• Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child (Scholastic 1967, 2001)
• Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (Bloomsbury 1973, 2000) (reread)
• Russell Hoban, Kleinzeit (Summit Books 1974) (reread)

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale 2009, 2019)
• AR Ammons, Sumerian Vistas (Norton 1987)
• Ellen Bass, Indigo (Copper Canyon 2020)
• Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin 2020)
• Rob Shouten (ed), Rinkeldekinkel (Milkweed 2021)
• Mark Scroggins, Elegaic Verses (above/ground 2020)
• JJ Rowan, a simple verb (Bloof 2019)
• Kristina Lugn (trns Elizabeth Clark Wessel), I Want You to Come Now! (Bloof 2021)

Finished in December

• Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row 1977) (reread)
• Robert Karen, Becoming Attached (Oxford 1994)
• Walter J Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (University of Chicago 1958, 2004)

• Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Return of the King (Mariner Books 2012) (reread)

• Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace (Bloof Books 2017)
• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books 2012)

• Maria Dahvana Headley (trns), Beowulf (MCDxFSG 2020)
• Thoreau, Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds (Island Press 1993)
• Dana Levin, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon 2005)
• Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (Scribner 2007) (reread)
• Goethe (Salm, trns), Faust (Bantam 1962, 1985)

• Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (Penguin 2013)
• David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language (Princeton 2007)
• Robyn Hitchcock, Somewhere Apart: Selected Lyrics 1977–1997 (Tiny Ghost Press 2021)
• Dorianne Laux & Kim Addonizio, A Poet’s Companion (Norton 1997)

• Danielle Pafunda, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books 2017)
• HD, Trilogy (New Directions 1998)
• Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End (Harvest 1989)
• Ada Limón, The Carrying (Milkweed 2018)
• Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest (Random House 2020)

• Ursula Andjær Olsen (trns, Katrine Øgaard Jensen), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021)
• JM Tyree, The Counterforce: Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Fiction Advocate 2021)
• Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (Norton 2021)
• Marcus Aurelius (trns, Gregory Hays), Meditations (Random House 2003)
• Jean Daive (trns, Rosmarie Waldrop) Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (City Lights 2020)
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Penguin 2015)

• CG Jung, Synchronicity (Princeton 1973, 2010)
• Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon 2021)
• Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English (Random House 2019)

• Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala 1986, 2016) (My first reread in maybe 33 years)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (Pike trns), The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Dalkey Archive 2008)
• Claudia Serea, Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone 2016)
• Craig Koslovsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2011)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (M.D. Herder Norton trns), Letters to a Young Poet (Norton 1954)
• Don Paterson, Orpheus: A Version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus (Faber & Faber 2006)
• Aase Berg (Göransson trns), Remainland: Selected Poems (Action Books 2005)

1. Evening’s Empire was a long time coming. I checked it out of the library in the spring of 2013, and read maybe the first quarter. I bought a copy a year later, starting over from the beginning. I set it down repeatedly over the next six years, and finally finished the last three chapters in a big push over several days. An absolutely excellent book.
2. All this Rilke over the last month or so is because of a correspondence course called Rilke by Mail offered by the poet Mark Wunderlich. Rilke was an early and, I see now, extremely strong influence on me when I was a young poet starting out in college.

• Ursula Andjær Olsen (trns, Katrine Øgaard Jensen), Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books 2017)
• Danielle Pafunda, Spite (The Operating System 2020)
• Dakotah Jennifer, Fog (Bloof Books 2019)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (trns, Edward Snow), Duino Elegies (North Point Press 2001)
• Shirley Kaufman, Roots in the Air: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon 1996)
• Alex Dimitrov, Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon 2021)
• Aase Berg (trns, Johannes Görensson & Joyelle McSweeney), Tsunami from Solaris: Essays on Poetry (Action Books 2019)

• Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row 1989) (reread)
• Mark Wunderlich, God of Nothingness (Graywolf 2020)
• Erin Belieu, Come-Hither Honeycomb (Copper Canyon 2021)
• Erin Belieu, One Above and One Below (Copper Canyon 2000) (reread)
• Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz (Andrea Dykes, trns), The Grail Legend (Sigo Press 1986)
• Shanna Compton, (Creature Sounds Fade) (Black Lawrence Press 2020)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (trns, Damion Searls), Letters to a Young Poet, with the Letters to Rilke from the “Young Poet” (Liveright 2021)

