Creativity: Writing, rather than Writing About Writing

This week I have been sorting through piles of books and CDs, deciding what I can live without. I need to thin the herd, lighten the load, divest. Yesterday I unloaded a satchel full of books at a used book store, one friendly to the obscure, the academic, the poetic, the literary.

I realized, in my sorting, that I have over time amassed an entire library on LGBT/queer/gender theory and LGBT history, all these heavy-duty big books written from an academic and philosophical viewpoint. I've read them all, and realize I'm not going to read them again. There are a very few of these that I will keep, as the only ones I'm ever likely to re-read or consult ever again (like John Boswell's books, Martin Duberman's history of Stonewall, etc.). But most of these need to find another home. Yesterday, the used book store took them all in, and will pass them on. (The recycling of ideas.)

But in truth, the more important realization here is: I'm an artist.

To engage with LGBT studies in future for me is to make art about it, rather than to read or write a dissertation about it. Now that I've embraced being an artist, it's time to let go of my academic background.

And one way I do that is to make art about how I respond to LGBT life, rather than to write a theoretical paper about it. Thus, I have a two-page spread of artwork in the current issue of RFD Magazine, in their brand new "Qweer Arts Issue." (And I plan to participate in the art gallery show that is being planned to highlight artists from the issue.)

Writing, rather than writing about writing.

There are limits to the intellectual and academic study and analysis of the way we live our lives. There are limits to talking about it, as opposed to doing it. I went through graduate school. I can actually read and understand these kinds of heavy-duty high-theory academic books. I know the lingo, I know the theories, and I know the history. (I am a data sponge.) I was actually read good in graduate school: I was an excellent, thorough researcher, and a good writer of thesis-like papers. I got good grades, and was well-liked by most of my professors, one or two of whom thought I could be a brilliant scholar in future.

But that's no what happened. Academia, the university as an educational and research institution, has its own rules of survival, "publish or perish" being only the most famous example, that I could not adhere to, in the end. Grad school politics did not engage my heart, and so I did it poorly. Even though I was very good at the scholarly side of academic life, I failed at the political side.

Most importantly, however, I left grad school, I now believe, because I knew on some level, at the time still a pre-verbal level, that I'd rather write music than write about music, I'd rather make art than write about making art. Making art is what I do best. I'm pretty good at writing about making art, too. But I never wanted to be a Critic, an intellectual who analyzes the artwork of others and never makes his own. I know now that I never would have fit in, in academia; I might have been a good teacher, but probably not a good Professor.

I still write about making art and making music, although I write about it because I'm interested in the creative process as a process. I make notes. I leave breadcrumbs. I document and study the process itself, out of fascination. I have written a great deal about the creative process, and the arts. It's one of my main topics as an essayist.

And I enjoy reading what other artists and writers and poets and composers have to say about their own creative processes. (Stephen King's book On Writing is a wonderful book, even if you don't like anything else he writes.) I love that kind of book, and have an entire library of "poets on poetry, writers on writing" sort of books. I have an entire library of John Cage's books.

But I don't want to read another academic book about queer theory, LGBT theory, or theoretical models of queer living, when what I'd rather do is go live life as a creative gay shaman artist poet composer painter, and respond to life lived as an artist instead of an academic.

I have no regrets about the academic period of my life—except perhaps for one: I never should have let anyone convince me that I was supposed to write ABOUT music, rather than writing music. But even that is a minor regret, because it was part of the path that led me to where I am now.

I embrace that I am a maker, not one of those who talks about makers, although I think it's okay for makers to talk about what makers do. I write, rather than write about writers writing. I embrace the paradox that I am writing, now, about writing about writing. But I'm still writing about the creative process, not about the "product" that I produce. I have little interest in telling you how to think about the art I make, or telling you what to believe it means: I'd rather you discovered that on your own.

As the haiku master said, centuries ago: The poem is only fulfilled when the reader completes the poem by bringing his own life-experience to the reading, filling in the gaps with those things we all have in common, just because we are human.

RIP Maurice Sendak

This wild thing, for one, feels sad today.

One thing I loved about Maurice Sendak was that he aware that childhood has a dark and scary side, which shouldn't be suppressed. His books were often attacked by adults who would prefer that children would be innocent and pure, even though they're not. As Sendak himself said, "Children know everything." But children themselves loved him, for understanding them better than most adults, for knowing their terrors and nightmares and silly playful joys alike. It's another example of the critics being moralizing and clueless about an author, while the author's readers understood far better what was really going on. I know plenty of sane, mature adults who recall fondly their childhood encounters with Sendak's books. So where was the harm?

When I was an adult myself, working in a publishing company, I had access to many children's books that I had missed as a child, since I grew up in another country. A lot of classic children's books that many of my peers recalled fondly I had never heard of. But I knew about Sendak. One of the first children's books I bought for myself while working in book publishing was Where The Wild Things Are. (Probably the second one I bought for myself was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz.) The wild things still speak to all of us: the book has never in fifty years been out of print. (Speaking as someone who has run press and pre-press, I stagger at thinking how many times the printing plates have had to be remade during that tenure.)

That wildness is still in us. We often try to deny or suppress it, to make it conform to some manicured suburban ideal, but it pops up relentlessly. Better to embrace it, to have a bad day, to go howl at the moon and trees, then resume our routine. Wildness is necessary. It's part of us, and we deny it at our peril. It's the deniers who end up dancing the insane tarantella of repression and obsession.

Of course Wild Things is only the most famous of Sendak's many books, illustrations, and designs. I enjoyed his art whenever and wherever I encountered it.

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A couple of essay assessments available online (hat tip to Frank Wilson and Dave Lull):

NY Times article

Bloomberg article

May Sarton

Born May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and a naturalized U.S. citizen from the age of two, she remained something of an outsider, which no doubt made her a better observer. That's probably one of the reasons I have always appreciated her: a perpetual outsider, not always a happy one, occasionally caustic, but with an eye for detail that missed little of what was around her. Nobody sees what's actually there better than a stranger. Her poems were usually compressed lyrics, often reflective of the universal within the particular, often full of those details that an outsider sees. Sarton didn't follow any poetic fashions or schools, and was not a self-conscious literary experimenter like many of her generation. In her novels, which I would also call lyrical, she had a fine ear for the subtleties of relationships and human family drama. Some of her very best fiction is about love, insightful and funny and harrowing and profound all at once.

Sarton considered herself first and foremost a poet, with more than a dozen volumes of poetry published, but she also published nine volumes of journals and nineteen novels. It seems likely that her journals and memoirs will be what she is most remembered for, as they remain her most popular books. They continue to inspire new generations of readers. There is an honesty, even in edited form, about the difficulties of reconciling life and art. Journal of a Solitude is still one of the most often read of the journals, a story of living alone on the Maine coast, mostly cut off from others, with the occasional visitor: such an occasion as makes an artist go within and examine one's own darknesses and shadows.

In 1965 she published her tenth novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which describes a woman’s quest to belong in the world as an artist and a lesbian. After that novel was published, to some controversy even though her reputation as a novelist was already well-established, her later journals were more revealing about her own love for women. In Journal of a Solitude she wrote, "The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing . . . a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. . . ." Eventually she admitted what many readers believed, that this novel was autobiographical in spirit, if not literally so in every detail.

Nonetheless, she always insisted that she wanted to known as a poet and novelist, not a lesbian novelist. Some of that of course was the more circumspect times, and the generation she belonged to. There was some critical backlash against Sarton after that, but she has always had a devoted and dedicated fan following. I find this interesting because it means she was always a success to her readers, even if some of the critics were not supportive. What artist doesn't feel sympathy with that?

That double assessment continues to this day. Every so often I still get comments on my blog post here about the day I spent in Nelson, NH, where Sarton lived before Maine, and where she is buried: May Sarton at Nelson, NH. Yet two years after Sarton died in 1995, Margot Peters published May Sarton: A Biography. I read it a few years ago. It's thorough, discusses her entire life, her most important friendships, the places where she lived, and what she wrote. It's also a hatchet job, a biography that is biased towards depicting Sarton as an impossible person who was hard on her friends and angry all the time. Well, she was indeed restless, tempestuous, and strong-willed—but to be a woman artist in her times, one needed to be strong-willed. She doesn't paint herself as perfect in her journals, she doesn't pretend to be without fears or hard times. Nonetheless the journals contain moments of exceptional beauty, of near-awe, of pathos. Any artist who struggles with making a living and making art can sympathize; that many readers do just that speaks highly for her relevance. Plant Dreaming Deep, her first mature memoir, a series of short pieces about her house and friends in Nelson, set a new standard for memoir and journal writing; it remains a lucid and engrossing book, in some ways exceptionally brilliant. So I didn't like Peters' biography very much; it felt quite unbalanced. I think we're still waiting for a more balanced, definitive biography.

Making It New

Scrambling around for something to do to make the new year feel new, feel worthwhile (ah, the joy of putting on a fresh ostomy appliance in the first morning of the new year! such celebration!), I stumble across in my morning reading, sipping my tea, a long interview between Robert Birnbaum and Sven Birkerts. Birkerts, always-thoughtful author of The Gutenberg Elegies, had more than one thing to say that was epiphanic to me.

