I wanted to do one of those Best of 2010 lists, but it’s too hard because I read a fuckload of books in 2010.  A heaping fuckload.  PhD school has me reading at least two but sometimes three books a week, plus secondary materials that amount to about four or five scholarly articles a week, not to mention my own research amounting to about two books and about a half dozen articles a month. Plus, I teach about two books a month plus secondary materials, which I always re-look at before entering the ring.  That’s just for school.  For fun, I probably read between two/four books a month. When I say “read” I mean from beginning to end, every single word (I don’t “skim,” I actually internally vocalize every syllable — so, I’m also a very slow reader). I certainly abandoned a good amount of books I disliked. So the other reason I couldn’t really do justice to a “Best Of” list this year is because I didn’t get to read many of the books that are appearing on other best of 2010 lists. I also didn’t read very much poetry.  I got a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway, I decided to make a list of lists, which might more accurately express my reading practices over the course of 2010.

Five Works Of Canonical Literature That I Read For The First Time Slash For Classes In 2010, Which I Really Enjoyed Reading

Shelley’s Frankenstein
Thoreau’s Walden
Melville’s Moby Dick
Homer’s Odyssey
Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Tobias Smollett translation)

Three Personal Research Books I Really Enjoyed Reading

Kendall Walton – Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard university Press, 1993)
Jacques Derrida – The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Steven Shivaro – Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (MIT Press 2009)

Three Comics/Graphic Novels I Really Enjoyed Reading

Hans Rickheit – The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics, 2009)
Stephen King, Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque – American Vampire Vol. 1 (Vertigo, 2010)
Charles Burns – Black Hole (Pantheon, 2008)

Three Books Published In 2010 That I Really Enjoyed Reading For Fun

Steven Moore – The Novel: An Alternative History (Continuum)
Bill Simmons – The Book of Basketball (ESPN)
Francois Dosse – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press)

Four Small Press Books From Two Small Presses Published In 2010, Which I Really Enjoyed Reading

Evan Lavender-Smith – From Old Notebooks (BlazeVOX)
Gary J. Shipley – Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX)
Sasha Fletcher – when all our days are numbered marching bands will fill the streets and we will not hear them because we will be upstairs in the clouds (MLP)
Ben Brooks – An Island of Fifty (MLP)

Eight Books Published By Small Presses in 2010 That I Did Not Get A Chance To Read Yet That I Really Want To Read

Terese Svoboda – Pirate Talk or Mermalade (Dzanc)
Lily Hoang – The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press)
Grace Krilanovich – The Orange Eats Creeps (Two Dollar Radio)
Amelia Gray – Museum of the Weird (FC2)
Christian Hawkey – Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse)
CAConrad – The Book of Frank (Wave Books)
Leslie Scalapino – Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (The Post-Apollo Press)
Tan Lin – Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan University Press)

Book I Am Sad I Did Not Purchase When It Was Available, Which Was Published This Year And Then Immediately Went Out Of Print

Kate Durbin – Fashionwhore (Wrath of Dynasty)

Best Book(s) I Got For Christmas, Given To Me By My Wife

Paul West – Sheer Fiction Volumes 1-4

Books I Am Currently Reading, Here At The End Of 2010

Frank Kermode – The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1967)
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations (New Edition from Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, and Mike Dringenberg – The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes (New Edition, Vertigo, 2010)

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