THE END

I guess this blog has reached its terminus??? Or has it??? I am, at the moment, considering just taking out the '2011' and making this blog either:

• "Every Book That I Have Read 2012-30XX" ?
• an actual 'person' blog, like, where I talk about things (do I really want to do that?)
• leaving the blog inert as of tomorrow

What's going to happen?? The Mystery.

2011 is probably the year I read the most amount of books. That is good! I hope to read more in 2012. I was thinking of making some charts and lists about the books that I read but now I just feel like that's probably not going to happen. The consensus is that most of the books I read in 2011 were great. That is great! The only books that I didn't finish in 2011 were Kobo Abe's The Face of Another and Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America. Counting those books as a 'single' book (huh?? what kind of logic is this??), in 2011 I read about 78 books! Cool! Though to be fair, I have been reading quite a bit recently, and just have not gotten around to finish the following:

• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (recently finished 'Part 1', about ~200 pages in)
• Brodie's Report by Jorge Luis Borges (about ~40 pages left)
• The Tennis Court Oath by John Ashbery (about ~30 pages left)

So that's it! Maybe! Happy New Years! If you have read this, thank you!

Best,
Sebastian

The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño

TITLE: The Romantic Dogs
AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Have read a bunch of the poems in here already. I enjoyed this poetry collection, though I have to admit that my opinion of these poems is obviously filtered through my already-existing obsession with Bolaño. There was actually probably more here that I disliked than 'liked'...well maybe that is a bit harsh! I think there are some aspects of Bolaño's poetry that I don't really enjoy, and I think it's because it is in his poems that his most sentimental impulses come out. Stuff like "no one is braver than poetry" or whatever...maybe I have a diminished opinion of the importance or 'bravery' of poetry...Zurita did, like, scar his cheek or whatever, and Bolaño was arrested when he was younger than I was, and poets today probably just complain about iPhones or something...well I guess writers today in general, or really just any young person born in the mid to late 80's living in the United States. There are definitely a bunch of poems in here that I really enjoyed. I also feel like the tonal and syntactic quality of his poems are an interesting counterpoint to his fiction, in that it sort of crystallizes the "Bolaño tone" and distills it into colloquial speech mixed with some sort of weird image-based-mystery-cum-abstraction thing. I also enjoyed the themes/setting for a lot of these poems: prostitutes, Mexico City as smog and violence void, sci-fi opining, putting your head into a black hole and thinking about that, etc. Yeah, good good I like it all, etc.

In Praise of Darkness by Jorge Luis Borges

TITLE: In Praise of Darkness
AUTHOR: Jorge Luis Borges
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Technically only read the prose pieces from this book, as my Borges collection doesn't have any of his poetry in it. The stories were all wonderful. As I have been making my way through the Borges oeuvre chronologically, and given that his most highly regarded work was written in '40's, I expected the Borges stories later on to lessen in quality. I have not found this to be true yet. It seems like as Borges got older he was able to condense what he wanted to do in an even smaller amount of space, even though most of his classic stories are only about 7-10 pages long. Some of the most powerful stories in here are about two or three paragraphs; I was particularly emotionally affected by "A Prayer." Also really love Borges' prefaces to all of his collections, something that by today's standards might seem 'lame' -- but I think I would like seeing more people writing prefaces to their own work in the future.

Some Trees by John Ashbery

TITLE: Some Trees
AUTHOR: John Ashbery
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Feel like I read poems pretty frequently but rarely sit down and read 'full' poetry books so I am going to try to rectify that in the coming months or so. Been thinking of getting through some Ashbery canon, decided to start chronologically. This honestly did not do much for me. I was bracing for the incomprehensible, trying to get into a zone where I can 'soak up' that kind of stuff, but it left me dry. Aside from "The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers" and maybe a few others I mostly have already forgotten all of the words in this book. I dunno. I might be a dolt, but with poetry that is largely written in abstract and un-literal/concrete language my sensibility for what makes a poem work is incredibly murky and unintelligible. I guess it becomes closer to music, more about "feeling" or something, and I wasn't feeling it. Still about three or four more Ashbery books to come, and this was his really early stuff, so maybe I will come to like all of that a lot more! I really like "How Much Longer..." and "The Skaters" and the poems I've read in "Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror" so I have a feeling I will like the later stuff better.

