I had a look at Libraries, by photographer Candida Höfer (2005). Some spectacular libraries here, a number of which I've added to my Places to Visit, If or When I Get the Chance.

I read The Signature of All Things: On Method, by Giorgio Agamben (Zone Books, 2009; translated by Luca D'Isanto & Kevin Attell). Agamben goes a few rounds with with some abstractions and I'm the one who gets punch-drunk. I'll need to have another go at this, someday.

I read The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes (1926), his first poetry collection and the opening work in this latest addition to Everyman's Library.

I read A Murder of Quality, by John le Carré (1962). George Smiley solves a cozy mystery.

I read You Will Hear Thunder (1985), a selection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry, translated by D. M. Thomas, here reissued as a Penguin Classic with the bare title 'Selected Poems' (2006).

I read The Trojan Women and Other Plays (viz., Hecuba & Andromache), by Euripides, in James Morwood's translation for Oxford World's Classics.

I read Memoirs of My Life, by Edward Gibbon (posth., 1795). I enjoyed this very much. (The Folio Society volume is just the Penguin Classics edition in fancy dress.)

I read In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden, by Byung-Chul Han (2018; 2025 translation by Daniel Steuer, from the German). 100% read in the garden (yeah, we're having that kind of January).

I read Poems from Greek Antiquity (Everyman's Library, 2020). Edited by the antiquarian Paul Quarrie, whose commentary on historical transmission, editions, reception, translations, etc, amount to nearly a third of this volume. In the Pocket Poets series but not of it.

I read The Upright Piano Player, by David Abbott (2010). A corporate exec finds his (forced) retirement more eventful than expected, not all in good ways. It's 'The Late Harvest of Henry Cage' in the German edition and that gives a good sense of the book.

I read The North Sea, by Heinrich Heine (1826/27). Translated by Vernon Watkins for New Directions, 1951. Und längst ist erloschen / Das unauslöschliche Göttergelächter. And long is extinguished / The inextinguishable laughter of gods.

cover art: Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Boys in a Pasture (1874). Oil on canvas, 15.8" x 22.8". Museum of Fine Arts Boston #53.2552

I read Bevis: The Story of a Boy, by Richard Jefferies (1882). Real natural history meets boyish imagination in the adventures of Bevis and his friend Mark. h/t to Thomas (@thatiliazdguy.bsky.social) for the introduction!

cover art: Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), 'Approaching Storm, Beach Near Newport" (c.1861-62). Oil on canvas, 28" x 58". Museum of Fine Arts Boston #45.889.

I read Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, by Annie Dillard (1974). I'd read more like this.

I read Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2008). Her terrific 'Correspondences: A Family History in Letters' (1974) takes up about half of this volume. It's her birthday today (b. 3 January 1933).

Happy New Year! In spite of all the football I've managed to do a little reading, including Whose Body?, by Dorothy Sayers (1923), in which Lord Peter Wimsey makes his début.

I read Dubliners, by James Joyce (1914). This is a 2014 de Selby Press centenary edition with droll illustrations by Stephen Crowe (@invisibledot). As far as I know, this "Irish publishing house based in Paris" (comprising two colleagues from Shakespeare & Co.) only ever published this one title.

I read What is a Classic?, by T.S. Eliot (Faber, 1945), the inaugural lecture of the Virgil Society (of which Eliot was a founder and first president). Spoiler alert: There is one and only one classic in European literature, the Æneid, and that is not a bad thing.

I read The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck (1932). A skein of stories about the inhabitants of Las Pasturas del Cielo [real-life Corral de Tierra, situated in the hills between Monterey and Salinas]. Among my Steinbeck favorites.

I read Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell (1933). I'm grateful that Orwell had these experiences (and made a fine book of them) and that I haven't.

I read Christianity & the Writer's Task, by Georges Bernanos (Wiseblood Books, 2022). I'm neither Catholic nor writer but thought the author of Mouchette & Diary of a Country Priest might have something interesting to say.

