Reading in 2024

In frequenting my local library a lot during 2024, I bought some of the books that were being discarded, such as Mary Oliver’s Devotions. My library only charges a quarter for each book. I once suggested that the library should sell some of its discarded books online, but I don’t know whether they enacted such a venture. I have ordered discarded books from other libraries over the years. I regularly look at used options when I am thinking of buying a book from Amazon.

As someone who regularly completes surveys for YouGov and earns a bit of money after about six months of surveys, I spent the money I earned on books of poetry by Faith Shearin, George Bilgere, and Laura Read. I originally had read these books by using interlibrary loan, which is another benefit of visiting my local library.

I added twenty-eight books to my account at LibraryThing in 2024, ten of which were published by Choeofpleirn Press, the press that my wife and I run. We decided to stop publishing our literary journals after 2024 because of budget issues. We are concentrating now on our poetry chapbook and nonfiction book contests.

Early in 2024, before I had to return to teaching, I reread The Bedford Incident, a novel that captures the paranoia within the military during the Cold War.  This novel was made into a movie starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. I found the novel to be much more misogynist than I remember when I read it previously. The misogyny wasn’t as apparent in the movie. After reading that novel, I also reread Ten Hours Before Dawn, an account of a small boat sinking during a storm off the coast of Massachusetts. I have nearly an entire shelf devoted to accidents at sea, and this fascination or fixation can be attributed to my being raised as a Navy brat.

Another interest of mine is jazz. I probably have enough books about jazz to take up two shelves in my home library. I enjoyed reading The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music a bit more than 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool. 3 Shades of Blue, I thought, devoted too much attention to the heroin addiction of these musicians. I ended up only reading those parts of the book that appealed to me—the description of the recording session, for example. The Blue Moment would have been better if it had devoted more attention to the rise of contemporary jazz in Europe in general and Scandinavia in particular.

Another book that I read in the year was Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains. Much of the book describes the writer’s memories of growing up in southwest Kansas, his mother’s own research, and his experience visiting his father while researching the Ogallala aquifer. His first-person account of the water that used to exist in southwestern Kansas and that is now threatened makes the book worth reading. I just wish that the final chapter were less abstract. The author treats the concluding chapter as if it were an academic treatise.

My wife published her screenplay titled Mrs. Nash during the year. She wrote this screenplay while earning her PhD and has only now published it. Mrs. Nash is the first known account of a man who chose to live his life as a woman during the 19^th century. Libbie Custer makes reference to Mrs. Nash in some of her writing. I hadn’t read my wife’s screenplay before it was actually published. I have been encouraging my wife to publish it because of how topical the story of Mrs. Nash is. I enjoyed reading the screenplay but would much rather see it as a movie. There are visual cues that I miss and would like to see when Mrs. Nash encounters other women for the first time, for example.

My local library discarded Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, a collection of essays, recently. Although the book is a bit dated, having been published in 2002, I enjoyed reading the essays on Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens.

Otherwise, the time that I usually spend reading went toward my own writing. As a kind of preface to putting together my own collection of poems, I read both Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems and Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, neither of which were extremely helpful for me, having put together a collection of poems for my thesis and my dissertation. Diane Seuss admits in one of these books that there is no formula for putting together a book of poems. During the few months that I devoted to assembling my current collection of poems. I was arranging poems, revising poems, thinking about my poems, and writing new poems. The entire process took a lot of time.

At the moment, I recently completed reading Sanora Babb’s An Owl on Every Post, a memoir of living in eastern Colorado during the early years of the twentieth century. I liked her descriptions of the prairie, the sky, the animals, the weather, and the sounds she heard. I have The Lost Traveler, another memoir of hers, and the collection of essays Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb on order at my local library. It generally takes a week or two for interlibrary books to arrive. I hope to start reading one of these two books before I have to grade another batch of essays. I have been looking for her novel Whose Names Are Unknown among the thousand or so books of mine, but I cannot place my hand on it. I have been hoping to reread it.