(fleeting)

Finished

A running log of the books I finish reading each month:

Beginning in January of 2019, I committed to reading two books of poetry each week to work through the embarrassingly large backlog of poetry on my TBR shelf. I expanded the scope in 2020 to tracking all books I finished reading, regardless of genre, updating the list monthly rather than weekly.

After several years of monthly blog posts, I switched to a single, static page that I updated regularly. In May 2024, I switched back to blog posts. They appear with this tag: finished

(Note: They are all print books, not audio- or e-books. Also, it is not a complete list; not everything I’ve read and finished is worth mentioning, and not everything is your business.)

August

July

June

May

April

April Notes

  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.

March

February

January

❦ 2020 (everything, such that it is, not just poetry)

December

November

October

August

July

July Notes

The Origin of Satan: First reread since ’96. Short version: Satan was invented largely by the cononical gospels as an internal 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.

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 wanted to stay focused but kept taking in wider and wider vistas.

And Irenaeus? Yep, still an asshole.

Pieces of Air in the Epic: Holy shit, is that an actual book of poems? Pledging to finish all the half-finished, 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.

June

May

March

February

February Notes

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.

January

❦ 2019 (poetry only)

35/ Week of 26 August

34/ Week of 19 August

31/ Week of 29 July

30/ Week of 22 July

29/ Week of 15 July

28/ Week of 7 July

25/ Week of 17 June

24/ Week of 10 June

23/ Week of 3 June

20/ Week of 13 May

19/ Week of 6 May

18/ Week of 29 April

14–17/ Finished in April

13/ Week of 25 Mar

12/ Week of 18 Mar

10/ Week of 4 Mar

9/ Week of 25 Feb

8/ Week of 18 Feb

7/ Week of 11 Feb

6/ Week of 4 Feb

5/ Week of 28 Jan

4/ Week of 21 Jan

3/ Week of 14 Jan

2/ Week of 7 Jan

1/ Week of 31 Dec

–>