A Book a Week in 2012 - Failure

A Book a Week in 2012

For the last two years, I read an average of a book a week. In 2012, I set out with the same goal but got waylaid and came up short. As much as I would have liked to meet my reading resolution, I think its a valuable lesson to accept that sometimes life gets in the way and 70% has to be enough. I could make a defense and point out that I read at least a dozen issues of Poetry Magazine or claim extenuating life circumstances but instead, I’ll list what I read along with some highlights and statistics.

The Children’s Book - A. S. Byatt

MacBeth – William Shakespeare

Hay – Paul Muldoon

Green Squall – Jay Hopler

Envy – Joseph Epstein

Ether/Ore – Brett Jenkins

Trojan Women – Seneca (trans. A.K Boyle)

Ashes for Breakfast – Durs Grünbein (trans. Michael Hofman)

Love Stories/Hate Stories – Russ Wood & Brett Jenkins

Victims of a Map - Samih al-Qasim, Adonis, & Mahmud Darwish (trans. Abdullah al-Udhari)

The Deleted World – Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Robin Fulton)

Ode to Walt Whitman and Other Poems – Federico Garcia Lorca (trans. Carlos Bauer)

Birds of a Lesser Paradise – Megan Mayhew Bergman

Corruption – Camille Norton

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

 Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins

The Bhagavad Gita – (trans. Juan Mascaro)

My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (trans. Edith Grossman)

The Apple Speaks – Becca Lachman

The Seven Very Liberal Arts – Marilyn Taylor

The Birth of Classical Europe – Simon Price

Passions and Ancient Days – C.P. Cavafy (trans. Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard)

The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Nifflinger

The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson

The Casual Vacancy – J.K Rowling

In the Garden of Beast – Erik Larson

Shakespeare: the World as Stage – Bill Bryson

The Great Divorce – C.S. Lewis

Berlin Stories – Robert Walser (trans. Susan Bernofsky)

Descartes’ Bones – Russell Shorto

My Unwritten Books – George Steiner

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

Things Fall Part – Chinua Achebe

Some Lines:

• Purity of heart is to will one thing. (Søren Kierkegaard)
• Once there was a city that was at war for ten years. Eventually it was destroyed; many people were killed and their women taken into slavery. (Linda Gregerson)
• Facts are surprisingly delible. (Bill Bryson)
• The beginning is an artifice and what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows. (Ian McEwan)
• Every letter was a love letter. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
• What has become of us as a people that we can possess the beautiful only in dreams? (Robert Walser)

Some Statistics:

• 35 Books
• 26% in translation
• 32% poetry
• 35% female writers
• 7243 pages