This is of course the season, just after the calendar adds a number to the year date, to talk explicitly about epiphany. Epiphanies are not always revelations of the unknown: sometimes they are encounters with a formulation or explanation articulated by someone else that seems so true to your own experience that it goes off like a bomb, even retroactively, so that things in your past are reframed in a way that now makes new and more solid sense. In a sense, this other kind of epiphany is when you encounter something that you realize you already knew, all along, on some level, but you hadn't articulated it to yourself quote so clearly, elegantly, or thoroughly; so when you hear it coming from another source, there's a big "Aha!" moment, and part of the moment is your realization that this was something you already knew.

Birnbaum and Birkerts spent a long time talking about reviewing, its changing climate, its current diminution and failures (reminding me in a way of the long conversations between Michael Ventura and James Hillman transcribed in their mind-blowing book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse), and its possibilities.

One moment early in the interview that came across as an epiphany—one of those things I already knew, on some level, but hadn't yet articulated to myself—was in regard to a fundamental aspect of the creative process. They were talking about journalism and book reviews:

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RB: How do you do with deadlines?

SB: Eschew them (both laugh).

RB: I guess that disqualifies you from journalism.

SB: I could have gone that way. I have done a major life-flip because I’d say the first 15 years of writing was a huge amount of reviewing and most of it was on deadline. I created a discipline-monster who I have since repudiated, or begun to. And I am not sure which leads which, but the stuff that used to arrive effortlessly in terms of the kind of mental structure of a review—it was like butter, I could just sit down and it would all come together. And that very thing has become almost unthinkably difficult for me. Everything in me resists writing the sentence that says, “In the opening of her latest novel…”

RB: Too facile, too banal?

SB: Well, you wear yourself out with your own repetitions. That’s also the basis of any progress in the arts, turning against what you can’t do anymore.

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Pay attention to that: The basis of any progress in the arts is turning against what you can't do anymore. This makes so much sense to me. It strikes me as the root psychological force behind any avant-garde. All avant-gardes are on some level a rejection of the past, of the status quo, of the existing prevailing winds of artistic fashion, of received wisdom.

As an artist, there are things you have done before—whether they were rote exercises done during your apprenticeship, or whether they are received wisdom about what Art is or should be—that you can't stand to do anymore—you have an almost visceral, gut-level reaction against repeating your old habits and patterns. You wear yourself out with your own repetitions. The notion that the new is always better than the old is at root a Romantic ideal—and keep in mind that the artistic Modernism of the early 20th C. was the full and final flowering of the Romantic period that had begun almost a century before, in terms of its ideas about who makes art and why—and so the various avant-gardes of the early 20th C. were really rejecting the old ways of making art, while not really rejecting the archetypes and stereotypes of the Artist that are part and parcel of the Romantic ideal. (The Solitary Artist, the Starving Artist, the Misunderstood Rebel, etc.)

I've said often that as an artist I don't really ever get bored. And that's true. If something starts to seem stale, I can go do something else. I practice crop rotation between several artforms, as one way of staying fresh. (This past couple of weeks, even though in many ways I've had a personally crappy time, I continued to make art. I'm almost done with a new song, and I did a couple of rounds of papier-maché, and a couple of smaller poems. It's never a vacuum, even when things are bad.) Yet even though I never get bored, I do get tired of repetitions. I've invented at least four new forms for poetry, that I can recall off the top of my head, which I've then used several times for my own poems—until they seem stale, then I go on to invent new ones. (One contention that some formalist poets seem to have with what I do as a poet is not that I occasionally do use forms, but that I don't use existing, inherited, historical forms, like the sonnet: which are, after all, another form of received wisdom. The objection seems to be as much about the act of invention, itself, as it is about any poetic content.)

I am self-aware enough of my worldviews and mindsets to know how they appear in my art—and how they affect the basic assumptions I make about the nature of the Universe, of life, and therefore of art. It is characteristic of me as an artist to not repeat myself. At least, not very often. There are various creative grooves that I return to, for fresh idea-mining, but if you were to closely observe my process, it's often about variations rather than repetitions. This operates on both large and small scales. I am aware of my own preference to not repeat a melody exactly in every verse of a song; there are always a few notes different, in variation. If you listen to live performances of signature songs by familiar recording artists, they usually change the arrangement that was recorded on their album. This is another way of keeping it fresh. I am aware that when I write a poem within one of the forms I've invented, even then it rarely exactly matches its predecessors. My life's experience has led me to be very conscious that nothing ever repeats exactly the same way twice, that change is always active and inevitable, and that most things are ephemeral. One reason I don't like to repeat myself is because life's too short to waste time on repetitions. I periodically turn against what I can't do anymore, what doesn't work for me anymore. I periodically therefore must try new things, or invent them. I suppose it's a form of artistic restlessness, but it's a fertile sort.

Of course, this means that I will usually tend to find myself allied with an avant-garde, philosophically if not in terms of what my art actually looks like. I've always been allied in spirit to the avant-garde, although I have rarely used self-consciously "avant-gardist" styles or means. I'm not a member of any school or -ism. Neither an Expressionist nor an Existentialist be. I usually find myself in disagreement, sooner or later, with all keepers of artistic ideology. (The classic example was the Surrealists, who began as disruptors of the old way of making art, precisely as Birkerts stipulates, very fresh and original in their approaches to making art—yet ended up being rigidly encoded, with ideological purity enforcement about who was good enough to be a member of the group or not.)

I know that the price of this, as well as the price of not repeating myself, is likely to be a lack of popular or commercial success. Pop music audiences, for example, don't really want innovation, they want repetition. Most intelligentsia like to re-affirm existing (received wisdom) values and truths, and not seek out new territory. We still, as Jean Cocteau once said, tend to judge what is beautiful by what we are already familiar with. It takes time to educate the audience. So be it.

On the other hand, later in their conversation Birnbaum and Birkerts discuss the ongoing contemporary balkanization of popular media, the lack of a centralized critical value-system, the anarchic tendencies of the new publishing media. There is no real Top 40 list of songs in popular music any more, instead there are many genres and sub-genres each going their own way. Birnbaum is as critical of Top Ten lists as I am, and for similar reasons. Many balkanized genres openly ignore the Top 40 nowadays. Even such public praise as winning peer-recognition awards like the Pulitzer or the Oscars comes under scrutiny as meaningless to creativity. Many younger artists simply ignore the entire awards process.

So there is also the possibility, as Birkerts points out, that with all the new niches being created, an artist who might never have gotten published by a large publishing venture, or received much mainstream critical attention (such as myself, or you), can find or create their own niche to fill, and an audience that might be small but loyal. So there's hope even for me (and you).

Just as there are artists who tend to not repeat themselves, there are audiences who do like to be surprised, and enjoy the adventure of not knowing what they'll see next from the artists they like. I too am that sort of fan, and mostly follow artists who veer and migrate, rather than following the straight and narrow. Unpredictability is a positive virtue, in these cases. (Which is why I will always prefer the unpredictable Brian Eno, or the genuinely original Bjork, to the Michael Boltons and Lady Gagas of the pop music world.) Again, my experience has taught me that to embrace chance and change; which you must do, even if you don't want to, as that's how the world turns.

Which brings me around to epiphany again. Epiphany, as I said above, is about revelation, and about realization. It's also about making it new. How do we make it new? Sometimes by discovery. And at other times by refusing to re-enactment the old and familiar. It's an epiphany to realize, for myself, that I have always been inclined towards not repeating myself. It's an epiphany to accept that as being a good and proper way to be, with its many possibilities for the positive uses of restlessness.

The Shamanic Art of Writing

I just spent an hour reading (re-reading) a novel so compelling that it pulled me entirely inside its own world building, so that I lost track of my own world, and my own self. This is what I call immersive reading. You become an active participant in the story, not merely a detached observer. When I emerged from the book after an hour of reading, I felt like I had lived an entire lifetime, and yet it was still the same bright morning. I found myself blinking in the light as though I had just woken from a very long night of dreaming.

For awhile, that other world seemed more real than this one, which also happens after particularly lucid and involving dreams. A week should have gone by in the world, while I was absent, but it was still Sunday, only Sunday, leaving me all the rest of future time to inhabit, even though I had just spent a lifetime in another universe. It is a strange sensation of two kinds of time overlapping, a lifetime's experience lived, and yet it wasn't yet tomorrow, as if time in the outer world had flowed much more slowly, had barely advanced. As if you have already lived a full lifetime, yet still have a full lifetime left to live.

(At least this is what happens for me. I've heard from some writers that they can never lose their sense of self when reading, never get wholly immersed in the worldbuilding of what they're reading, never turn off their inner editor and observer, never lose that part of their mind that sits in judgment, that edits, that comments on the writing as they go along. I struggle not to pity that lack of loss of self, because judging others is not a good game, yet I can't help feel sad for some writer who can't allow herself to fall into a book headfirst and inhabit that world, and that world alone, for the duration of the reading.)

Emerging from the other world, as if from a long dream, that sense of doubled time lasts for awhile. You only slowly begin to return to inhabit so-called normative time. Which is consensus time, really. Even so, one of the mysteries of consciousness is that time does change its rate of flow, both subjectively in terms of how we inhabit our lives, and objectively in terms of Einsteinian relativity. Most people think time is steady and constant—but it's not. Time is lumpy and uneven. It clumps. It takes longer to go around some objects in its flow than it does others. Space warps time; a heavy gravity field slows time down relative to its flow elsewhere.

