So Many Books, So Little Time

Jim Murdoch’s The More Things Change, a terrific novel I filled with flags in preparation for reviewing it … but the review, like so much of my more enjoyable work, went by the wayside in favor of work work. More’s the pity….
I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party). Reading for me has a different value, being a form of communion with the dead and with the distant living, a way of overcoming the self’s isolation and paralysis.
Among the books listed below, all well worth reading, those that particularly hit home were Silvana Paternostro’s extraordinary collections of interviews with friends, acquaintances, rivals, and relatives of Gabriel García Márquez, Solitude & Company. It is insightful, often funny, more often astonishing—a warm and complicated portrayal of a great writer’s development.
Rodrigo Fresán’s challenging novel The Invented Part inspired me to read, at long last, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which I quickly realized is superior to The Great Gatsby, although it would be very tough to situate in a high school curriculum because of the child sexual abuse that—along with the doctor/lover’s egoistic desire to rescue his patient—is the story’s underlying motive force. Fitzgerald’s writing is flawless, as it is in Gatsby, but here it is more adventurous, almost always right on the shimmering edge of transcendence.
Before I wander away from comments on prose works, I have to mention Joanne Greenberg’s extraordinary novel Jubilee Year. It is, I think, the largest of her novels, a portrait not of an individual or a family but a large, conflicted community. If Greenberg had not published it before the rise of COVID, a reader would be forgiven for thinking of it in that context. The book examines, with moving detail and compassion, the impact of an isolating disaster on a community with a history of exploitation—both exploiting and being exploited: a microcosm of the U.S.’s history in the West. The prose, as ever in Greenberg’s work, is clear, fluid, and luminous. It’s among the most humane of the books I’ve read in our pandemic year.
At last, a few words about the poetry I read this year. There is not a collection mentioned below that I wouldn’t recommend. And I have to confess that I tend to read poets, not poetry books. When Cooperman, Jacobson, Giannini, or Kooser, Thomas R. Smith or Mark Irwin or Linda Hogan, offer up their latest work, I’m all in. There are always those that hit home in some inexplicable way, of course, and this year I was especially bowled over by Linda Hogan’s A History of Kindness, Thomas R. Smith’s Storm Island, Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel: A Poem, Dale Jacobson’s Notes from the Travelogue., and Mark Irwin’s Shimmer (winner of the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry).
As I mentioned at the outset, all the books in this list are worth reading, not least the classics which you may have read in other translations. Set aside, for example, Robert Fagles’s now standard free-verse Odyssey and enjoy Peter Green’s version of Homer’s epic in naturally cadenced English hexameters. And if you know Rilke only in the MacIntyre or Mitchell translations, give Edward Snow’s exquisite and accurate renditions of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus a try.
Onward into 2021 … with Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace on the top of my stack….
