A List of Books

I gave in to peer pressure and made a list of books I read in 2014.

Reading at Northrop. Photo by my dad.

I'm posting this early because I have a BIG THING to post once the New Year hits (so check back the first full week of January)!

But first, some newsy things:

• Loft Mentor Series Reading! With fiction mentor Diego Vazquez Jr. and Rebecca Diaz on Friday, January 23rd
• Latest review: Sasha Steenensen's House of Deer (which made me say, more than once, "I want to write a book like this!"
• I read at the Best Buy Theater in Northrop at the U of MN campus (photo at left)
• I was mentioned by City Pages as being part of one of the Top Literary Moments of 2014, for performing at the inaugural New Sh!t Show
  

I did a lot of reading in 2014.
65 books, as of the writing of this post (with a few days to sneak in one or two more). The stats are: 44 by women, 20 by men, and 1 by someone I know uses both pronouns. 15 were by people of color. These numbers are, generally speaking, better than my count last year.

I put together a short list of books that they stayed with me after I finished reading.
The books on the list below didn't necessarily come out in 2014 (though several did), I just read them this year. Also, one of them I didn't particularly like, but I did a lot of thinking about why I had that reaction and that thinking felt productive, so it's on the list.

So, here's the list, in the order I read them:

• Jessica Piazza's Interrobang, for formal dexterity
• Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, for emotional intensity and technical focus
• Douglas Kearney's Patter, for the use of page as part of the composition
• Vijay Seshadri's 3 Sections, for unadorned technique and featuring the best long poem I read all year, "Personal Essay"
• Patricia Lockwood's Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals, for making me laugh and uncomfortable

---

• Everything by Tamora Pierce, whose feminist young adult and middle-grade fantasy books I'd never read and am glad I finally have
• Marianne Moore's Collected Poems, because I didn't like it and felt weird about that, but learned from it anyway
• Kao Kalia Yang's The Latehomecomer, for being a dense and moving family memoir
• CAConrad's Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, for teaching me new ways to write poems
• Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, for being timely, but likely to transcend our current moment

What books stuck with you this year?
Are any of them on my list? Do you want to get a drink and discuss it? Will you pick up the tab?