And delightfully, when you lose your sense of self, in reading or in meditation, you lose your sense of time, and inhabit only the present Now. Physicists and experienced meditators agree about this: time is never as fixed as we think it is. Consciousness itself is time-binding; the ability to bind time into linear flow is in fact one definition of consciousness. And as Einstein said, The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. So it's no wonder that time goes away when the sense of self goes away, too. Consciousness is time, in this sense. Self-conscious self-awareness can become hell if we bind ourselves too tightly to time.

Sources tumble onto my table next to my writing desk, sometimes it seems of their own volition. Or I have been slowly gathering them, finding books and articles here and there over a period of time, not really consciously, till of a sudden a pattern emerges. When a pattern reveals itself, or takes shape, or suddenly becomes obvious, I am sometimes tempted to berate myself for not noticing the obvious earlier. But I've learned not to do that; instead, I remind myself that we all are much broader and deeper in mind than we usually realize, or admit to, and once again, the smarter, deeper, silent, unknown, more-tuned-in part of myself has been working behind the scenes until it was ready to dump realization on my doorstep once again, and bring me to my knees. I used to get annoyed, and resist. These days, even if I get annoyed, which is mostly annoyance at the timing, I accept affairs more readily, and just roll with it. That kind of acceptance comes with practice, with experience, with repetition. You learn to understand your own process, and accept its working habits. You learn to give up trying to mold your process into some idea of what you think it should be—"should" is a very coercive concept—and just let it unfold in its own time and manner.

And that's how I most often operate, creatively. I've learned that forcing the process never yields a good outcome: it either ends in a stubborn block, or I produce crap I wouldn't want to share with anyone, anyway. So my job is usually just to be prepared for whenever the process happens.

On the other hand, I've learned that I can coax and cajole, invite and hope. I can encourage that larger, smarter self that's responsible for most of my best work to come forward. I can invite in the wild things. i can leave the door open, and let the wolves wander through. I can open wide the windows inside my own soul, and let the wind and the silence move through, and blow away the accumulating dust.

All I have to work with are metaphors (wolves, windows) and analogies. This is too big and too mysterious a theme to write about definitively, or fully. I keep circling back to it, as part of my own process. I can only dip in and out, and hope each time I contemplate it to learn a little more, go a little deeper.

So here are few small aspects, in unreal order:

1. Because writing creates new worlds to inhabit, because it is worldbuilding, and travel between worlds, it is shamanic. Or at least it has the potential to be. Writing can activate its shamanic potential through content, style, and context of presentation. Traveling between your ordinary world and another one, invented or real, is what a shaman (or wizard) does. This isn't escapism, though; more on that later.

2. Sometimes we write to understand, rather than to describe or explain. Sometimes we don't what we think or fell until we write it out. The process of writing is the process of revelation, of becoming. The creative process is a process of self-discovery, but since we are all One, self-discovery also means discovery for others. The shamanic artist makes art in part to share the fruits of the journey of discovery. Traditionally, the shaman took a journey to the other worlds for the sake of healing the person, or the community: the knowledge brought back for healing was meant to be shared publicly, not kept privately. (Of course there are always confidences and secrets whose privacy one maintains.) If writing is shamanic, then it have that effect on readers.

3. The artist is a shaman in the sense that he or she goes into the other worlds via imagination, intuition, vision, and brings back the archetypal gold of new truth, new beauty. Shamans are divers of the deep waters of the self, who dare to explore the hidden and invisible world of the psyche. What knowledge and wisdom is brought back aids in coping with what is. Thus writing is not escapism, it is completion and conjoining. Context matters.

4. Art, in whatever medium, when it is shamanic in nature and function, can be identified by its liminality and numinosity. Its effects on the reader (viewer, audience, etc.) can be traced by the event of personal transformation, no matter how large or small, either in the moment of art, or later on after contemplation. Art can change lives. One way that we recognize great art is that it does indeed have that kind of effect on people. Shamanic art also disturbs. It can be uncomfortable to confront.

5. In order for writing to become shamanic, the shadow, the darkness, the wolf at the door, must be allowed to enter. You have to let the outside night in. You have to give control over to the unconscious, to the inner forces, to that larger, smarter self. You have to let go of the ego-personality's need to be in charge, in control, to consciously direct art-making. You have to allow for unpredictability and chaos. You have to be willing to tell the hard truthful stories, the difficult ones that most people turn away from because the content disturbs them. You also have to be willing to tell the stories that transcend experience, that are almost impossible to fit into words, short of the exultant poetry of ecstatic praise. Don't stint. And don't censor yourself. Be a prophet. Be a voice crying in the wilderness.

6. Shamanic writing is about process, about change, about reorganizing the kernel of the word into a new, hopefully shape. The contents of the story matter less than that the story is told. The story must be told. The process of telling is essential to your own process of internal change. Don't censor yourself: write whatever it is that you must write.

7. If you assume there is only one reason to write, you kill a million universes in which other reasons are even more essential. Writing can be therapeutic, but the end-product of writing, the written poem or essay, etc., is not itself therapy, it is only the record of therapy, or the product of art therapy. No matter how attached to it you become, because writing it was therapeutic, don't assume it's good art. Making art can be cathartic, to both the maker and the viewer, but art is not inherently a catharsis. Don't confuse the process with the product or the purpose.

8. The archetypal stories are the oldest stories, and have been with us the longest. The narratives of shamanism, or myth, of deep psychological roleplay, all recycle the same stories. So don't fret about originality. If anything, if we write a numinous, evocative story it will evoke the oldest resonances in the psyche, and trigger the archetypes. That feeling you get when the small hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That feeling of standing on the threshold of a brave new world, about to take a first step into the unknown. So don't worry if your story isn't the most modern, the most ironically postmodern, the most original: let the old resonances in, let the oldest echoes ring through. That's how you get at the journey to the other worlds, by remembering you've already been there.

What I'm Reading This Summer

First off, I've been reading a lot of pamphlets and information packets relating to medical issues. There's even an illustrated booklet describing the surgery I've had, and the next planned surgery, too, co-written by my surgeon. There's lots of forms and papers and guidesheets to various issues pre- and post-operative, and more than one pamphlet on dietary needs and restrictions. Not to mention the exciting "how to" books about the ostomy appliances. These were all real page-turners.

But if that's not exciting enough, there are other things to read, recently acquired. I'll get to some of those in a minute.

First, though, I need to remind myself that I was completely out of commission for almost a month. I didn't go anywhere for weeks, and the truck didn't even get out of the garage for about three weeks. The engine turned over just fine when I finally got around to starting it, and this week I got the front brakes fixed, which had been waiting to be done since before my first date with the scalpel. Since then, I'm still catching up with life. I've spent a little bit of money on books and CDs since I got going again. I spent a fair bit before the surgery, too, laying in DVD movies to watch and books to read while recuperating. I didn't actually get to all of those I'd picked up, usually at random and mostly used at thrift stores for very cheap, but the pile is still there to be gone through. I didn't acquire ephemera, during that pre-surgery stocking-up period, I bought things I knew I'd want to watch, with pleasure, and re-read and re-watch again later.

I was thinking about doing what "What I'm Reading Now" post anyway, earlier today. Then I ran across some online literary friends' thoughts on the same thing, which pushed me over the edge. I've had a difficult night sleeping tonight, so it's the middle of the night now, after I did sleep for awhile, with vivid dreams, and I'm waiting until the pain pill kicks in and I can get through the rest of the night's sleep with better comfort. The idea was to post very short lists of what we've enjoyed reading lately, particularly for summer reading. Some other online poet friends have joined in with their lists, so since I was going to write about what I've been reading anyway, I thought to myself, why not?

Border's, the large bookstore chain, is going out of business. I have very mixed feelings about this. When I lived in Ann Arbor, I was a regular at the original Border's Book Store, the original store before it was ever a national chain. It was a haven for lovers of books. I discovered many treasures there, and they also would order anything you wanted. They were at the time an independent bookstore, the like of which is fading into the past, now. Then they became a chain, but they were still good, and I shopped there often. Now, with their going out of business sales, I've gone down to the closest store and spent a significant amount of money, acquiring rarities that I will treasure for a long time, divided more or less equally among books, CDs, and DVDs. One thing I always liked about Border's is that they were willing to stock music concert DVDs, a particular pleasure of mine, including some rare and unusual ones I never saw anywhere else. In recent years, for example, I picked up a couple of documentaries about Glenn Gould, a German film featuring an historical John Cage concert, and much more.

I've also been having luck at the local Goodwill thrift stores, after not having been to any of them in over a month. That's enough time for stock to turn over, and new things to appear. I found some real treasures earlier this week.

So here's a short list, as recommended, consisting of summer reading: 2 non-fiction books that we have enjoyed; 2 new fiction also enjoyed; and 2 old favorites we've recently re-read. To that list I'll add 2 poetry books also recently enjoyed, as part of this summer's post-surgery reading feast.

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Non-Fiction:

I read a lot of non-fiction. I've usually got several books going at once, dipping in and out of them on different days, when particular topics catch my attention. Sometimes I will become absorbed by a particular book, and finish it that day, ignoring everything else. This list is a very brief and very incomplete overview of what I've been dipping into this summer, both before and after the surgery.

