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the year in books
Crunching the numbers on last year's reading reveals the following trends:
Total number of books I read last year: 59 (down three from 2003)
Novels / novellas: 9 (down seven)
Collections of poetry: 22 (+7)
Collections of short stories: 0 (-8!)
Books on science / technology: 2 (-1)
Books on religion: 0 (-3)
Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 5 (+2)
Books of literary or cultural criticism: 6 (+4)
Books on art / architecture: 3 (+3)
Essays / memoir: 4 (+4)
History: 2 (+2)
Authors I read in 2004 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2004: 14 (Colson Whitehead, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Henri Michaux, John Ashbery, Terence McKenna, Stanislaw Lem, Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs, Donna Haraway, Grant Morrison)
Books I read in 2004 that I read at least once prior to 2004: 3 ( Radical Artifice : Writing Poetry in the Age of Media by Marjorie Perloff, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, White Noise by Don DeLillo)
High points: Manuel DeLanda's One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, two nonfiction works of untrammeled brilliance; Eros and Magic In the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano's idiosyncratic study on esoterica; Virginia Woolf's The Waves, the newest addition to my all-time favorite novels list; Christine Hume's startlingly good poetry debut Musca Domestica; William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Soft Machine; Rae Armantrout's Made To Seem and Precedence; the coffee-table-book compilation of Jim Woodring's hypnotic, transcendent Frank comics; Colson Whitehead's unclassifiable The Colossus of New York. Labels: book_commentary |
