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Jen Leo has already mentioned this, but I’ll reiterate that Newley Purnell has posted “Bloggers’ Favorite Books of 2004“, which includes feedback from the bloggers behind sites like BoingBoing, Old Hag, MoorishGirl, The Elegant Variation, Written Road, and Vagablogging.
I’ll let you surf over to Newley’s entry to find out what my favorite books were this year (but I’ll hint that one of them is called The Art of Mackin’).
What did you read and enjoy this year? Feel free to post below…
December 22nd, 2004 at 10:36 am
I was actually interested in the Love book that you talked about. We should talk about that sometime. Us single women in our thirties smelling like carnitas could use a book like that. And yeah, I want to get The Art of Mackin’ for a friend of mine.
December 22nd, 2004 at 4:26 pm
Always interesting to see what people are reading. For myself, I estimate 25 books and here are the highlights.
Fiction: Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau. Terrific, lyrical novel set in Martinique and a tribute to the art of translation.
Short Stories: Brownsville, Oscar Casares; and I Sailed with Magellan, Stuart Dybeck. Oscar is relatively new, from far south Texas; Dybeck, from Chicago, is justly famous. Place figures prominently in both books.
Essays: The Long-Legged House, Wendell Berry. Still relevant 35 years later, this book, too, is all about place. Though he rarely strays from his Kentucky farm in this book, Berry’s attitude, wherever he is, is to immerse oneself slowly, and, eventually, to emerge just as slowly, having soaked up the land’s story and disturbed as little of it as possible, leavng behind the same place for the next visitor or landowner. Think environmental stewardship treated as vagabonding on geologic time.
Poetry: After All, William Matthews. The last book of poems from one of my favorite poets. No writer, poet or journalist ever captured Charles Mingus like Matthews did.
Travel: Vagabonding. No joke.
Nonfiction: manuscript of Splendor in the Short Grass, a collection of the magazine work of Grover Lewis, UT Press 2005. No longer well-known, Grover did some of the best writing about music and, especially, movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Don’t take it from me, take it from Tim Cahill: “He (Grover) was the best of all of us.”
Cheers,
Casey
December 23rd, 2004 at 11:27 am
Thanks for sharing, Casey. It’s interesting that you mention Wendell Berry, since my sister and her husband actually met him in Kentucky two years ago. He’s been a big inspiration for why they bought a farm to live close to the land in northern Kansas. And you’re right — the mindful, land-literate living Berry espouses has similarities to the peripatetic mindfulness one seeks in vagabonding…