Over the last few weeks, I have finally managed to begin focusing on reading in a sustained way again, which allowed me to finish two books. And there are several others I’ve been nibbling at for months that I may actually manage to finish quite soon.
This has been a rough year — and a rough week — for my attention span…
I haven’t managed to finish reading anything since mid-March. My concentration is shot, and so I have been drifting through easy books while rewatching TV shows. I’m trying to make a virtue out of my short attention span by concentrating on distracting things.
Burns: Riveting, with a delicious gallows humor. Perfect voice, perfectly sustained.
Harwicz: My god, how brutal. But tonally flawless.
Quin: A wonderful balance of experimental writing and slapstick comedy. It actually seemed a bit Pythonesque at times – which is appropriate, considering it originally came out during the great British absurdist fever of the mid ’60s. Berg was my first Quin, and I hope her others are as fun and as wicked.
Hwang: She has said that she turned to poetry only in recent years, after working at fiction for most of her adult life. It shows. Many (though not all) of the poems have a strong narrative propulsion to them, often reading like sharp moments from a short story. The best poems do something truly powerful and compelling with this hybrid, the weaker ones fall between two chairs.
Wahmanholm: Absolutely unerring choices. Always surprising and inevitable. Lucid nightmares. And much the same could be said for the other volumes I read last spring.
In 2019, I tracked what poetry I finished reading each week.
New plan. Until my poetry reading gets back up to speed, I’ve decided to track any book I finish each week, regardless of genre.
Also, beginning in 2020, I will try link to Indiebound or Powell’s and, whenever possible, the publisher’s or author’s website. I hope to go back and retrofit older posts from 2019 in the same way.
While I’ve continued to move slowly through several collections, everything unfinished last month remains unfinished. My reading has been dominated by nonfiction, and some new work commitments have begun to take up much more of my time.
Both the nonfiction and the work will continue through the winter, so I’m putting this project on hold until the new year.
I didn’t finish anything in September, since most of my reading time was devoted to my (I think) 19th re-read of Lord of the Rings. As I have long known, autumn for me is often a time to revisit old texts, like having a familiar TV show or favorite album on in the background while you’re working.
I’ve been reassessing my “Finished” program, and I think it’s time to make a few changes.
First, I’ve long been aware that I tend to re-read books in the fall more than I read new books, so I am anticipating a decrease in my willingness to tackle new work. I’ll still be reading some new/unfinished things, but not at the expense of re-reads.
Also, I feel as though I have achieved the root reason for doing this: my poetry TBR shelf is now just over a third of what it was at the end of 2018.
And instead of weekly updates, I’ll be going back to a monthly update, like I did in April. So this will be the last update until the end of September.
Another week with nothing finished. I’m mired in several longer things, as well as the arrival of two new books, a Collected and a very large Selected.
Nothing. This has been a bad week — I had an allergic reaction to all of the poetry I was trying to read. Apparently there was a reason why they’d been lying around only partially-finished: I simply disliked them. Maybe next week will be better…
I’m this close to finishing a few books, but I haven’t wanted to rush them, and I’ve had so many distractions…