Naomi (with long pandemic hair!) smiling with copies of Kati Standefer's Lightning Flowers The book lists are abbreviated this year, by which I mean they're not annotated. I sprained my left thumb a week ago and was going to forego this annual ritu ...
The astonishing translation by Emily Wilson Last month I posted about my Ursula LeGuin reading project for 2019; here’s the complete list of everything my husband Dan and I read over the past year. We read just two books in common this year: Lauren ...
Some good reading This year, for the first time ever, I read a lot of books by a single author. I decided to try this at the end of 2018, inspired in part by my husband Dan, who often reads multiple books by one person, and also by my friend Christian ...
All I need: green tea, GF donut, riveting book. What a lame blogger I’ve become! This is literally my only post for the year. But I had my reasons, chief of which was a breast cancer diagnosis this spring that proceeded to derail the entire year. I hope ...
Can't lie: I love my Kindle For the eighth consecutive December 31, I’m seeing out the old year by reporting what my husband Dan and I read over the past year. A few comments about this year’s lists: One big change to my reading habits: I started read ...
Books we both read & loved[/caption]
This was the year my husband read more—a lot more—than I did.
There were two simple reasons for this: He read more, and I read less.
He joined two book clubs in 2016, which explains, at least in part, his impressive list. He read so many books this year that he spent over an hour typing up and annotating his list. Then, after handing me the notebook where we record our completed books, he suddenly cried out, “Wait! I need that back. I skipped a whole page.”
Show-off. ... 
Ill: N. Elmehed. © Nobel Media 2016[/caption]
When the Swedish Academy announced this morning that Bob Dylan was their choice for this year’s Literature Prize, people went crazy in exactly the ways you'd expect: his die-hard fans were jubilant; many writers and literature-lovers expressed open dismay; and others jumped into the fray to defend the award and call out the naysayers for snobbery and narrow-mindedness.
I think one can be nonplussed or even disappointed by this decision and remain innocent of elitism or parochialism or of suggesting Dylan is anything less than awesome. Sure, song lyrics are poetry, which makes it literature. Still, I don’t think the expectation that the award go to people who’ve spent their lives making, you know, books, as their principal occupation, is necessarily misplaced or snobby. ... 
In under the wire, my annual round-up of the books my husband and I read over the year.
My book-loving guy and I read two books in common this year: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which we both loved (a rare event for us), and Alice McDermott’s Someone, which I loved and warned him he wouldn’t. I was right, alas.
The other thing I’ll say about Dan’s list is that he’s shown his usual penchant, both for reading work in translation and for finding an author he loves and reading a lot of their work. ... 
Blackout poem in progress[/caption]
My novel Landfalls came out in North America yesterday (!!!), and I want to share a quirky project I’ve been working on in anticipation of its launch.
The idea came from Austin Kleon’s newspaper blackout poems. Kleon’s technique entails “finding” short poems in a newspaper page and inking out everything else. They’re really cool. Here's one example:
[caption id="attachment_2071" align="alignright" width="300"]
Austin Kleon newspaper blackout poetry[/caption]
I first stumbled across Kleon’s work four or five years ago. I was teaching at Sacramento City College and looking for an engaging and approachable in-class writing exercise for the poetry unit of my Intro to Creative Writing class. Many of my students had signed up to write short stories or personal essays. The prospect of writing a poem daunted them. Indeed, their instructor had not written a poem in many years and wasn’t undaunted herself. ... 
A long, mesmerizing read about a really dysfunctional society.[/caption]
This was the year of long books for me and my spouse. Dan read Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov. I read The Goldfinch and The Tale of Genji.
Needless to say -- but I'll say it anyway -- those books not originally written in English, we read in translation. In fact, most of Dan's reading for the year was work in translation. I actually attempted to read Genji in a modern Japanese version, an attempt that lasted two hours and one paragraph.
This year my family did a new thing, which was reading a summer book that all four of us agreed to read. We selected One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was, needless to say -- but I'll say it anyway -- an inspired choice, and a fitting tribute to the author, who died in April.
Another new thing: I'm giving Goodreads a try. ...