Category: Non-Fiction

My 2016 Reading List

Denton LovingLeave a comment

 

In regards to reading, I had two goals this year.  Actually, I’m going to refer to them as one goal and one hope.

The goal was to read one Shakespeare play each month.  The few I had read before this year were school assignments, which I mostly wasn’t prepared to read and didn’t get much out of.  I got a bit behind during the fall semester, but I managed to catch up just this week in order to complete my goal.

My hope was to read 100 books this year.  Why 100?  I don’t know.  It’s a fairly arbitrary number, but it’s nice and round, and I thought this was the year that I could do it.  Unfortunately, I’m a bit short, clocking in at only 91 books read this year (full list below).  I admit that almost half of those books were poetry books, which means that many were a bit short.  Still, 91 is a respectable number, or so I’m telling myself.

Here’s the full list.  FYI, a few of these books are unpublished manuscripts.  You won’t find them for purchase yet, but I hope you’ll find them one day soon.

  1. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
  2. Diane Cook – Man V. Nature
  3. Steven Pressfield – The War of Art
  4. David Daniel – Seven-Star Bird
  5. Charles Dodd White & Larry Smith – Appalachia Now
  6. William Trent Pancoast – Valley Real Estate
  7. William Shakespeare – Othello
  8. William Kelley Woolfitt – Beauty Strip
  9. William Kelley Woolfitt – Charles of the Desert
  10. Richie Hofmann – Second Empire
  11. Jill McCorkle – Creatures of Habit
  12. Junot Diaz – The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  13. Michael Ondaatje – Divisadero
  14. William Shakespeare – The First Part of Henry VI
  15. Jeremy Jones – Bearwallow
  16. Elijah Burrell – The Skin of the River
  17. William Shakespeare – The Second Part of Henry VI
  18. Wesley Browne – Slice
  19. Pauletta Hansel – The Lives We Live in Houses
  20. Alex Taylor – The Name of the Nearest River
  21. Major Jackson – Holding Company
  22. Kyle McCord – You Are Indeed an Elk, But This is Not the Forest You Were Born to Graze
  23. Jodi Lynn Anderson – Tiger Lily
  24. Brent Martin – Hunting for Camellias at Horseshoe Bend
  25. William Shakespeare – The Third Part of Henry VI
  26. Robert Zubrin – The Case for Mars
  27. Rose McLarney – The Always Broken Plates of Mountains
  28. Rose McLarney – Its Day Being Gone
  29. Lee Smith – Cakewalk
  30. Amy Willoughby-Burle – Out Across the Nowhere
  31. Darnell Arnoult – Galaxie Wagon
  32. William Shakespeare – Richard III
  33. Pasture Art – Marlin Barton
  34. Barrett Warner – Why is it so hard to kill You?
  35. New Stories from the South 2008 – ZZ Packer
  36. A Fox Appears – Jennifer Stewart-Miller
  37. Larry Brown – Joe (June)
  38. Bob Shachohis – The Woman Who Lost Her Soul
  39. Geoff Dyer – Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
  40. Theodore Wheeler – Bad Faith
  41. Joanne Proulx – We All Love the Beautiful Girls
  42. William Shakespeare – The Tempest
  43. Ross Gay – Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
  44. Jim Elledge – Tapping My Arm for a Vein
  45. William Shakespeare – Two Gentleman of Verona
  46. Keith Stewart – Bernadette Peters Hates Me
  47. Cassie Pruyn – Lena
  48. Nathan Hill – The Nix
  49. Erica Anderson-Senter – Seven Days Now
  50. J.K. Daniels – Wedding Pulls
  51. Sue Weaver Dunlap – Knead
  52. Lauren K. Alleyne – Difficult Fruit
  53. Major Jackson – Hoops
  54. Brandon Courtney – Rooms for Rent in the Burning City
  55. Henry Real Bird – Horse Tacks
  56. Jen Leija – Good Bones
  57. William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  58. Lyrae Van Clief-Stafanon – Open Interval
  59. Ron Houchin – Death and the River
  60. David Armand – My Mother’s House
  61. William Shakespeare – The Merry Wives of Windsor
  62. Thomas Rain Crowe – Radiogenesis
  63. Dorianne Laux – The Book of Men
  64. Mark Eisner – The Essential Neruda – Selected Poems
  65. Richard Hague – Possible Debris
  66. Nathalie Handal – Poet in Andalucia
  67. Saeed Jones – Prelude to Bruise
  68. Joseph Bathanti – Anson County
  69. Jim Minick – Burning Heaven
  70. Jim Harrison – Letters to Yesenin
  71. Tim Peeler – Fresh Horses
  72. Mark Wagenaar – Body Distances
  73. Richard Hague – Alive in Hard Country
  74. Connie Jordan Green – Darwin’s Breath
  75. Grace Paley – Later the Same Day
  76. William Shakespeare – Measure for Measure
  77. TJ Jarrett – Zion
  78. Carrie Mullins – Night Garden
  79. William Shakespeare – Comedy of Errors
  80. William Shakespeare – Love’s Labour’s Lost
  81. -91. (11 poetry manuscripts I read for a contest)

I’d love to know what you read this year.  If you don’t want to include your full list, what were your favorite books of 2016?

