. Ammons

Note: I received this poem with a college acceptance letter my senior year of high school – I didn’t wind up attending that school, but I’ve kept this poem in a notebook of mine ever since, thought of it often, reread it many times, misquoted it even more than that and misattributed it too, though I am fairly certain it’s A.R. Ammons (who, incidentally, wrote the poem that gave the title to my favorite collection of short stories from last year, Maile Meloy’s excellent Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It). This poem has come to mean a lot to me and I hope you like it too. 
This time, it’s for Devin. 

Mother.

Daughter. I admit, I may have a bigger problem (if you want to call it that). But I've also got 38 years to learn some restraint.