Wordful 2009: What I Read

A year ago, George wished me a “wordful, birdful  2009” so I figured I’d wrap up my year of words and birds on the blog starting with the books I read.

I read 58 books this year. As I look at the list, I see a few groupings and so I’ll mention some favorites in each category.

The newest thing in my reading was chapbooks. I bought Ten Poems about Highways and Birds by Sarah Bennett after reading a review at Via Negativa. I guess that turned me on to chapbooks and I really fell in love with the form and even tried my hand at it (more on that later in the week).

Of the chapbooks I read, my favorite was Bennett’s, but they were all enjoyable and I discovered a number of poets whose work I hadn’t read before. I’ve now got a small collection of chapbooks going, and I expect I will continue to buy them. Two others that stood out were Heartland by Howard Good and Raven Feathers by Nicole Nicholson, and I’ll be posting my review of Pamela Johnson Parker’s A Walk Through the Memory Palace on January 28 as part of Read Write Poem’s Virtual Book Tour.

I read a bunch of young adult stuff. Every few years, I bring a stack of YA books home from the school library so I can read what my kids are reading and talk about their books a little bit. I read all of Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Shadow Children series and even had my summer school students read the first book, Among the Hidden. A few continued through the rest of her books and decided that maybe reading isn’t so bad after all.

My favorite of the YA books, though, was The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci, a dark tale of outsiders and insiders at a small town high school. The writing was sharp and the book held my attention better than most YA books.

I also read my usual assortment of novels and nonfiction books about random things that interest me. I continued my obsession of reading every book shown or referenced on ABC’s Lost, the most substantial of which was James Joyce’s Ulysses. Click here for a list of all the Lost books along with links to my reviews.

For novels, I happened to read two of the books that are showing up regularly on all those best-of-the-decade lists: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, both of which have post-apocalyptic settings. While I agree with many reviewers that The Road is a brilliantly crafted novel, and one of the best to come along in a great while, I liked Cloud Atlas more. Those two books, along with Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home were my favorite novels for the year and they’re the three I’m recommending most frequently.

Other highlights include finally reading Joyce’s Dubliners (“The Dead” may be one of the best short stories I’ve ever read) and David Allen Sibley’s Sibley Guide to Trees, which though I haven’t read it yet, looks beautiful and will be a fine companion to his excellent Sibley Guide to Birds.

Here’s the full list:

1. The Tales of Beetle the Bard – JK Rowling
2. Alabama Wildman – Thurston Moore
3. Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
4. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches – Matsuo Bashō
5. JRNLS80s: Poems, Lyrics, Letters, Observations, Wordplay and Postcards from the Early Days of Sonic Youth– Lee Ranaldo
6. Tao Te Ching – Lao Tsu (tr: Gia-fu Feng & Jane English – reread)
7. At-Risk Students: Feeling Their Pain, Understanding Their Plight and Accepting Their Defensive Ploys – Bill Page
8. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
9. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
10. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
11. Zen and the Birds of Appetite – Father Thomas Merton
12. The Survivors of the Chancellor – Jules Verne
13. Through – Rachel Barenblatt
14. Ulysses – James Joyce
15. The Crucible – Arthur Miller (reread)
16. A Separate Reality – Carlos Casteneda
17. Preventing Death by Lecture – Sharon Bowman
18. Lucy – Jean Valentine
19. The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English – Henry Hitchings
20. Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryōkan – Ryōkan
21. Among the Hidden – Margaret Peterson Haddix
22. Restless Astronomy – Michael Gilmore
23. The Devil’s Arithmetic – Jane Yolen
24. Ten Poems about Highways and Birds – Sarah Bennett
25. No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy
26. Monster – Walter Dean Myers
27. Heartland – Howard Good
28. Stuck in Neutral – Terry Trueman
29. Among the Imposters – Margaret Peterson Haddix
30. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
31. Among the Betrayed – Margaret Peterson Haddix
32. Among the Barons – Margaret Peterson Haddix
33. Raven Feathers – Nicole Nicholson
34. Among the Brave – Margaret Peterson Haddix
35. Among the Enemy – Margaret Peterson Haddix
36. Among the Free – Margaret Peterson Haddix
37. The Intellectual Devotional: American History – David S Kidder & Noah D Oppenheim
38. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K Dick
39. The Bible of Lost Pets – Jamey Dunham
40. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
41. Book Made of Forest – Jared Stanley
42. The Imperfection of the Eye – Steven Schroeder
43. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
44. The Body of Christopher Creed – Carol Plum-Ucci
45. Red Bird – Mary Oliver
46. Inside Bone there’s Always Marrow – Rachel Mallino
47. Hemispheres – Jeanpaul Ferro
48. The Bear Comes Home – Rafi Zabor
49. Leaf Weather – Shira Dentz
50. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah
51. Lord of the Flies – William Golding (reread)
52. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing & Life – Anne Lamott
53. Mars: The Lure of the Red Planet – William Sheehan & Stephen James O’Meara
54. Bicycle Diaries – David Byrne
55. The Day-Glo Brothers – Chris Barton
56. A Walk Through the Memory Palace – Pamela Johnson Parker
57. Nuclear Meditations – Cathy McFann
58. Dubliners – James Joyce

James Brush

James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.

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