Allan J. Hamilton, MD: The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with surgery, the supernatural, and the healing power of hope. Most surgeons, indeed most doctors, are trained to be highly materialistic, treating the body almost as a malfunctioning machine. There has been change, however, in my lifetime, towards a more holistic, multi-factored, and empathetic practice of medicine. The return of family practice is one sign of this trend. And surgeons like Dr. Hamilton are another. He is one of those who is willing to explore alternative medicine, both as a complement to allopathic medicine and on its own terms. There are stories in his book, all based on his surgical practice, of miracles of healing, and also miracles of spirit. He knows the difference between "healing" and "curing," the latter being the removal of disease, the former being the healing of the soul regardless of whether death is evaded or not. This is wise material. I was very impressed with book, and often surprised. As a patient myself, as the son of a doctor who has been around medicine and hospitals his whole life, I cannot say it better than Dr. Hamilton says here, near the end of one chapter: One of the great secrets of medicine is that, as a physician, you have unparalleled entry into the lives of others. Every patient is an existential conduit to seeing your own struggles. Each patient brings you one step closer to seeing the truth about yourself. I read part of The Scalpel and the Soul before I went for surgery; I will continue reading it through this summer, before my next surgery, and probably again after. It helps a lot.

Scott Herring: Another Country: Queer anti-urbanism. One very important truth about living gay in the United States was crystallized for me by several arguments I got into with other, very urbanized, ghetto-living gay men, soon after the movie Brokeback Mountain came out. I found myself confronted again and again with the truth that one of the most significant rifts in queer culture was not, as often postulated, between gay men and lesbians (and trannies, etc.), but between those who assumed that if you were LGBT you must move to one of the big city gay ghettos and live urban, and those who had chosen to stay in small towns, in rural areas, and make their lives there. As a gay man who has lived in big cities with major urban gay cultures, including San Francisco, but has always enjoyed living in small rural towns outside the big cities, as i do now in Wisconsin, the publication of this book has been a validation, an affirmation, and a blessing. Scott Herring has presented us with a very well-written, readable, and also seriously academic-theoretical book that is one of the best discussions of what lesbina cartoonist Alison Bechdel (who features in a long chapter in the book) "the complicated intersection between topography and destiny." This is a book about queer regionalism. It makes the point that not everybody who is queer wants to or likes living in the big city; nor do all of us like the bar scene, or the urban anonymous cruising scenes, or any of the other big-city scenes that have become the clichés of gay life in media presentations ranging from movies, books, and popular music, which are all assumed to be the pinnacles of gay life. The metropolitan lifestyle has been almost exclusively the focus of queer scholars and queer studies, to the point where it becomes an assumption that is never questioned. But Herring questions and deconstructs such assumptions, presenting several alternatives as they have been developed by individuals and groups outside the gay cultural mainstream. The Radical Faeries are mentioned, a decentralized group of misfits of misfits within gay male culture, which I am affiliated with. So are the rural lesbian communes of Albion, CA, in Mendocino County, which I have visited and enjoyed. The history of queer publications, both rural and urban, is compared and contrasted. And a whole lot more. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who is interested in alternatives to the urban gay lifestyle and subculture, who is looking for something different, or just plain likes country living. This book, one of only a few in its positional genre, is a revelation.

Victor L. Wooten: The Music Lesson: A spiritual search for growth through music. You probably know this author's name, if you know the music scene at all, as one of the greatest bass players currently living. He has his own band, he frequently plays duos with fellow bassist Steve Bailey, and he's with Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. Victor is also a genuinely nice person. His book falls into that small genre of memorable writing that you're never quite sure is either memoir or fiction, an absolutely true story or a fantasy made up of true elements. This book's closest relatives are books such as Richard Bach's Illusions: The adventures of a reluctant messiah, or Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior. This is that kind of book. It gets at the difference between being able to play all the right notes, and being able to make Music. That's a distinction I've always made for myself, as a player and composer; I will never be the best player on the planet in terms of technique, but I can play a wide range of instruments, and when I play them I make music. Victor's book not only validates this attitude, he shows how great technical playing really can also be part of making Music—but the attitude has to come first. I have just started this book, but I already find it true and inspirational.

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Fiction:

I don't read much mainstream literary fiction anymore; mostly it's not very good or interesting these days, despite all its pretensions. One of the worst of those pretensions is that mainstream literary fiction places itself above "genre fiction" in terms of writing quality, interest, and relevance to ordinary readers—none of which placements are defensible on the evidence—while denigrating "genre fiction" as basically pulp fiction, all the while ignoring that "realistic narrative mainstream literary fiction" is itself a genre. This attitude is promoted by the guardian gate-keepers of literary artistry, those literary critics who promote prose fiction as great art, usually with an agenda. But for the general reader, a pleasurable rather than critical ideology is more important; and on that criteria, genre fiction is at least as good in terms of writing quality as anything in the post-modernist literary mainstream, and often far more readable.

Jack Vance: The Demon Princes omnibus. Not exactly space opera, not exactly a novel of revenge, not exactly a baroque fiction, not exactly an adventure of discovery, not exactly a 19th C. bildungsroman, not exactly a 20th C. science fantasy escapade—but at the same time, all of these. Vance's style, well known in SF as inclined towards the Baroque, is in fact highly readable and very straightforward, even when it seems its most non-linear. Consisting of five novels originally published between 1964 and 1981, this five-part adventure is also a deeply moral fiction, not only in terms of its plot and its characterizations of future good and evil, but also in novelist and critic John Gardner's sense: a novel of adventure that is also a novel of ideas, with a moral compass that the reader leaves having learned from, beyond the plot itself. Vance was well-known as a great literary stylist, both within SF and in everything else he wrote. His stories were always inventive and colorful beyond the norm, truly a literature of ideas. Reading through these five novels has been great fun, and a reminder all over again that a good space opera can also be just a good story, period.

Patricia A. McKillip: The Bards of Bone Plain. Though this fantasy novel repeats some of the themes that the author is known for, notably the bardic harper on a quest for self-knowledge, which involves some very ancient magic and some very ordinary love—one of the things that attracts me to her fantasy novels, to be honest, of which I have most—in this shorter novel she takes everything to a new level. The key elements of this fantasy, around which all the action orbits, are poetry and music. These are the threads that run all through the story, that are woven into both cause and effect. The characters drive the plot, as it should be, with both good and bad choices having consequences. The culminating scene, in which many mysteries are revealed, was spine-tingling and unpredictable. Some things end conclusively, some threads move on without being tied up—very much like real life. In sum, these is indeed very realistic fiction, very true to life and experience, very natural in execution, with characters both believable and likable, with individual temperaments and quirks. This combination of modernistic realism and ancient magic is McKillip's unique trademark as an author; it's what makes her stand out as feeling very realistic a writer, even as her stories are wound with fantastic elements. If McKillip were not relegated as an author to "genre fiction," she would be a continuous best-seller along the lines of "mainstream" authors who dabble in speculative fiction without being labeled as "genre" writers.

By the way, Patricia McKillip could just as easily go onto my "re-read list," as some of her novels I have read multiple times, each time getting more out of them.

Gene Wolfe: Storeys from the Old Hotel. This collection of short stories and metafictions, experiments, dreams, and more traditional fantasy tales, underlines many critics' opinions that Wolfe is one of the greatest living stylists we have, whether or not you consider any labels for his writing. Like Ursula K. LeGuin, he is one of a handful of "fantasy" authors who has been published in The New Yorker magazine, a publication notoriously picky about what it prints. Wolfe has been called a literary giant, not only in science fiction, but in general, and this collection of stories showcases his talents very well. Contents range from single-page metafictions, including the title story, to longer fantasies, and even a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I first read Wolfe back in the 1970s, and his writing then was like nothing else SF had to offer: clearly literary in the best sense, and rich in texture and deep in resonance. I can still remember the images evoked in my mind by such early works as "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and other stories." Wolfe has continued to be on the literary leading edge, no matter what genre you try to place him in. I'm still reading this collection, savoring each piece as I go. I'm taking my time and enjoying each piece on its own, as I'd recommend any reader do, as well.

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Old Favorites Re-read:

Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business. The short stories and novellas featuring Chandler's great character Philip Marlowe. I re-read Chandler periodically, both the novels and the collections, enjoying them anew every time. Even though I have this paperback edition, I found a fresh copy of it at a thrift store just before surgery, in nearly-new condition, for almost nothing. So I took that as a hint, and enjoyed re-reading Chandler again.

C.J. Cherryh, omnibus edition of the Chanur saga: The Pride of Chanur, Chanur's Venture, The Kif Strike Back, Chanur's Homecoming. Four novels set in a particular future history that Cherryh has set several of her novels in, but what makes these unique and different is that humans are the aliens, newly-discovered, and barely comprehended. This is one of the most successful series in SF history for the story being told from an alien viewpoint, with a richly-detailed alien psychology and cultural context. Not only the hani, the lead viewpoint characters, but four or five other alien cultures, all interacting in trade and politics. It's also one of the most suspenseful space operas I've ever read, making you want to go back and re-read it again and again. I've re-read the entire series three times this summer, particularly right after the surgery, when I wanted something comfortable and familiar to read when my mind was still fogged with drugs, and I was tired all the time. I even took this omnibus edition along to my hospital room; I didn't read much of it there, but it was like having an old friend along for comfort's sake.

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Poetry:

William Everson: Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a literary region. Published in 1976, this remains an important study of Pacific Coast literature, including historical writing, prose, fiction, and poetry. Everson was a poet, printer, once a monk, and a student and friend of some of the most famous names in California literature, not least among them Robinson Jeffers, who Everson championed for many years after Jeffers lost popularity with the fickle masses. Everson's thesis is that the coastal West creates its own literary style, and presents convincing arguments. It is quintessentially American writing, the end of the frontier West where it runs into the ocean, and encounters Asia. it is writing that treats nature as a living character, as a dominant feature of literature, not as a mere backdrop for human-centered dramas. Everson draws on many examples, and considers many famous West Coast writers in this study. I'm going to have to read it at least twice before I can absorb it all, but it will be worth it. Everson validates in this study what I've long believed to be true, which is also supported by many other writers of the West, from Jeffers to Gary Snyder, and many others.