Recommended Reading 9/23/2016

Denton LovingLeave a comment

I’ve been reading some great stories, poems and essays in the past few weeks.  If you’re looking for something to hold your attention over the weekend, try one (or all) of these:

Barrett Warner’s poem, Oxon Run, was recently featured at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily: https://autumnskypoetrydaily.com/2016/09/08/oxon-run-by-barrett-warner/.

Emily Mohn-Slate has two poems at Connotation Press: http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/2862-emily-mohn-slate-poetry.

Linda Michel-Cassidy interviewed Tom McAllister and Mike Ingram, the creators of Book Fight!, over at Entropy: http://entropymag.org/book-fight-books-we-love-books-we-hate-books-that-inspire-us-baffle-us-infuriate-us/.

K.L. Browne’s fantastic story, Toucan, was published this week at Ascent: http://www.readthebestwriting.com/toucan-kelly-browne/.

Susan Pagani wrote this cool article about a cooperative grocery store in Minneapolis for Civil Eats, a national food justice mag: http://civileats.com/2016/09/20/this-minneapolis-cooperative-grocery-store-is-working-to-break-the-diversity-mold/.

Finally, I highly recommend you check out this essay by Jamie Zvirzdin in The Kenyon Review’s Poetics of Science issue: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2016-fall/selections/jamie-zvirzdin-656342/.  The essay is titled, “Observations of a Science Editor: If Romantic Scientists Pilfered Fiction’s Toolbox, You Can Too,” and it’s really fascinating.

Recommended Reading 9/9/2016

Denton LovingLeave a comment

If you’re looking for something good to read this weekend, here are several worthy options:

Poetry lovers should check out Cassie Pruyn‘s three poems that were included as part of CutBank’s “All Accounts and Mixture” online series: http://www.cutbankonline.org/cutbank-blog/2016/7/all-accounts-mixture-cassie-prurn.

And Tanya Grae has some beautiful new work online at Agni and at Fjords Review: http://www.bu.edu/agni/authors/T/Tanya-Grae.html and http://fjordsreview.com/featured/current_issue.html.

And be sure to read a new poem by Larry Thacker‘s in The Rappahannock Review: http://www.rappahannockreview.com/larry-thacker/.

If Creative Non-Fiction is more your style, you should read Elizabeth Glass’s essay “A Series of Almosts” online at The Manifest-Station: http://themanifeststation.net/2016/08/24/a-series-of-almosts/#more-16645.

And Susan Pagani has a wonderful essay, “On Living with Geese,” online at Switchback: https://www.swback.com/issues/2016/living-geese.html.

Corina Zappia wrote a fantastic review of Seattle restaurants in The Stranger:http://www.thestranger.com/food-and-drink/2016/08/26/24520833/seattles-downtown-evolution. I promise it’s a fun read, even if you won’t be in Seattle anytime soon.

the-nest-1-courtesy-of-nic-lehoux_mag

 

Keith Stewart’s “Bernadette Peters Hates Me”

Denton LovingLeave a comment

Keith Stewart has been making me laugh ever since I met him, but this weekend, I laughed because of his fantastic book, Bernadette Peters Hates Me: True Tales of a Delusional Man.

Bernie Peters

It’s hard to imagine that all of these incidents could have happened to one man.  Let’s start with the time he was attacked by a bird in a supermarket.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Why be scared of such a tiny bird? Why be so bitter towards a poor, struggling animal? Perhaps I am overreacting, you say? I beg to differ. A couple of years ago, I was accosted by an angry, terrified bird in a Kroger MegaGrand Store. I honestly can say I will never be the same, and neither will that dumb bird. Here’s how it went down:

“I ran into the grocery after work to pick up a few items. For convenience, I stopped at the store that was closer to work, so it was not my home Kroger. All the produce was placed in completely different places, and I walked around aimlessly trying to find the organic section, in particular, the celery. I was standing in front of a large display of carefully pyramided cantaloupe when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something dark and ominous. It was a bird, maybe a sparrow, flying at what appeared to be the speed of a fully engrossed Indy car. I stood there and thought to myself, “Huh, that bird looks like it’s flying directly toward me.” The next thing I know I feel something repeatedly beating me about the head and ear, and I hear the FLAP FLAP FLAP of bird wings. “OH GOD! HELP ME!” I yelled, flailing both arms up in the air trying to fight off the crazed bird. I was feeling around for a celery stalk to use as a sword, and in my panic, I jumped back directly into the large display of cantaloupe. At this point, the bird had tired of terrorizing me and had flown away to target its next victim over in the dairy section, but I was still flailing my arms, rolling in the floor with about fifty cantaloupes.” Read the whole piece at humoroutcasts.com.

There’s also the time he rubbed jalapeno pepper juice in a place he especially should NOT have.  There’s the time he and his cousins brawled with another family at a funeral.  There’s the title piece about why Broadway legend Bernadette Peters really does hate him.  I’m just tipping the ice berg here.  You’ll have to read the book for yourself.  In the meantime, you can follow Keith’s latest exploits online on Facebook or at www.astrongmanscupoftea.com.