Europeana by Patrik Ouředník

TITLE: Europeana
AUTHOR: Patrik Ouředník
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Have never read a book quite like this! I guess I would call it a kind of deconstructive narrative history of the 20th century, as much as that might make some (me) cringe. Despite its consistent deadpan tone and syntactic clarity there is no creedence given to historical linearity or even really any conventional idea of history. Dalkey calls it a novel, and I like that. It is much more a novel than a non-fiction text; it just so happens to be a novel written entirely with 'factual' elements, which I really like and I find exciting. Reading this made me tremendously curious about Patrik Ouředník, whom I have never really heard of before reading about this I think. I might have seen his name on some websites but no ideas or titles attached itself to the name. I would recommend this book to pretty much everyone. The structuring element along with the the tone really make it work for me. Because the tone feels so distant it, at times, almost felt like I was reading a story about a foreign world, that perhaps has nothing to do with the one I inhabit, which I take to be part of the conceit of the book. It almost felt like reading a 120 page version of the "Findings" section in Harper's. Great great yes. 20th century was a mistake and the 21st century will be weirder probably !!!

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño

TITLE: The Third Reich
AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
READ: November-December
THOUGHTS: Enjoyed this, though didn't think so at first. The first hundred pages were a bit meandering and felt more like an exercise or 'practice novel' (the manuscript for this dates back to '89, which is about 4 or so years before Bolaño published The Skating Rink, which I believe is his first published novel? I could be wrong.) The book was close to 300 pages, which for Bolaño's shorter works is a bit long; at times I felt like this could have definitely merited a shorter length, though maybe the slow pace does well for the book's overall atmosphere, tone, etc. It very slowly develops into the perennial Bolaño narrative: a story with somewhat innocuous origins delves into a kind unseeable and unverified looming terror -- for the last third of the book you slowly suspect that something terrible is going to happen and then things just sort of peter out in both an anticlimactic (which is never a bad word in Bolaño) and emotionally confusing/diffused way. I would say this book stands well among other Bolaño novels. I don't think there is a single thing he has written that I have disliked, though I think this book will probably end up lumped into a grouping of 'lesser works' in the Bolaño oeuvre. Still lots of fun and not a boring moment, despite its slow pace.

My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec

TITLE: My Two Worlds
AUTHOR: Sergio Chejfec
READ: December
THOUGHTS: Damn this book....after reading Vila-Matas' incredible preface for this book I was practically bouncing off of the walls with excitement to read it. It really is, I think, incredible. An antecedent, or perhaps just contemporary I guess, for this kind of writing is definitely Sebald: the solitary walker's soliloquy, and the nebulous, amorphous text that follows -- also dense, beautiful (thought more plain stated here than in Sebald, which I actually really like) and also brimming with a million things that it simultaneously is and isn't; it is also about a 100 pages long. I will admit that the narrator's philosophical, emotional, and social concerns all seem to mirror my own quite closely, so maybe that plays a part for why I feel such an overwhelming kinship with this book and its author, but there is something about this kind of writing that is incredibly exciting to me -- probably one of the most exciting books I have read this year. One of the things I have found out about myself by keeping this blog (man this sentence can only be embarrassing or stupid or both) is that I have a tendency to be able to write at great length and with great ease about books that I either thought were ok or don't feel particularly attached to. With this book, as with the other books that I really loved this year (Vila-Matas, Bolano, uhh others (don't feel like looking at my list)) there is a very real trepidation in my attempts to try and articulate why I have admired them so much, as if any stray or thoughtless remark will either smudge the book's reputation (a reputation which I am seeking to exalt and represent) or either just make me look really stupid, in that my reasons for liking something will appear to be fraudulent, inauthentic, barely articulated, superficial, etc. The knowledge that my experience with this book has been both the experience of filling myself into an inanimate object as much as it has been an experience of reading someones voice creates some weird kind of familiarity and estrangement, a relationship I think is present in the book between the narrator and the world he encounters and perhaps suggests the same kind of problem and/or weirdness of reading the traces of someone elses' existence, like the thing you're holding in between your hands. I don't know. My head is jumbled. All of these thoughts are nonsense.