Patricia Donegan: Haiku Mind: 108 poems to cultivate awareness and open your heart. A haiku-based self-help book? Why not. Actually, despite that caveat, this is a pretty good read. The author is an experienced haiku student and writer, and a long-time Buddhist meditation leader, so the credentials are in place. The book is divided into 108 chapters, each a meditation on the theme of the haiku cited at each chapter's beginning. The haiku themselves are a mix of classical and brand new, written by writers from Japan, America, and elsewhere. Some are well known classical masters (Basho, Issa), others their modern heirs. It's an interesting idea for a haiku book, and it works rather well; although, it's not really a book about poetry, but a book about life and healing and transcendence that uses poetry as its touchstone. So don't expect any poetry criticism here, but do expect some genuine wisdom.

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Music: What I've Been Listening to This Summer

I also want to mention some CDs that I've been enjoying this summer. I've been on a lucky streak at the thrift stores, finding CDs both new to me, and filling in the gaps in my album collection with some old favorites that I've never owned before, but are classic albums of various kinds. I've been on a, well, not exactly nostalgia kick, but call it a historical review. Great albums from the past I've been picking up here and there to fill in gaps in my music library.

Simon and Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Water

Dave Brubeck: a special five-CD edition of all the original "Time" series albums, boxed as a set, with the CD slipcases reproducing the original liner notes and cover art. I'd already acquired the special edition of Time Out, but I'd been looking for Time Further Out for some time now (ahem), and this filled in that gap. The set also includes: Countdown: Time in Outer Space; Time Changes; Time In.

Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen: Poetry for the Beat Generation. A classic with Kerouac reading his poems accompanied by Allen's piano and jazz stylings. This is one of those great albums that anyone interested in mid-20th C. poetry and music needs to hear at least once in their lives.

Igor Stravinsky: Miniature Masterpieces. A large compilation of several short orchestral and chamber pieces, many of them only rarely recorded or performed. The "Dumbarton Oaks" chamber concerto is here, probably the best-known work on this album, but so are the two Suites for Small Orchestra. Even rarer still are the wonderful "Circus Polka" and my personal favorite among Stravinsky's rarely-performed short works for large orchestra: the "Greeting Prelude," which is his arrangement of "Happy Birthday," a very witty and wry orchestral setting of the familiar song.

Various Artists: the original musical soundtrack for 2001: a space odyssey. I wore out two copies of this on vinyl, back in the 1970s. It was my first exposure, as a budding teen proto-composer, as I'm sure it was to many other listeners, of the music of Gyorgy Ligeti, whose dramatic and abstract works figure prominently in the film. Also included of course is a full performance of Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," which still in mind evokes those spacecraft and space stations dancing gracefully in Earth orbit. This CD gives us all the music exactly as it was used in the film; in many ways, the long passages in the film in which the only sound is music prefigure my ongoing interest in non-verbal cinema, of which 2001: a space odyssey can be seen as a precursor of the entire genre.

Antonio Vivaldi: Cello Concertos, Vol. 4 as performed by cellist Ofra Harnoy. I've been listening to a lot of classical music again this year, and Vivaldi and Telemann have both been prominent in my listening. This CD was a revelation, giving me the chance to experience several beautiful concerti I hadn't really heard before. My favorite here is the Concerto in E-Flat, RV 408, which contains a middle-movement adagio of sublime beauty. It's a lovely cantabile, full of deep ardor and high emotion, which I find both soothing and mournful to listen to.

What's Your Favorite Novel?

I was having a discussion the other evening about what were out favorite novels. The truth is, I'm not sure I could pick just one. I'm not even sure it's a valid question.

One criterion for choosing one's favorite novel is: How many times have you re-read it? For example, every two or three years I get the urge to re-read Raymond Chandler; I think The Long Goodbye is a great novel, and I often re-read that one.

A contrasting criterion, however, is to choose a novel one reads, thinks very highly of, enjoyed the style and content and would recommend that others read, but one doesn't feel the need to re-read it often, if at all. For example, when I pick up Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which I think is a great novel, I usually only re-read a favorite section or two, not the entire work, cover to cover. I thoroughly enjoyed James Joyce's Ulysses, but I don't feel the urge to re-read it very often.

How is one to choose a favorite novel, therefore? I'm not sure I can.

I could provide a long list of many novels I've enjoyed reading over the years. That list would contain as much science fiction as it would mainstream literary fiction (which is itself a genre, even though critics claim it is the non-genre by which they define, and usually dismiss, other forms of "genre fiction"). The list would also contain books by a select group of mystery writers, from whom it would be hard to pick one best novel out of the overall oeuvre; for example, Raymond Chandler (again), Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon is a great novel, very well-written, that I re-read less often than Chandler.

I could compile a long list, therefore, but it would be impossible to pick one novel out as my favorite novel. There are too many favorites, almost all of equal regard. I don't think I could pick just one. And it would be a very long list, as I'm an avid lifelong reader, with an unschooled knack for reading relatively fast and retaining most of what I read. (I can still remember the smell of the paper, and the breeze coming in my bedroom window, and the color of the sky, from one day the summer I was thirteen and read my first Isaac Asimov novel.)

The urge to compile lists of "Best Novels" is an urge that is mostly useless. It's a fun game, but it's also a subjective one. Hardly any two readers, or literary critics, would agree on all choices.

I'm not even sure I could pick one favorite writer, and his or her works, as my favorite. Different writers give me different pleasures.

For example, I thoroughly enjoy reading Arthur C. Clarke novels such The Songs of Distant Earth for his dry wit, his scientific imagination coupled with a cool humor regarding human foibles. I enjoy reading Isaac Asimov because of his characters and ideas; he has been called an intellectual writer, but he has a knack for making the reader care about those ideas his characters are tied up with, in novels such as The Gods Themselves or stories like "Nightfall." Kate Wilhelm has summoned in me an atavistic terror, a fear for my survival, because she gets me so involved in her well-depicted characters and the threatening situations they find themselves in; I can still feel the gut-impact of her novella "The Gorgon Field" just by thinking about it. Thomas Merton activates in this reader a living, active contemplation of world, self, and spirit; I think about my place in the world, my purpose, even as Merton describes (or photographs) what has moved him to feel that same way. I periodically re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Nick Adams Stories" because these compiled stores and fragments are some of his best, most compelling writing; I've often thought that Hemingway shined brightest in story rather than novel form; and the Nick Adams stories are semi-auotbiographical, many of them in northern Michigan, my home state as well as Hemingway's, and thus the stories carry a special resonance for me, right down to my experiences summering in the some of the very same locales. (I've also visited Hemingway's home in Key West, and have a feeling for his work set in those locales, as well.)

In providing examples, I'm already making a list. My reading tastes are all over the map. I go for good writing, I don't care what "genre" it falls into.

One of the typical arguments I have with mainstream iiterary critics is their stubborn insistence on dismissing "genre fiction" when in fact much of writing in genre fiction is as good or better than one finds in mainstream literary fiction (again, a literary genre even if it claims not to be)—which these days is often bland, tepid, self-involved, and contains a lot of characters it's hard to have any empathy with. One of the reasons I find certain famous living authors over-rated is that they haven't managed to make me give a damn about their characters, stories, or quality of writing. A good story, well-written, is what makes for a great novel; mere style alone cannot sustain interest very long. Nor can the writer's fame alone make me want to read their new novel, if I found their previous novels uninteresting. People tell me I'm supposed to like and revere Philip Roth and John Ashbery; try as I might, I never have been able to.

One sometimes comes to the conclusion that the mainstream literary fiction (genre) one is "supposed" to adore is all about self-involved, angst-ridden New England urban dwellers; none of that speaks to my life or interests, dwelling as I do in Midwestern heartlands that most New Englanders neither comprehend nor want to. (I still laugh when a friend in New Hampshire was astonished by the fact that, out here in the Middle West, one can drive all day long and still only cross one state border.) Those of us who live in the "flyover" zone, who often live in smaller towns, or more rurally, than the literary denizens of either urban coast, often seem to live in another universe entirely. Even those who live in our large Midwestern metropolises, such as Chicago, Detroit, or Denver, have a different attitude towards life than those in Los Angeles or the New England megaplex. For one thing, the sky is simply much bigger out here. Under that big sky, it's easier to contemplate the horizon. One sometimes wonders if the reason New York City is so self-involved is because there can only see themselves reflected in their shiny glass-and-steel buildings, and can't see enough sky.

This may also be an aspect of my long list of favorite novels, many of which are weighted heavily towards novels that broaden the mind, that stretch outwards into the sky, that have a sense of wonder that is expansive rather than narcissistic and claustrophobic. Many novels on my list of favorites are novels that opened my mind in new directions, that gave me insight into cultures I never encountered or understood before, that explored ideas and relationships beyond those merely human-centered and social. This accounts for the large number of novels of speculative fiction on my list. It also may account for what attracts me to certain writers, while there are others to whose works I am unable to connect at all. E.F. Forster famously prefaced his great novel Howard's End with two words: "Only connect." And not only is that the theme of his novel, it's a good rule for living: only connect. Those people, real or fictional, with whom we are able to connect, all give us something for living. And connecting needn't be limited only to people like ourselves. Another reason I feel little connection with much mainstream literary fiction these days is that it has become very parochial; frankly, in my experience, writers from New York City are a lot more tunnel-visioned and parochial than writers from rural South Dakota (Linda Hasslestrom) or Michigan (Jim Harrison, a genuinely cosmopolitan writer) or California (a long list indeed).