Title | Author | Publisher | Year | ISBN | Category | Translator |
Neila, Evening Song: Last Poems of Yvan Goll | Yvan Goll | Spuyten Duyvil | 2016 | 9781941550717 | Poetry | Donald Wellman |
Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told with Help from His Friends, Family, Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls | Silvana Paternostro | Seven Stories Press | 2019 | 9781609808969 | Biography | Edith Grossman |
Duino Elegies | Rainer Maria Rilke | North Point Press | 2000 | 9780865475465 | Poetry | Edward Snow |
Sonnets to Orpheus | Rainer Maria Rilke | North Point Press | 2004 | 978086547611x | Poetry | Edward Snow |
14 Poems Regarding Women | David Giannini | New Feral Press | 2020 | http://nfp.cmgpromo.com/about-us | Poetry | |
The Last Mastodon | Christina Olson | Rattle | 2019 | 9781931307437 | Poetry | |
Lost on the Blood-Dark Sea | Robert Cooperman | FutureCycle Press | 2020 | 9781942371946 | Poetry | |
All Transparent Things Need Thundershits | Dana Roeser | Two Sylvias Press | 2019 | 9781948767064 | Poetry | |
The Invented Part | Rodrigo Fresán | Open Letter | 2017 | 9781940953564 | Fiction | Will Vanderhyden |
In the Sun Out of the Wind | Louis Jenkins | Will o’ the Wisp Books | 2017 | 9780979312878 | Poetry | |
Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Book-of-the-Month Club | 2000 | 9780965684392 | Fiction | |
Villa Pacifica | Kapka Kassabova | Alma Books Ltd. | 2012 | 9781846881862 | Fiction | |
Maigret Hesitates | Georges Simenon | Nelson Doubleday, Inc. | 1970 | 9780241304198 | Fiction | |
Maigret’s Pickpocket | Georges Simenon | Nelson Doubleday, Inc. | 1968 | 9780241304174 | Fiction | |
Maigret and the Killer | Georges Simenon | Nelson Doubleday, Inc. | 1971 | 9780241304266 | Fiction | |
Ledger | Jane Hirshfield | Alfred A. Knopf | 2020 | 9780525657804 | Poetry | |
Jubilee Year | Joanne Greenberg | McMania Publishing | 2019 | 9781545678152 | Fiction | |
Notes from the Travelogue: A Long Poem | Dale Jacobson | Red Dragonfly Press | 2019 | 9781945063312 | Poetry | |
Viral Packet | David Giannini | New Feral Press | 2020 | http://nfp.cmgpromo.com/about-us | Poetry | |
Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish | Breyten Breytenbach | Archipelago Books | 2009 | 9780981955759 | Belles Lettres | |
Shimmer | Mark Irwin | Anhinga Press | 2020 | 9781934695630 | Poetry | |
The Plain in Flames | Juan Rulfo | University of Texas Press | 2015 | 9780292743856 | Fiction | Ilan Stavans with Harold Augenbraum |
The Misuse of Scripture | Daniel Klawitter | Self-Published | 2020 | 9781711015576 | Poetry | |
The Black Sea | Stephanos Papadopoulos | The Sheep Meadow Press | 2012 | 9781937679095 | Poetry | |
Chaos, A Fable | Rodrigo Rey Rosa | Amazon Crossing | 2019 | 9781542090353 | Fiction | Jeffrey Gray |
The Good Cripple | Rodrigo Rey Rosa | New Directions | 2004 | 9780811215664 | Fiction | Esther Allen |
The Book of Illusions | Paul Auster | Henry Holt | 2002 | 9780805054088 | Fiction | |
Gold: Being the Marvelous History of General John Augustus Sutter | Blaise Cendrars | Marlowe & Company | 1996 | 9781569248072 | Fiction | Nina Rootes |
Epitaph of a Small Winner | Machado de Assis | Noonday | 1952 | 9780374531232 | Fiction | William L. Grossman |
A History of Kindness | Linda Hogan | Torrey House Press | 2020 | 9781948814256 | Poetry | |
I Am Not Sidney Poitier | Percival Everett | Graywolf Press | 2009 | 9781555975272 | Fiction | |
Gabriel: A Poem | Edward Hirsch | Knopf | 2014 | 9780385353731 | Poetry | |
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes | Seamus Heaney | Noonday | 1991 | 9780374522896 | Drama | |
Gardens in the Dunes | Leslie Marmon Silko | Simon & Schuster | 1999 | 9780684811543 | Fiction | |
The Selected Poetry of Gabriel Zaid | Gabriel Zaid | Paul Dry Books, Inc. | 2014 | 9781589880931 | Poetry | Various |
Robert Bly in This World: Proceedings of a Conference Held at Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, April 16-19, 2009 | Thomas R. Smith, editor | University of Minnesota Libraries | 2011 | 9780816677702 | Nonfiction | |
The Odyssey | Homer | University of California Press | 2018 | 9780520293632 | Poetry | Peter Green |
Red Stilts | Ted Kooser | Copper Canyon Press | 2020 | 9781556596094 | Poetry | |
