Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Haruki Murakami

I waited for months on the hold list from the library, only to be unable to finish all these stories before going out of town. Perhaps I should have just paid the few days of late fees I would have received if I'd taken it with me on my trip and returned it afterwards. I only got through half the book, but I might have gotten through more if I hadn't been unable to resist re-reading the stories I'd caught in magazines previously.

The End

Lemony Snicket

I couldn't decide while reading this whether it was a good ending for the Baudelaires, being stuck on some island rather than somehow encompassing all the books in one. But the ending does deliver pretty well. A lot of us had our suspicious anyhow.

I still think it would have been better to wait until all the books were published, having only read the first twelve books about a year ago.

It leaves off so mysteriously, it's hard to imagine there won't be follow-ups of some kind.

The Crooked Mirror and other stories

Anton Chekhov

I tried reading some Chekhov three years ago after a long stretch of short stories and just couldn't do it. Being that I read with much less density these days, what I read has less to do with what I've read before it. And I guess not having read much short fiction lately at all gave me a prime opportunity to try again.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

I wanted to like the movie Capote but in truth I found myself bored through large stretches. Aesthetically it was pretty well-done, but the story maybe needed some extra editing. This isn't one of those straight-up book vs. movies cases, as the stories are from the same source but different perspectives—the movie a story about Capote writing the book and the book absent of Capote's personality and interactions with the town entirely.

Rules of the Red Rubber Ball

Kevin Carroll

Someone recommended this to me for the design, which is pretty funky, but almost too funky for me to appreciate design-wise. It got a little incohesive. But it is a little motivational book and maybe they succeed better with a little wacky incohesiveness.

My New York Diary

Julie Doucet

I used to read a lot of comics years ago but I don't think I'd ever read any of Julie Doucet's, not even holed up in a comic shop, pretending it was a library. Her drawing style is pretty dense; it took awhile for me to adjust to it, and then I was surprised I never stumbled on her largely autobiographical work before now. This one opens with some back story in her early sexual and romantic experiences before delving into her time spent in New York, where she lived for about a year in the early 1990's with a jealous artist boyfriend in Washington Heights.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

I heard mixed things about this book, so I approached it with what turned out to be an appropriate amount of expectation. It may also help that the themes of loss and the profound sense of absence in the aftermath of loss are things that have been on my mind lately.

Penguin by Design

Phil Baines

This is an image-rich overview of Penguin cover designs from 1935–2005. I've been thinking a lot about book design lately, and there is something oddly fresh about some of the older cover designs. Or perhaps it is just refreshing to see a limited palette when compared to the attention-getting standards of today.

Copia

Casey Kwang

It's been well over a year since I last read a book of poetry in its entirety. There have been a few attempts that went undocumented, since I barely even imposed any stress to the bindings.

This is one of those books that's easy to just breeze through without really hearing it, if you aren't careful. And I kept wondering to myself if I am less prepared to read poetry since I haven't read a whole lot (and certainly not the "classics")—can I be better prepared for certain works the less I read?