2014: Year in Reading

Unsorted, uncategorized, un-reflected upon, here's a list (as complete as my memory can make it out) of books I read in 2014, as well as books I'm currently reading and intend to finish. I have a lot to finish. If you want a snap opinion or recommendation for any of these, let me know!

Read:

Shirley Jackson - The Bird's Nest
—The Haunting of Hill House
—We Have Always Lived in the Castle
—The Sundial
James Baldwin - Another Country
Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments
Kyle Minor - Praying Drunk (my blurb)
Leslie Jamison - The Empathy Exams
H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
Paul Elie - The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Shusaku Endo - Silence
George Saunders - Tenth of December 
—In Persuasion Nation
Marilynne Robinson - When I Was a Child, I Read Books
David Foster Wallace - Both Flesh and Not
Christian Wiman - Once in the West (poems)
Penelope Fitzgerald - Human Voices
Mary Szybist - Incarnadine (poems)
John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van (my review)
Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast
Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son (reread)
Christian Wiman - My Bright Abyss (reread)
Michael Chabon - Maps & Legends
Joseph Mitchell - My Ears Are Bent
—Joe Gould's Secret
Alexander Theroux - The Primary Colors
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Judy Oppenheimer - Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson
Jeff Sharlet - Sweet Heaven When I Die
Jacques Derrida - The Gift of Death
Gene Luen Yang - American Born Chinese
Aaron Belz - Plausible Worlds (poems) (my review)

In progress:

Michael Schmidt - The Novel: A Biography (my blurb)
Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
—Between Parentheses
Gregory Wolfe (Ed.) - Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE
Michel De Montaigne - The Complete Essays
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Sarah Ruden - Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
Miguel de Unamuno - Three Exemplary Novels
Fred Sanders - The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything
David Bentley Hart - The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
—The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
John Cheever - The Stories of John Cheever
Felix Ó Murchadha - A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night

How to Store Your Books If You Are Awesome and Rich

I thought of this the other day while talking with roommate Dan about interesting ways to store books. I couldn't find illustrations online for anything close to what I had in mind, so I downloaded a free drawing program from the app store and attempted to sketch out my idea. Here goes:

First, imagine that you own a house with a large basement or ground-level room. The floor is basically composed of congruent glass panels set in a grid pattern, like so:

I had to clear out the furniture to draw this picture.

The glass is reinforced—it's like, an inch thick and bulletproof—which allows people to walk over it and place furniture on top of it. You are probably wondering why there is a hazy blush of color in the center of each of those transparent or translucent (homeowner's choice) glass panels, huh? Well, I'll tell you why! It's because underneath each panel is an inset storage shelf, upon which has been placed a row of books! Seen from the perspective of a person standing on this floor, the vertical alcoves would look something like this:

A first edition of Yale Press's 1954 The Future: Progressive Essays in Experimental Ontology anthology? Amazing!

How might a person go about accessing the books they put under their glass floor? Did I hear that question correctly? I  sure hope so, because that's precisely the question I was about to answer. Notice that on the right side of each glass pane, there is a pair of dots. Those dots represent small holes, the rims of which would be specially reinforced with rubber O-rings. Why is this important? Because you, as the owner of this classy, bookish basement, have in your possession a grip with two prongs that are designed to fit into the holes on these glass panels. Each prong would terminate in a curve designed to slide into a groove under the glass, for a close and sure fit. 

The backwards beamed eighth notes pictured are actually the grip. 

When the prongs go in, the attached grip becomes a handle with which you may open the glass panel! Each pane will turn on a hinge that allows it to open like a square glass door. You know what that means? It means that with this grip, you have exclusive, easy access to your basement library! When you're finished retrieving the tomes you want, you can close the panel, remove the grip, and hang it back up on the bronze hook you installed in your kitchen, closet or panic room. 

What pretty pastel-colored spines your books have!

And there you have it. So, if you're a wealthy homeowner with a large spare room that's got a high ceiling (this design would move the level of the floor up a couple feet), and you happen to own a lot of books, you should consider storing them in this way—under a beautiful, thick plane of square glass panels. You could even line the walls with traditional standing bookshelves, especially ones made of fragrant wood, like pine. People would walk into that room and say things like, "I am in a great hall of knowledge!", "this person is serious about book storage!", "what a great-smelling repository of literature and philosophy!", and so forth. Who doesn't like compliments?

* * *

UPDATE: In light of my usual standard of scrupulousness when it comes to citing my sources, I am a tad bit ashamed to admit that Dan was the one who originally introduced the idea of the glass floor. When I started writing and sketching the above yesterday, I was operating with the sincere belief that I was the originator of the idea, but alas! It came out in conversation today that Dan is the true source. Consider the above an appropriation and development of his original idea, which emerged in rapid-fire brainstorming (hence the mistake). Sorry Dan! 

Annie Dillard and Innocence

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

On Sunday mornings I usually like to read scripture and sections from a book of practical theology, such as Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure by the man for whom I was named. Today I decided instead to pick up Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"Ecstatic" might be the most apt word for Pilgrim, a series of deeply meditative and wide-ranging reflections that the author composed while spending a year in solitude near the eponymous creek. Like no other writer I know, Dillard has a remarkable talent for transfiguration. What is familiar to us—assumed, casually passed over, thought to be unremarkable—takes on an unsettling and foreign dimension as she recasts the familiar in her own terms. Insects become horrific voids of meaning, a tree caught in the light at dusk throws open a door to eternity, and the whole world of nature reassumes a majesty and transcendence that the disenchanting movement of modern culture has all but shut out.

In light of themes running through the David Foster Wallace quotations I put up recently, I can't help but share an extended section from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; here Dillard reflects on self-consciousness and its opposed state which, interestingly, she calls innocence.

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. In fact, it is only to a heightened awareness that the great door to the present opens at all. Even a certain amount of interior verbalization is helpful to enforce the memory of whatever it is that is taking place. [. . .]

Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities—looking over my own shoulder, as it were—the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at every moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist's world, not the poet's. I've lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, "next year . . . I'll start living; next year . . . I'll start my life." Innocence is a better world. 

Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time. Innocence is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. It is not lost to us; the world is a better place than that. Like any other of the spirit's good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: singlemindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains, hurling itself from ridge to ridge over the valley, now faint, now clear, ringing the air through which the hounds tear, open-mouthed, the echoes of their own wails dimly knocking in their lungs. 

What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn't be, shouldn't be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I'll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I'll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river, up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away. These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. 

 A good lady. 

I'll Show You a Package Covered in Stamps, Its Contents Even

Another day, another act of international kindess.

 This is how to cover an international postage charge using only thirteen-cent stamps

"Yo young poet!" - Rainer Maria Rilke

My wonderful friend Ryn sent me a copy of a book I once loved so much that I gave it away. Thank you, Ryn! Reading through the first few letters again has reminded me of why I loved Rilke so much in the first place. If you haven't encountered any of his work before, I would recommend the pictured book, Letters to a Young Poet, and perhaps Sonnets to Orpheus (if you're familiar with the myth) or The Book of Hours (if you're a person of faith). Themes and motifs in Rilke's poetry anticipate Heidegger's phenomenological perspectives on being and language! Which is to say, Rilke is an exciting and brilliant observer of life. Thank you again, Ryn!