Some writers we read for their content, their subject matter. I enjoy reading John Muir's diaries of his solo treks in the Sierras. Robinson Jeffers appeals to me as much for his creation-centered observational poems as for his writing style presented as an alternative to hermetic (obscurantist) Modernism. Both Hemingway and Harrison appeal to me because we're all Michigan boys at heart, although their appeal spreads out in many other directions, as well.

So I can't tell you what my favorite novel is. I don't know myself. There are too many available choices, potential possibilities, a long list of favorites. I could compile a list, but perhaps I already have, at least in part, simply by giving examples here as I meandered across the terrain of this topic. I might someday try to make a list. Yet list-making itself is something of which I am skeptical, veering as it does so close to canon-making. Such lists ought to be appreciative, not prescriptive: unlike most critics with an axe to grind or an ideological agenda to pursue, I don't insist that every other reader like the same novels that I do, even for the same reasons. A list of favorites would be only my idiosyncratic list, even if others agreed with me on many choices.

"Only connect." We do our best. But I think it remains better to connect out of love and common humanity, as Forster intimates in his novel, rather than out of an aggressive will to impose our social standards upon each other. So make your own connections, and make your own list of favorite novels. If we connect, thereby, that's all to the good.

What I'm Reading Now

Books acquired along the way, on the recent roadtrip. This isn't all I acquired, just the highlights. I'm reading a couple of science fiction series, for example. I also picked up a lot of



The real finds here are the Complete Poems of DH Lawrence, and Kenneth Rexroth. These are both important collections. I had once owned a copy of a different edition of the Lawrence, but had to sell it when I was moving to New Mexico, some years ago. It's good to have it again, as a reference and source. Lawrence was in some ways a better poet than novelist; and even though many of his poems are didactic, in the same way that Walt Whitman's poems can be didactic, Lawrence's poetry contains a white-hot passion and intensity that are marvelous. His poems about natural forces, about animals (his memorable whale poems, for example), and about sex, are all necessary reading.

The Rexroth Collected, along with a couple of of other poetry books, I have already written about. It's an important collection by an important poet, who is only now starting to earn the reputation he long deserved.

The Marshall McLuhan book here, Culture Is Our Business, is a whimsical book that analyses American culture through its presentation in advertising. McLuhan looks at dozens of ads, arranged topically, with wit, irony, and intelligence. What we advertise not only tells us about ourselves, but the lacunae, what is missing, tells us much as well. McLuhan looks at the values presented by corporate commercialism, and finds them lacking in real humanity. This book from the 1970s is even more relevant now than when it was first published.

The Dashiell Hammett book, The Big Knockover, is a classic of noir mystery writing. This volume collects several short novels featuring Hammett's unnamed first-person detective, The Continental Op. So it's a classic of hardboiled detective fiction, alongside Raymond Chandler's novels. This was pulp fiction as its inception; it has become classic literature, still some of the best detective fiction ever written. It's fun to read most of these pieces again, and one or two for the first time. There are a lot of great character moments, and some fantastic dialogue, as one would expect from this writer.

Growing Up Gay in the South is an anthology of stories, interviews, essays, and psychological and anthropological studies. It's one of the many recent studies of regional gay life. I enjoy reading these sorts of regional studies, because I do believe that regional culture affects all of its constituents, including its LGBT members. Local culture is universal culture, and it's something that we absorb in childhood and carry all our lives. I haven't gotten that far into book; just far to realize, again, that some stories are universal stories, even though they are also particular and individual. Growing up gay and living openly gay in the Midwest is the subject of the new music commission I am writing now, both lyrics and music. So this book adds another source to my research, to my materials for the commission. (I have written reviews of similarly-themed books elsewhere. Consider this the list of books that are part of the research for the music commission, along with the stories of the men in the chorus.)

There are other books in this pile that I haven't read yet. I'm a fast reader, so I'm likely to get to them soon. As usual, my tastes are diverse and eclectic, even omnivorous. So when I get around to them, I'll have more to say.

A Few Memorable Books

In the spirit of self-assessment and annual overview one nearly drowns in this time of year, I have put together a very casual, incomplete, and idiosyncratic list of books that I've read over the past year, which I enjoyed, which linger in memory, and which in one or two cases I have already re-read. This won't be another list of best books.

(A small disclaimer: People who know me already know that I am a very fast reader, and retain most of what I read. It's my secret superpower, if you will, and I exercised it a lot this past year, when illness forced me to spend more time in a chair than I was able to spend out hiking or camping or traveling. It's not an exaggeration to say that this year, I estimate I read some tens of thousands of pages with no special effort. I'm not even sure I can discuss everything I read here, without droning on and on for far too long. So this will be incomplete.)

I can give little higher praise to a book than that it lingers in memory and is worth re-reading. My shortlist of favorite books of all time would consist of those I've re-read numerous times, always re-enjoying them, in many cases always finding something new in them. The complete works of Raymond Chandler fall into this category; I re-read Chandler every few years.

This year I re-read large amounts of Virginia Woolf, including the short stories surrounding Mrs. Dalloway, some of the essays, and one of my two favorites of her novels, To the Lighthouse. The part of this novel that is so resonant for me is its close look at the lives of artists, the choices artists must make, the price they pay sometimes for being an artist instead of a "respectable member of society." This is my own dilemma, and it speaks to me in this novel directly, as I'm sure it has for many other artists.

This past year I also re-read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, in the complete, uncut edition. When Heinlein originally wrote this novel, the publishers insisted he cut it by about a third, for length, and probably also a bit for content. After the author died, his wife rediscovered the original uncut manuscript, and it was published in uncut form for the first time. The general consensus between Mrs. Heinlein, the publishers, many readers, and myself, is that the uncut version is a much, much better novel. It reads like a charm, smoothly and effortlessly, and the added details and scenes make the experience a much richer, much more immersive reading experience. I had originally read this a few years ago, when it first came out, but my copy of the novel was lost in a move, along with some other books I've missed. I finally found another copy of the uncut Stranger this past autumn, and enjoyed reading it all over again.

During the summer, I also re-read large portions of Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Not the entire saga this time, I just skipped around and read some favorite sections. This time through, I focused mostly on the chapters featuring the non-Hobbit characters, mostly Aragorn and Gandalf.

My science fiction "discovery" for the past year—an author new to me, who I hadn't read before, although he's had quite a career so far—was UK author Peter F. Hamilton. I am thoroughly engrossed in his Void Trilogy, having devoured The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void, and eagerly awaiting my chance to read the concluding book in the trilogy. I also went back and read the Commonwealth duology that came before the Void Trilogy, of which the Void books are set later on in the same universe. These two novels are Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. The latter novel was particularly thrilling, building to a climax of both action and concept that really soars. Hamilton is writing modern space operas, full of imaginative technology, culture, and characters that move with varying degrees of success through their milieu. I like science fiction sagas in which the concepts are mindblowing, which really make you think, and in which even the human characters can seem quite alien at times—such fiction makes you think, it stretches your thinking outside the usual boxes, and at its best it creates in you that "sense of wonder" which is hallmark of great fiction of all eras, be it speculative fiction or otherwise. Hamilton's Commonwealth series of novels, which I mention here, succeed on all those fronts.

There seems to be a contemporary revival of cosmically-vast and wide-ranging space opera going on right now, coming especially from the UK. Alastair Reynolds is another author, like Hamilton, who has been writing really amazing stories. One aspect I find fascinating about this current wave of space operas is that the scientific speculation contained in the novels is cutting-edge, exploring the implications of current theoretical physics, nanotechnology, biological discoveries, and so forth, to create a sense of wonder I haven't experienced in SF on this expanding cosmic scale for quite a few years. I like this trend because these novels think big, as in cosmically big. Since I trained as a geologist, I got used to thinking, as geologists do, in two kinds of time: everyday time, and deep time, or geologic time, in which the mind must take in literally millions of years. When I read a contemporary SF novel that makes me think in deep time, across thousand or more years of human cultural and technological evolution, it's quite a treat.

William Gibson: Spook Country. Gibson doesn't write trilogies, but he does tend to write books in groups of threes, each novel individual but set in the same basic conceptual universe, and often with secondary characters appearing in the related group of novels. Spook Country is the second in the current group of three; the first was Pattern Recognition, which I read in the previous year, and which I thought was Gibson's most compelling and absorbing novel since his Neuromancer. The third book in the current set of three is Zero History, which I look forward to reading soon. Like Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition rewrote all the rules. This current set of three novels are all linked by being set in the very near future, exploring artistic trends on the bleeding edge of artistic technology, and examining the world as it has come to be since 9/11 when the Twin Towers were brought down. Many of the characters in this set of novels were directly, personally affected by 9/11. Gibson isn't writing SF of the distant future, he is turning his extrapolator's eye on the present, and showing us ourselves in a clarifying mirror. Pattern Recognition, in one or two of its climatic scenes, actually made me put the book down and weep a little. I cared that much, I was that deeply affected. Spook Country didn't affect me quite as deeply, but its thinking about culture and cutting-edge art was, if anything, more resonant, more lingering. Some of the ideas about art in this novel are so far ahead of the groove that they fall into Björk or Bill Laswell territory—two musicians who are always ten years ahead of everybody else. It makes for fascinating speculation about where technology and art meet and converge, and how new media generates new art, in a feedback loop of mutual discovery.