• Giusseppe Ungaretti (trns, Geoffrey Brock), Allegria (Archipelago Books 2020)
• Erin Belieu, Infanta (Copper Canyon 1995) (reread)
• Katie Manning, 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books, 2020)
• Alison Moncrieff, Cherrystem (Finishing Line Press, 2017)
• Jeff Parent, This Bygone Route (845 Press 2020)

• Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (in Poems 1962–2012, FSG 2012)
• Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem (Copper Canyon 2020)

• Jennifer L Knox, Crushing It (Copper Canyon 2020)
• Vievee Francis, Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly 2016)

• Hergé, Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh (Atlantic Little Brown, 1975) (reread)
• Hergé, Tintin: The Blue Lotus (Atlantic Little Brown, 1984) (reread)
• Hergé, Tintin: The Broken Ear (Atlantic Little Brown, 1978) (reread)
• Hergé, Tintin: The Black Island (Atlantic Little Brown, 1975) (reread)
• Hergé, Tintin: King Ottokar’s Sceptre (Atlantic Little Brown, 1974) (reread)
• Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air (Anchor 2019)
• James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf 2008)

• Elaine Pagels & Karen L King, Reading Judas (Penguin 2007)

I’m suspending the “Finished” project for the rest of the year, for largely the same reasons I stopped this time last year: I tend to focus on rereads in the fall and winter.

There are several longer books I’m slowly working my way through, and I tend to move between them according to my mood each day. And my mood in the darker months is such that I will need my reading habits to serve my therapeutic, self-medicating needs rather than some goal of finishing books and then reporting out about it.

I’ll continue to keep my own log of finished books, and will post a recap of 2020 sometime close to New Years.

• CK Williams, Repair (FSG 2000)
• Arthur Sze, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon 2001)

For a few days this week, I thought I would belatedly join in the Sealey Challenge. It did not go well. (I have some Very Deep Thoughts on this, but they will have to wait a few days.)

• Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan 2005)
• Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Vintage 2004)

Beyond Belief: I bounced off this one hard when I first read it in 2003. I have no idea why, considering how absolutely up my alley all of Elaine Pagels’ books had been up to that point. My guess is that it’s because Beyond Belief is, at times, much more personal than her previous books, which I don’t think I was in a position to appreciate at the time. This book feels different, too, as though she was trying to stay focused yet kept taking in wider and wider vistas.

No Emo joke this week, sorry. And Irenaeus? Yep, still an asshole.

Hillman: Holy shit, is that an actual book of poems? Pledging to finish all the unfinished and unstarted poetry that was lying around is what started this whole thing off, waaay back in January of 2019. And poetry has been thin on the ground for a very long time. Who knows, maybe I’m ready to get back into all that. Tune in next week for another exciting episode.

• Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (Picador, 2009)
• Colin Woodard, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking 2020)

• Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Random House, 1995)

This was my first reread of The Origin of Satan since ’96. Short version: Satan was invented largely by the cononical gospels as a counterpoint to the external enemy of Rome. “Satan” ceased to be the impersonal adversary or debate opponent of the Hebrew scriptures and swiftly bloomed into the personification of the intimate enemy within the then-incipient community of the early Jesus cult: first Judas; then the scribes and Jewish elders; then all Jews; and finally (once it had fully broken away from the Jewish world) any Christian who disagreed with orthodoxy (literally “straight thinking”). Satan is a textbook example of the narcissism of small differences.

Or as Emo Phillips puts it:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.”

I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.”

I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”

I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

Also, Irenaeus is such an asshole.

• Daryl Sanders, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound (Chicago Review Press, 2019)

• Italo Calvino (Brock, trns), Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Mariner, 2016)
• Colin Woodard, American Character (Penguin, 2016)
• Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry (Ecco, 2018)
• Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began (Scribner, 2020)

• Robert M Thorson, The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years (Harvard, 2017)
• CG Jung (R&C Winston, trns), Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Vintage, 1963)
• Ursula K Le Guin (with David Naimon) Conversations on Writing (Tin House, 2018)