I read Distant Light [La Lucina], by Antonio Moresco (2013; 2016 translation by Richard Dixon for Archipelago Books).

I read The Old Glory, by Robert Lowell (1965), a trio of plays (Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; & Benito Cereno), based on stories by Hawthorne and Melville.

I read The Invention of Love (1997), by Tom Stoppard, who has lately left us. "...what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup."

I read Vaim, by Jon Fosse (2025, translated by Damion Searls). Lonely men and their boats. And one headstrong gal.

I read Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis (1943), the second in his Space Trilogy.

I read Mimes, by Marcel Schwob (1893). Short vignettes, inspired by the recent discovery of the Mimes of Herodas (3rd century BC), but transformed into something between symbolist and surreal, with a whiff of opium about them.

Gerhard Richter, 1025 Farben (1974). In situ at the Louisiana in Humlebæk, Denmark.

I read Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2015). Just for fun, a breezy introduction to the major meters, with a dozen or two examples of each showing its character and range of effects and uses.

#MelvilleMonday scanning dad's slides - I found this one of our 1966 31' Trojan Sea Skiff (Juneau, 1973). From which we saw lots of humpbacks and orcas.

I read A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines (1968). I do love this book.

snack for a fall day (I just got a hefty load of pecans from Limestone Creek Pecans down there in Georgia) @theorchardkeeper.bsky.social

I read Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, by Dorthe Nors (2015; 2017 translation from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra). Did I devour a whole jar of salty licorice while reading this? That I did (Lakrids by Bülow #2).

<sigh> another project . . .

I read Beowulf: Dragonslayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff (1961). Just checking it out before I hand it off to a great-nephew, a bright boy.

I read The Haidah Indians of Queen Charlotte's Islands, by James G. Swan (1874), a Smithsonian Institution paper. Swan's dream destination almost from his arrival in the Northwest, he begged the American Museum of Natural History for years and years to fund a study trip to the Queen Charlottes 1/2

I read Old Friend from Far Away: 150 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties, an anthology compiled and translated by C.H. Kwock & Vincent McHugh. This 1980 North Point Press edition gathers several earlier publications, really just pamphlets, sold through City Lights Bookstore.

I intended yesterday to mow the lawn one last time but it started raining so I went to the bookstore and found some good used books to bring home. Curious, the two 1970s books use the exact same typeface on the cover.

I read An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf (1978), in which the poet Ovid undergoes a surprising metamorphosis of his own.

Poking around in my mom's things I found a packet of letters, 112 of them, from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, 1938-1945. She and my gr-grandfather had just moved from Seneca, Missouri, to Olive Branch in Illinois' Little Egypt region when the letters start, 1/2

I read The Poems of François Villon, in poet Galway Kinnell's 1977 translation. A scoundrel and a scapegrace, but a poet.

I read Bucolics, by Maurice Manning (2007). A farmer addresses God ("Boss") on subjects high and low, in an Appalachian mode.

I read Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, by Raymond Carver (1983). The hunk on the cover looks like my brother did around that time.

Celebrating over here in my little corner: Krasznahorkai in the late lamented Music & Literature (#2, Spring 2013).

I read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger and some others (1972). Should've been called Berger's Way of Seeing.

I read Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837). The Library of America arranges the stories chronologically by first publication in various periodicals, but also offers an arrangement by the books in which they were first collected (see pg 1479), which is how I'm making my way through them.

I read Black Light, by the poet Galway Kinnell (1966, but extensively revised for this 1980 North Point Press edition). Made me think at times of The Stranger, at times of The Sheltering Sky, with occasional wafts of Hafiz and Rumi.

I read The King Must Die, by Mary Renault (1958), the first of two novels inspired by the legend of Theseus.

I read Penitential Cries, by Susan Howe (New Directions, 2025). Two thirds of the book is her word collages (see attached example), the rest seems to have to do with getting old and hanging out at Yale's Sterling Library. Has a nice poem for her sister Fanny.