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Jim Harrison: Letters to Yesenin. This is one of the great book-length poems of the latter half of the 20th C. I originally first read these poems in an earlier collection of the poet's work, Selected & New Poems, 1961-1981/ More accurately, I read through the Letters back then, but not that carefully, and they didn't leave that strong an impression on me. In 2007, Copper Canyon Press republished Letters to Yesenin as a separate paperback again, along with the newer poems "Postscript" and "Return to Yesenin." This is the edition I acquired and read twice this year. The second time, I sat down and read it all the way through. I have already written about how this book has inspired and influenced my own series of poems begun this past summer. I love the language and tone of these poems, which are basically prose-poems. They wander, they include a great deal of the everyday. They're not exactly lyric poems, they're not really elegies. If you read the entire book at one sitting, it reads almost like a mid-length narrative poem, with page after page accumulating to add depth to story and feeling alike. These poems were written at a time in Harrison's life that was hardscrabble, living poor on a dirt farm in northern Michigan, during which depression and suicide were never far away. This context is part of the poems' resonance, and it's also why they speak to me, in my own extremis this year, brought on by illness-caused nearness to dying. This edition of Harrison's Letters is also a clean, elegant book design, making for a whole experience of reading that comes highly recommended by me.

Sofia Cheviakoff, editor and co-author: Minimalism: Minimalist (2008). This is a thick overview of the minimalist style in fashion, design, architecture, and interior design, including a history of the style, and also some of its related history in fine art. If I had my life to do over again, if I were 20 years old right now, I would seriously consider studying architecture. I love design, and I love architecture. I would apply to Taliesen, the school of Prairie architecture founded by Frank Lloyd Wright; which is one of my favorite styles. But minimalism as a style also speaks to me very strongly. Ando Tadao is another favorite architect. I also love the work of Santiago Calatreva. I have visited Marfa, TX, the small town that became a center of minimalist art under the direction of sculptor Donald Judd. I would like to visit there again, and spend more time in silence with the art. This book, which is an overview, is also a bit of a manifesto, in that it explains a lot of the ideas behind minimalism. It took me a long time to read, as I savored it, and only took in a few pages at a time. Each section is dominated by photos with captions, with the occasional commentary by the people involved. It's quite thorough, and quite international, and quite compelling.

Two books new to me from Federico Garcia Lorca, one of my favorite poets. One is a newer translation of Poet in New York, by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (2008). This is a luminous new translation of these incredible poems, en face with the Spanish originals. There is also an illuminating Introduction and Notes. This is probably the third or fourth different translation of Poet In New York that I own. It is a set of poems that moves me deeply every time I read it, because of the intensity and emotion. These were also the poems in which Lorca first began to be open about his homosexuality in his poetry; the "Ode to Walt Whitman" is one of the great poems of the 20th C., and I have read it many times, and responded to it, as a poet, in a poem or two of my own. My best response is often to write a poem, rather than a book review.

The second Lorca book is A Season in Granada: Uncollected poems and prose, trans. and ed. by Christopher Maurer, who is one of Lorca's most important translators. Many of these were poems and other texts I'd never seen before, so you might imagine my excitement. (This year I also acquired Maurer's Collected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, in the revised bilingual edition which also contains these poems.) This was an exciting couple of new reads, and almost-re-reads, that I am still going back to savor. Lorca means a great deal to me, on several levels.

Oliver de la Paz: Furious Lullaby (2007). I discovered this book of poems by accident, picked it up and enjoyed skimming it in the store, and found it to be one of the most exciting poetry discoveries I've made lately. I've written a review of this book of poems, so I won't repeat that here. But this book also inspired me to write several aubades this summer, as part of the new series of poems. So it influenced me, and inspired me, and re-reading it I still find amazing and powerful turns of phrase on almost every page. Truly de la Paz writes with his language on fire, writing eros in the complete sense of life-force and passion and engagement.

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At this point I find myself wanting to include everything I read in the past year, somewhat obsessively prowling my shelves to remember. And then stopping myself, knowing full well I'm going to leave most things out. The best I can do is sample a few memorable reads here, that I would recommend to other readers. So you have to be selective. I mean, why do we read anyway? Not just for pleasure? Not just for edification. Not just for the purposes of engaging with the literary world. (The latter reason least of all, to be honest.) Not just because we're interested in everything, and have the long habit of reading everything in sight. All of these are true. I choose not to sort between them for which might be most important, or least. So I'll just dip in and sample some more.

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Two books by and about the late, great Kenneth Rexroth, poet, translator, poetic champion, host of salons and readings, one of the reasons there ever was a San Francisco Renaissance in poetry. I found two different books at, believe it or not, thrift stores, the past summer, one by Rexroth, one a festschrift. The latter is The Ark 14: For Rexroth (1980) a book-periodical edited by Geoffery Gardner, a hefty 400-page hardcover. The first half is writings "On Rexroth," consisting of critical essays, discussions, memoirs, assessments; the second half of the book is "For Rexroth," mostly poems dedicated to and/or inspired by the poet. In the center is a small chapbook of a Rexroth poem accompanied by Morris Graves illustrations. It's quite a diverse anthology, with familiar and less familiar names comingling. I found this to be a valuable and useful read, opening some doors to aspects of Rexroth's poetry I hadn't encountered before; it deepened my appreciation both of his own achievements, and the impact he has had on 20th C. poetry in general. Rare and out of print, good luck finding yourself a copy; I got lucky, myself, in stumbling across this one.

The book by Rexroth is his book-length overview and essay, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). This is mostly a history, and a useful one, putting into sequence who influenced who, what little magazines were important to poetry in each period, and creating a narrative of 20th C. that any general reader would find helpful. Rexroth was ever the cheerleader for poetry, and there are many names he recommends that one goes and reads here, some of whom I intend to seek out since they were new to me. When Rexroth pauses to make a commentary or an assessment of a poet, or movement, or period, I find his writing extremely convincing. Most of the time I was pleasantly surprised to find myself agreeing with his assessments, as in many cases they were what I already thought for myself but hadn't yet articulated. He points out exactly what's right and what's problematic with the strain of inherited Surrealism in American poetry. Rexroth's assessment of Yvor Winters, to pick only one example, struck me as dead on target, both as poet and as teacher, and clarified many things in my own mind about Winters, whose poetry I have often liked but whose opinions on poetry, and poetry teaching, have often struck as incredibly, astoundingly wrongheaded. This was a very useful overview for me; again, though, it's long out of print, and you might have to go find it in a university library to read it for yourself.

Speaking of poetry teaching, I also read this past year the third, posthumous collection of writings about poetry and teaching from William Stafford: Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further views on the writer's vocation (1998). The book itself is a hodgepodge, mostly uncollected and previously unpublished articles, lectures, interviews, and poetry, all associated with writing as a craft and a way of life. Long associated with the Iowa Poetry Workshop, with writing workshops in general, and also known as a poetic heir of Theodore Roethke, Stafford is still controversial in some quarters, although almost always respected and admired. What I like about Stafford is his quiet insistence that the best reason to write is because you want to, rather than to impress the masses or achieve some kind of award-winning standard. There is a lot to criticize about poetry workshops and the poems that come out of them, and I among others have been critical, but Stafford manages to make it all seem effortless and inviting. He also addresses the role of critique and criticism (they're not the same thing at all) in teaching writing, and I think argues well for the supremacy of writing as a way of discovering the self, finding out what sort of person is writing the poem, rather than the emphasis (often presented in workshops and MFAs) on craft that teaches you how to write to get published. Stafford is actually critical of many habits of teaching in poetry workshops. I found this book quite refreshing.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy: American Vertigo: Traveling America in the footsteps of Tocqueville (2006). Explicitly calling on the spirit of de Tocqueville as his guide, Lévy herein tours around the USA, meeting people, making interviews and observations. He particularly examines American patriotism, religiosity, and the return of ideology in its relationship to "the tyranny of the majority." I found this a fascinating read, as it's an outsider's viewpoint, but also a lover's viewpoint. The comparisons between American and European culture are very interesting. One recurring theme examined here is Neoconservatism and its political and social fallout, about which Lévy can be scathing in his questions. A very revealing look at ourselves, and a very valid heir to de Tocqueville's original study of American democracy. I know some people who will hate this book, which is a good recommendation in itself.

Brenda Wineapple: White Heat: The friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008). This was very informative and interesting. I learned a bit about Emily, and her family and close friends, but I really learned a great deal about Wentworth Higginson, who was not only Emily's friend but her first editor and publisher. Some of her current fame must be given credit directly to his efforts to publish, and publicize, her poems. Even though he quite admittedly didn't really understand them, or her. (I wish contemporary poetry editors had such faith in the work, even beyond their own understanding; a lot more non-boring poetry might have a chance at seeing the light of day.) The history here is fascinating, but one of the best aspects of this book is how personal it gets; the excerpts from the correspondence are luminous and fascinating. There is a lot in here. I will probably re-read this book in the near future, and respond to it all over again.

