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Your next favorite book
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It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. - from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams |
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They're often short enough to accompany your morning coffee, and light enough to carry around in your pocket. They can be funny, powerful, sad, wistful, sexy, angry, or silly. With to-the-quick immediacy and just a handful of words, a poem can strike a place in the reader that most tomes could only aspire to. The first step to reading poetry is finding a poem you love, and I think collections are the best place to start, mostly because you increase your odds with so many poets between the covers.
The following are my favorite collections because they're curated with personality and passion, not obligation to the canon. So wrestle poetry away from the grasp of your stuffy high-school English teacher, forget all the rules, and add a poem to your daily news.
4045 votes were cast by BookBrowse subscribers to decide the 2010 BookBrowse Award winners. Thank you to everyone who took the time to vote!
The winners are ...
The just published issue of "BookBrowse Previews" profiles 80 notable books publishing in January. While the full issue is only accessible to BookBrowse members and patrons of subscribing libraries a selection of the previews are available to all, including these seven debuts which are receiving particularly strong prepub reviews:
A couple of weeks back, Kim Kovacs posted about her reading challenge to read 80 books set in different countries within one year. Here, by popular demand, is her reading list as a spreadsheet, so you can sort the books by country, rating, fiction vs nonfiction and so forth.
On September 15, 2009 one of my (far too many) book groups embarked on a reading challenge entitled "Around the World in 80 Books." Its object was to read 80 books from 80 different countries over the course of the subsequent 12 months. Of the nearly seventy people who signed up to participate, six of us met the goal. Sure, there's a sense of accomplishment, but far more importantly I've found that I've learned quite a lot over the past year, both about history and about my reading tastes in general.
The first thing I discovered was that when one is looking for books about a specific country or region, it's FAR easier to come up with non-fiction books than novels. Most book sites don't allow you to search by a specific country. (Ever try to find a novel about Qatar or Oman? It ain't easy!) At first, this intimidated me. I've had an annual goal for as long as I can remember to read six non-fiction books a year, and most of the time I don't succeed. I do a fine job of BUYING non-fiction books; there are many that look really interesting. Somehow, though, they always seem to languish on my shelves longer than the novels I purchase. I finally decided, though, that if I was going to participate in this challenge, I'd just have to bite the bullet and read some non-fiction (yikes!).
The New Yorker has chosen its "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching. The last list was published in 1999 and included future literary stars such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander and Junot Díaz; plus the likes of Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and David Foster Wallace, who were already relatively well known - so the new list has been much anticipated.
The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands June 7.
As it happens, BookBrowse has been following these authors too. Below are links to bios of all 20, plus links to many of their books (at least one for each author) and, where available, links to their websites:
