Books Are Too Fun

So we've reached the midpoint of the year, and I've been ruminating (perhaps sympathetically, since I've been reading about ruminants - becoming meat, alas - in The Compassionate Carnivore). I read a lot (it's been suggested possibly more than is wise or safe for a mens sana), usually discriminatingly, but, even so, nearly everything I read in the course of the year is thereafter expelled from my library, mostly as a matter of practicality, since we haven't the space for everything I - or my wife - has ever read, but also because  I simply won't reread much from the year's list. I read about fifty to sixty books each year (much of which is poetry, as my wife will quickly point out), and, often, what I read, while enough to hold my interest while reading, and generally entertaining to a greater or lesser degree, simply doesn't meet Kafka's criterion of being that axe. But here are ten books, that I've read in the past six months, that do ( I feel) merit retention. 

1 Rumor Verified - Robert Penn Warren (which I haven't, in fact, kept, but I replaced with Warren's Collected Poems - he's a fine poet, and I don't know why we haven't met before now)

2 The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines - John Crowley  (one of my favourite writers, author of my favourite novel, Little, Big, I'm currently (re)reading his Ægypt cycle)

3 Mother Love - Rita Dove (the more I read of Dove, the more I find myself thinking she's the best American poet living today)

4 Map of Dreams - M. Rickert (a recent discovery; lovely and literate fabulisms that haunt me still)

5 Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata (short and also haunting)

6 Shadow of Ashland - Terence M. Green (ditto)

7 The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein (not exactly a fun read, but probably the most important book I've read this year)

8 The Road - Cormac McCarthy (simply gorgeous prose, and says more about the human condition in one sentence than many others can hope to with their entire œuvre - okay, so I'm guilty of gross hyperbole)

9 The Best of the Best American Poetry - Harold Bloom, editor (I'm a Bloomsian through and through, and this volume contains so much wonderful poetry)

10 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (reread after watching the BBC version, and it's still incomparable, despite lacking zombies)

'Wrapped Up in Books' Belle & Sebastian