106.2 Books in 2009
I read 106 books this year. Actually, I read more because even in going through the list I am seeing things I remember reading, like John Dermot Woods’s collection, and Amina Cain’s, and Tim Horvath’s novella, and Justin Sirois’s and at least a handful of others, not to mention the various books I read in manuscript form for blurbing or review or feedback or whatever, and all the other writing in magazines and where else. Nor does it include chapbooks, which skips a lot, because there were a lot of good chapbooks this year. In the formal count pulled off the list of books I hold on my hard drive I read 106 books, and probably will 2 or 3 more between now and the year’s out. That doesn’t count, either, the books I started and gave up on: as such, the majority of the books on this list I enjoyed.
Anyway, this is what I wrote down that I read. Writing it down as you go, which I’ve been doing since 2001 now, helps me a lot to remember what and where and when about it. It also seems to help me move along. I limited myself to saying a single sentence about each, which was hard to keep to, and then hard to finish, because that’s a lot. Not as much, probably, as the number of books I bought this year or in years before still waiting for me on the piles around my loft, which together will one day become the bricks of my future home. So anyway, for the hell of it…