Faithful and Virtuous Night | Louise Glück | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2014 | 9780374152017 | Poetry | |
The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez | Hafez | HarperCollins | 2008 | 9780061138836 | Poetry | Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn |
Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations | Miroslav Holub | Bloodaxe Books | 2006 | 9781852247478 | Poetry | Edwald Osers, Ian & Jarmila Milner, George Theiner, David Young, Dana Hábova, Rebekah Bloyd, Miroslav Holub |
Chained Dog Dreams | Carol D. Guerrero-Murphy | Finishing Line Press | 2019 | 9781646620661 | Poetry | |
A Moral Lesson | Paul Éluard | Green Integer | 2007 | 9781931243957 | Poetry | Lisa Lubasch |
Night Open | Rolf Jacobsen | White Pine Press | 1993 | 9781877727337 | Poetry | Olav Grinde |
The Known World | Edward P. Jones | Amistad/HarperCollins | 2003 | 9780060557546 | Fiction | |
Semblance Vagrant | David Giannini | New Feral Press | 2020 | http://nfp.cmgpromo.com/about-us | Poetry | |
Bread Crumbs | Cynthia Tremblay | Lynx House Press | 2020 | 9870899241708 | Poetry | |
The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai | Ha Jin | Pantheon Books | 2020 | 9781524747411 | Nonfiction | |
The Selected Poems of Li Po | Li Po | New Directions | 1996 | 9780811213233 | Poetry | David Hinton |
By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 | William Carlos Williams | New Directions | 2011 | 9780811218856 | Poetry | |
In the American Grain | William Carlos Williams | New Directions | 1935 | 9780811218498 | Nonfiction | |
Allegria | Giuseppe Ungaretti | Archipelago Books | 2020 | 9781939810649 | Poetry | Geoffrey Brock |
Storm Island | Thomas R. Smith | Red Dragonfly Press | 2020 | 9781945063343 | Poetry | |
Hybrida | Tina Chang | W. W. Norton | 2019 | 9781324002482 | Poetry | |
The Tradition | Jericho Brown | Copper Canyon Press | 2019 | 9781556594861 | Poetry | |
Postcolonial Love Poem | Natalie Diaz | Graywolf Press | 2020 | 9781644450147 | Poetry | |
On Love | Edward Hirsch | Knopf | 1998 | 9780375402531 | Poetry | |
The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis | Odysseus Elytis | Johns Hopkins University Press | 2004 | 9780801880452 | Poetry | Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris |
North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen | Rolf Jacobsen | The University of Chicago Press | 2002 | 9780226333540 | Poetry |
Jim, it’s great to hear from you! I have missed your blog and am glad to know you’re reading and writing. By the way, I read The More Things Change inn 2019—it was on my annual reading list for that year—and fully intended to write a “review” (more of an appreciation), but life and work got away from me. The book is still on my shelf, and as you would see by the snapshot I just took but seem unable to embed here . It is full of colored flags marking the astoundingly many quotable passages that struck me as I read. (I’ll email it to you!) It’s an extraordinary novel, Jim. And thinking about it now leads me to hope that you’re gathering your recent poems together and making them available to the world as well. Cheers!
It’s been a bit the other way round for me. I only read twenty books between January and September (mostly novellas) of which only two were poets, Richard Brautigan and Jim Dodge. In October we decided, you would think on a whim considering the speed in which it happened, to move house. October-November was spent packing, November-December, unpacking. The poems of 2020 (and also 2019) represented a change for me, less structured and more musical. No less miserable though, in fact I’ve never written so many poems fuelled by unhappiness; sadness, yes, unhappiness is a different beast. Like most I would imagine I’m glad to see the back of 2020 but I’m holding my breath at the moment; I don’t want to jinx 2021. Things in the UK are far from settled. The true impact of Brexit has yet to be felt and coronavirus cases are soaring. You must feel a bit the same over there, hopeful but careful not to get carried away. Either way I wish you well this year and as far as the poetry goes you know as well as me how that goes.