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I've been hearing a groundswell of reappraisal about poet Jack Spicer in the past year or two. This is partly because a major Collected Poems was published in 2009. It's also because of renewed discussions about how Spicer's being gay affected his art. Spicer is highly regarded as part of the San Francisco poetry renaissance in the 1950s and 60s, and he spent most of his life in the SF region. The book I found at a used book store, and paid a bit dearly for, is an old Collected, not the new one: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975), edited and with a long essay by Robin Blaser. This is long out of print; you might know Black Sparrow as the publisher of several West Coast poets, some of them not highly regarded by the critical elite but all of them quite popular (ranging from Wanda Coleman to Charles Bukowski and Diane Wakowski among others) among readers. Blaser was Spicer's friend and executor, whom Spicer gave his manuscripts to even before his death; I like this book in part because it is well-edited by Blaser, and because Blaser's own essay and commentaries are superb. I still can't account for Spicer, or why he is so often claimed as a poetic ancestor nowadays; in part this is because he is so revered by contemporary schools of poetry for whom I have little interest or respect (LangPo, the post-avant, et a;.). So I was challenged by Spicer's poetry; and Blaser's commentary helped me a great deal. But I don't think I read this book successfully. I will probably have to read it again, awhile later, to get more out of it. I want to understand why Spicer is so important to so many people; and I'm not there yet.

By contrast, the last book I'm going to mention here (I can hear the sighs of relief) is about a poet and a poem to whom I have always felt connected, personally and politically. The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" fifty years later (2006), edited by Jason Shinder, who was an assistant to the poet. Of course we're talking about Allen Ginsberg and his poem "Howl." I have argued elsewhere that "Howl" along with Jack Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness novel On the Road were the two mid-century works of writing that both reflected and galvanized the zeitgeist. Fiftieth anniversaries of both works have been prevalent in the past decade. (Although my favorite Kerouac novel is The Dharma Bums, which I think might be a better book.) This book is a festschrift, a long meditation by many writers on why the poem is so important, and why it was important to them. Even Ginsberg's memories are included here, but the most interesting essays are those that tell us why the poem changed the writer's life. If you want to get a sense of how poetry can blow your mind, and excite you, and change your life, this collection is a good place to start. Poetry here is not a cerebral, safe, unoffensive thing: many contributors to this collection talk about the Dionysian aspects of poetry. There's history here, about the poem, the poet, but also about poetry in general. I very much enjoyed reading this book, and have written about it earlier. I mention it again here because I think it's so worthwhile a book to read, and quite a bit of fun.

Tree of Light 2010

A small Christmas tree this year, on a table in the living room, with the fireplace in the background. I put mostly star ornaments, and musical instrument ornaments on it, this year. I have a terrific collection of very detailed musical instrument ornaments, that look completely real and playable, only in miniature. I really enjoyed getting these out this year, as it has been a good year for me musically, and next year promises to be even more so—so the musical ornaments are on the tree by way of celebration.





What I love about Christmas trees are the lights, at night. Lighting up the darkest time of the year, setting the night aglow. Of course that's the original pagan purpose of the tannenbaum, or tree of lights: a winter solstice celebration of the returning of the light. From now on, the days get gradually longer, even though winter itself as a season has just begun.



The light in the darkness also makes me think of a poem I wrote two winter solstices ago, a poem that's been on my mind lately, which one or two poet-friends liked very much at the time, and which otherwise went unregarded: Evangelismos. It's a poem of annunciation. I could not get out of my mind Rilke's phrase "Every angel is terrifying," and what it must be like to be spoken to by an angel in its glory: which I imagined as a continuous explosion of light and sound, overwhelming and overpowering. I wrote from the point of view of the shepherds in the hills, being herded themselves by the angel, down into town, to witness a miracle.



I always like to put a few Christmas books under the tree, mixed in with the presents. Appropriate titles, such as Dickens, here, and Clement Moore's famous poem. I have a friend who decorates his entire house for the season with thousands of ornaments, garlands, and decorations. He also places a lot of classic Christmas books under the tree; it's always fun to pick one up and thumb through it. The books I usually put under my small tree here all Peter Pauper Press editions, which I have collected for many years; I particularly like their older books, many out of print now, from the 1940s through the 1960s, which are often beautifully typeset and simply yet elegantly decorated with woodcut illustrations. For example, I have a very nice PPP edition from 1965, with illustrations, of John Greenleaf Whitter's poem Snowbound.

Why Your Annual List of Best Books Doesn't Matter

This is the time of year when everyone involved in literary criticism, book reviewing, and/or simple book boosterism posts interminable lists of their favorite books of the year—and let's be honest, when you see another list of "best books" it's only just the list-maker's favorites. You rarely see someone post a book they hated on such lists, even if they have to acknowledge in other ways that it was an important book. (Along these lines, I think Jonathon Franzen's latest novel execrable; but I would list it as important because its publication instigated a lot of good discussion about the current health of the literary novel form. A few years ago, I would have listed Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road for the same reasons, as generating important discussions—although the novel itself was completely unoriginal, bullet-riddled with cliché, egregiously rude to the reader, and otherwise just not very good.)

This is the time of year when critics strive to make grand summations, to bring into coherent form their criteria for what constitutes great books (and thereby great writing). It's a time for Grand Pronouncements. It's a time for literary canon-making, which is what every Great Books list is really about. Summations are designed to bring order out of chaos, to construct a narrative of literary arcs that don't exist, and to promote a personal critical agenda. grand summations tend to be riddled with general theorizing, which in most critical hands is meant to be more prescriptive than descriptive. (This is how literature ought to be done!) We must look back over the past year in publishing, it seems, and try to bring the fray into some sort of coherent orderliness, in order for it to be understood. We must try to make sense out of meaningless, random existence.

And it gets even worse in the hands of some critics: The underlying tone, and hidden agenda, of many of the more snobbish "high-end" theory-driven literary-critical "best books" lists is that if you don't agree with the list-maker, you're an idiot. You really ought to agree with them, after all, since they're the experts and you're just an ordinary reader, too stupid to make up your own mind. That's pretty insulting, and i think a lot of ordinary readers can sense it—they're really far more perceptive than some in the critical elite like to think they are. Perhaps many "amateur" readers make their own best books lists in response to the hidden insult they perceive on some unconscious level. See, I can do a list just as well as you.

But what is ephemeral remains ephemeral. Little endures. Look back over best book lists of distant decades, and you'll find few recognizable names, titles and authors, that have stood the test of time. Short-term critical judgments, which is what "best book" lists are, very often get it hilariously wrong.

The process all seems rather expected. Maybe it's because review editors like to publish such annual summations; maybe it's because Top Ten lists are as easily absorbed to the busy mental palette as are soundbytes, which reduce genuine content to often misleading generalizations. The habit of best book lists has spread far beyond any compulsory editorial form it may once have been driven by, however. Online reviewers act like making a best books list is a year's-end requirement, a necessity to justify their extensive (often unpaid) time spent on reviews over the past year—not much different in compulsion in kind to all those New Year's Resolutions people make, too, this time of year. Well, I don't believe in those, either.

These lists of "best" books are precisely where objective criticism goes out the window. Justifications abound. Rationalizations get repeated. Sometimes books appear on everyone's best books lists simply because they're on everyone else's lists. A lot of reviewers read other lists before making their own, so they are further influenced towards de facto short-term consensus by the thoughtless application of literary favoritism. Those of us who prefer the sidelines to the center of the fray often find ourselves doing anti-best books lists, which is often just reactionary rather than carefully thought through.

And yet critics keep making these book lists every single year, at this time, as though it all mattered a very great deal, and this year's list will somehow make a difference, change the world, when last year's list was unable to.

A classic, very accurate definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again while expecting each time to generate an outcome different than last time. Yet 2 + 2 will always equal 100 (in Binary). The rigorous, cold equations keep balancing the same way each time, no matter how we wish for a miracle.

So keep your list of best books to yourself. No one cares. Well, maybe the publishers care, because it means more sales. There's nothing compulsory about compiling a "best books" list, not even for avid reviewers. (And don't mistake me: I think every writer ought to write the occasional book review; it teaches you a great deal. But I also think a lot of writers spend a lot more time on the reviewing project than they ought to. I'd rather read what they have to say about life and art then what they thought of a book I'll probably never really want to read.)

Far better, perhaps, to break the pattern, and to privately savor those books you read this past year that you treasured. Those of us on the sidelines, who could in fact present a list of the books we most enjoyed reading this past year, will likely keep our opinions to ourselves, where they belong. I could make up a list of books that have strongly affected me this past year, or strongly influenced my thinking and/or writing, or that meant a lot to me, that I greatly enjoyed—but it would be a personal, subjective list, which no one would ever care about but me. Nor would I expect them to.

I say, save yourself the effort of grand summations, of coherent narratives, or "best books" lists, and just keep reading. Keep reading, reading, and if you write, keep writing. If you want to share something that really got to you, do it as you go along. Post a review while the iron's still hot. Don't wait for the end of the year to put it on some list. Summations aren't necessary, and almost no one asks for them anyway.

Or, if after all this, you do feel moved to make a list, strive to make clear that it's a list of your favorite books of the year, not a list of the "best books" of the year. Make a list of Those Books I Enjoyed Reading this past year, even if they're older books. Be personal with your list. Be enthusiastic. Be outrageous. Have fun! Just avoid the critical pretensions of those who would dictate to you, gentle reader, what you're supposed to think is good, and what is not.