Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

This is a time of year for taking stock. The solstice approaches, not to mention Christmas, also my birthday is imminent and I'm feeling like I got far too much accomplished this year. Although not everything I planned to - fate saw to that, as she usually does. Anyway, next year I plan to relax a lot more: beachcomb, gaze out to sea, take long looks at interesting tree bark, read a few hundred books purely for pleasure (though really, is there any other way to read?), bake a lot of pies, doodle with watercolors, and generally have my feet up on the desk at the bookshop a heck of a lot more often. Right now, however, I'm concerned with the ghost of Christmas past, so I'm taking a look back through my old journals from this year. Here are a few of the books I'm happiest to have encountered. Some of these I've blogged about this year, some not:

The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. Do I need to say more than that?

The Complete Stylist by Sheridan Baker. My friend Sue recommended this to me as a good basic writing guide. Paired with The Elements of Style, I couldn't ask for better. Bonus: a few illustrative passages in the text describe used bookshops.

The Eclogues of Virgil translated by David Ferry. "Time takes all we have away from us; /I remember when I was a boy I used to sing /Every long day of summer down to darkness, /And now I am forgetting all my songs;..." (p.75)

The Education of Henry Adams.

Anagrams by Lorrie Moore.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.

The Art Spirit by Robert Henri. I read this every year. "We must paint only what is important to us, must not respond to outside demands. They do not know what they want, or what we have to give." (p.43)

U & I by Nicholson Baker.

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy.

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.

Table-Talk by William Hazlitt. "'Fine words butter no parsnips,' says the proverb." (p.198)

Book Business by Jason Epstein. "I am skeptical of progress. My instincts are archaeological. I favor the god Janus, who faces backward and forward at once." (pp.7-8)

Embers by Sandor Marai. The best novel I read this year. Could not put it down.

The Big House by George Howe Colt.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins.

Dreamthorp by Alexander Smith (thanks, Dan, it is indeed beautiful).

You Can Go Home Again by Gene Logsdon.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey.

Labels by Evelyn Waugh. "...Fortune is the last capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long." (p.168)

I Remember by Joe Brainard.

The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara edited by William Corbett. "I've been working on a sort of a thing but if I don't see any large, or any, design in it, I don't much care. As long as a fellow keeps up his plain-sewing and hem-stitching there's bound to be something in his hope chest some day..." (p.9)

Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard by Ron Padgett.

On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti.

The Joy of Reading by Charles Van Doren.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. Can't have a book list without mentioning him.

Ellis Island by Mark Helprin. Ditto.

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver. "This I have always known - that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I could come someday to bitter and mortal regret." (p.120)

Father and Son by Edmund Gosse.

England Have My Bones by T.H. White. I hesitate to add this, because it takes the cake as the strangest book I've read this year. It has so many beautiful, lyrical passages. Some of them happen to be about shooting rabbits in the head. I gritted my teeth and read on, and didn't regret it. One bit about this unclassifiable book: his and his brother's pet cats are named Chatsworth and Chatterley.

I've got to wrap this up. I'm in the middle of the Robert Fagles translation of The Iliad right now. Bloody and grim, but beautiful. I'm waiting for a copy of The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney to arrive in the mail. I hoped to finish the Pepys Diaries and didn't. This year I read many other books I haven't mentioned here, some memorable and some not, along with a ton or two of poetry, including books by Raymond Carver, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, William Corbett, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Porter.

A few of the best bookish experiences this year were of course seeing Mary Oliver and Augusten Burroughs. My one great regret of the year was not finding out that Bill Berkson was speaking in Maine until a full month after his talk (at the Skowhegan School, only an hour or two away). Rats rats and double rats.

I'll end for now with a few goofy highlights from my journals in general: best bingo this year in a Scrabble game was Ryan's use of the word squishy; best two bits of junk mail received were the numerous credit card solicitations addressed to Sarah S. Books and a flyer for a seminar entitled "Dealing with Difficult People" (I received this on a day when I had been doing just that and nothing else); best book found for a buck was a scarce Stephen King first edition in dust jacket in the dollar book bin at the supermarket (Ryan found it, and says "Vigilance!").

Okay, readers and friends, what books were your favorites during the year just past? Bookish experiences? Anyone actually read the new Pyncheon novel? What have I missed?