The reason I need to renew my library card

I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction. When the mixture is missing I simply stop reading; sometimes I can tell it’s my mood at the moment and so hang on to the book, but most of the time I let it float out of my library and into the stock of my favorite local used book stores.

This process has led to some regrets, and in a couple dozen instances I’ve had to replace copies of books I’d half-read and callously turned away. This happened, for example, with Christopher Middleton, whose Torse 3 and Nonsequences I let go during a “cleaning house” phase 20 years ago and now am looking for online because—as you’ll see below—I recently read his Two Horse Wagon Going By and was suddenly bowled over by the strangeness, resonance, and authenticity of his voice. Middleton died this past November 29th, which makes my search a bit melancholy—as if he’d been missing my attention all of these years and now will never know he’s won me back!

Anyway, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of them because all of them—a lucky year—were well worth reading. But I do have a few outright recommendations:

Best Rediscovery: H. D.’s extraordinary, labyrinthine Helen in Egypt
Best Prose Poem Collection Masquerading as a Fieldbook: Ted Kooser’s The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Fieldbook
Best Floating World Poetry: Art Goodtimes’s Looking South to Lone Cone, where the local and the spiritual intersect and release astonishing flashes of … well, I can only call it wisdom.
Most Pleasantly Surprising: Patty Crane’s subtle and forceful translations of selected Tomas Tranströmer poems in Bright Scythe. I’m especially grateful for her version of Tranströmer’s long masterpiece, “Baltics.” My wife Melody brought back from Stockholm a CD of the poet reading the poem in Swedish, which I’ve listened to half a dozen times and in the process come to sense how much is missing from the other available English versions. Crane brings over more of the poem’s music than any other translator, and her versions of even very familiar Tranströmer poems open them up in new ways.
Best Poetic Discovery: Wendy Videlock (how did I survive without her marvelous wit?)
Best Fiction Discovery: Percival Everett (America’s most entertaining anti-postmodernist postmodernist)
Best Creative Bending of Genres: C. M. Mayo’s delicious potpourri of political and cultural history, philosophy, literary detective work, and memoir, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. Personally, I find it impossible to describe, but reviewer Carlos Amanita at The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities does a fine job of describing this wonderfully complex book.  
Best Further-Proof Poetry Collection: David Giannini’s Span of Thread, which is a polyphonic, serio-playful, deep-structured celebration of life-in-language and language-in-life. This book is further proof that Giannini is among those who are saving American poetry from itself.
Best Grim-and-Strange-but-Luminous Novel: Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise. Don’t avoid it just because it wrestles with the Holocaust.

Enough! Herewith, my year in books….

Splitting an Order, Ted Kooser, Copper Canyon, 2014

Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2008

We Don’t Kill Snakes Where We Come From: Two Years in a Greek Village, John Levy, Querencia Books, 1994

Helen in Egypt, H.D., New Directions, 1961

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami, trans. Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2014

The Glass Adonis, C. A. Trypanis, Chilimark Press, 1972

A Flag for Sunrise, Robert Stone, Knopf, 1981

Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, C. M. Mayo, Dancing Chiva Literary Arts, 2013

Pierre Reverdy: Poems Early to Late, Pierre Reverdy, trans Mary Ann Caws & Patricia Terry, Black Widow Press, 2014

The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, trans. The Author with Cecil Hemley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962

Reader Please Supply Meaning, Jim Murdoch, Fandango Virtual, 2015

The Dark Gnu and Other Poems, Wendy Videlock, Able Muse Press, 2013

Nevertheless, Wendy Videlock, Able Muse Press, 2011

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, David Damrosch, Henry Holt & Co., 2007

Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami, trans. Alfred Birnbaum, Vintage International, 1995

In Paradise, Peter Matthiessen, Riverhead Books, 2014

Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and Off the Tracks, Victor Maymudes and Jacob Maymudes, St. Martin’s Press, 2014

Ordinary Love & Good Will, Jane Smiley, Knopf, 1989

George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel, Roderick Beaton, Yale University Press, 2003

George Seferis: Collected Poems (Revised Ed.), George Seferis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton U Press, 1995

Three Secret Poems, George Seferis, trans. Walter Kaiser, Harvard University Press, 1969

Poems, George Seferis, trans. Rex Warner, Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1960.

The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book, Ted Kooser, U of Nebraska, 2014

Baker of Tarifa, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Poetic Matrix Press, 2010

Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life, Robert Bly, White Pine Pres, 2015

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami, trans. Alfred Birnbaum, Vintage International, 1991

Looking South to Lone Cone, Art Goodtimes, Western Eye Press, 2013

The World of Dreams, Henri Bergson, trans. Wade Baskin, Philosophical Library, 1958

Through the Square Window, Sinéad Morrissey, Carcanet, 2009

Slingshots and Love Plums, Wendy Videlock, Able Muse Press, 2015

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Pubs., 1963

Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter: Refugee from Indian Creek, Enrique Hank Lopez, Little, Brown, 1981

Making Sense, Jim Murdoch, Fandango Virtual, 2013

Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, Ryuichi Tamura, eds. Takako Lento and Wayne Miller, trans. Christopher Drake, Takako Lento, Marianne Tarcov, Pleiades Press, 2011

Questions of Love: News & Selected Poems, Rika Lesser, Sheep Meadow Press, 2008

Midland, Kwame Dawes, Ohio University Press, 2001

Songs of Kabir, Kabir, trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, New York Review of Books, 2011

True Grit, Charles Portis, The Overlook Press, 2004 (1968)

Short Flights: Thirty-Two Modern Writers Share Aphorisms of Insight, Inspiration, and Wit, James Lough and Alex Stein, Schaffner Press, 2015

3 Sections, Vijay Seshadri, Graywolf Press, 2013

Kohl & Chalk, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Poetic Matrix Prss, 2013

Span of Thread, David Giannini, Červená Barva Press, 2015

The Iraqi Nights, Dunya Mikhail, trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, New Directions, 2015

The Glory, Thomas R. Smith, Red Dragonfly Press, 2015

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, Random House, 1996

Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar, Back Bay Books, 2013

The Physicists, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, trans. Joel Agee, Grove Press, 2010

Guarding the Air: Selected Poems, Gunnar Harding, trans. Roger Greenwald, Black Widow Press, 2014

Collected Poems 1969-2014, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Penguin India, 2014

The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Copper Canyon, 2014

A Change of Light, Julio Cortázar, trans. Gregory Rabassa, Knopf, 1980

Double Honeymoon, Evan S. Connell, Jr., Putnam, 1976

Half an Inch of Water, Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 2015

Assumption, Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 2011

The Burning Perch, Louis MacNeice, Faber and Faber, 1963

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story, A. E. Hotchner, St. Martin’s Press, 2015

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 2013

Paterson, William Carlos Williams, New Directions, 1995

Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe, Chris Andrews, Columbia U Pr, 2014

Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi, Riverhead Books, 2014

The Water Cure, Percival Everett, Graywolf Press, 2007

Aura, Carlos Fuentes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, trans. Lysander Kemp, 1975

Bright Scythe, Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Patty Crane, Sarabande Books, 2015

Two Horse Wagon Going By, Christopher Middleton, Carcanet, 1986

Far District, Ishion Hutchinson, Peepal Tree Press, 2010