Immanentize the Empathy
Lists of books and reading material
I didn’t read much this month, mostly due to spending all of my spare moments writing for NaNoWriMo. But what I did read was pretty good.
This was the month I finally made it to the bottom of my stack of back issues of The Paris Review. It was a wondrous, wild ride full of some of the best writing I have experienced in my adult life, but I feel a sense of relief now that I am done.
This was also the month in which I passed 200 pieces of short prose read, which means 2022, for all its chaos and uncertainty, was a stellar year for reading.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
Despite the craziness of my schedule, this was a pretty good month for reading. I passed 100 volumes read for the year, and 150 pieces of short prose. I have even managed to retain most of what I have read, which is a bonus.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
Things were kind of slow in August, reading-wise, due to a surge in burnout at the beginning of the month, and other assorted drains on my energy and attention span. I did make it through a few more issues of The Paris Review, and some interesting genre fiction as well.
Book and Journals
Short Prose
July was another excellent month for reading. I finished half a dozen issues of The Paris Review, as well as the some translated prose and the second and third books of John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy. And all that without feeling rushed. So even though July was exceptionally busy there were enough quiet moments to sink my teeth into some really good writing.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
I finally made it through all of the back issues of Poetry Magazine I have been collecting for the past decade. Forty-some issues, read and appreciated and ready to be archived. Now I am working my way through back issues of The Paris Review, and enjoying the experience. I will likely let my subscription lapse at the end of the year, or go to digital-only, which gives me access to the entire online archives, which is an AMAZING resource. But no more physical copies.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
This was another very poetry-heavy month, though I did manage to sneak in a couple of books about politics and the like. This quantity of poetry reading is putting my head in an interesting place, and I have written a couple of poems about the effect of reading so much poetry in a compressed time-frame. Perhaps this is what it is like to be an English major.
Two items of note here: Between Clay and Dust, which is the first fiction I have read since sometime in March, and Kameron Hurley’s short fiction, which is the first such I have read this year. 2022 had been like that.
Books and Journals
Short Prose
For National Poetry Month this year, I decided to work my way through my pile of unread issues of Poetry Magazine. It was quite an experience. Last time I read this much poetry, in this much variety, was in the heyday of The 3288 Review when we were getting over a hundred submissions a month, each with as many as ten poems.
Though sidelined for a few days by a touch of the flu, as well as some crazy work hours, I did manage to complete seventeen issues of Poetry, two poetry books by local writers, and the latest issue of Peninsula Poets.
The density of reading has put my mind in a very good space and I may continue this habit well into May in order to get caught up to present.
Books and Journals
Not a bad month for reading, was March. The first book, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, took the first half of the month to read, and the remaining six flew by, relatively speaking. This was a good mix of fiction and poetry, with a surprise nonfiction in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurrraqib’s collection of music reviews and criticism which I picked up at City Lights Bookstore back in the summer of 2019.
Books
February was a good reading month. I made it through five books – one genre fiction, one nonfiction sociological text, and three books in translation – one poetry and two fiction. Like in January, I didn’t read any short prose. I guess that’s just not where my mind is right now. Maybe in March.
Books
Short Prose