Read Everything

A complete list of the books I read in 2009 in Chronological order.

1. Karen Blixen - Seven Gothic tales
2. Philip Roth - Everyman
3. Don Mitchell - Four Stroke
4. William Saroyan - My name is Aram
5. Steven Kurutz - Like a rolling stone
6. Larry Zuckerman - The Potato
7. Ken Kesey - Once Flew over the cuckoos nest
8. Leonard Wolfe - Sowing: An Autobiography Of The Years 1880-1904
9. Betty Jeffery - White Coolies
10. Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place
11. Howard S. Becker - Outsiders
12. Rockwell Kent - N by E
13. J.G. Ballard - Crash
14. Ira Judson Condit - Fig varieties: a monograph
15. Erich Kahler - Disintegration of Form in the Arts
16. Ernest Hemingway - By Line
17. Robert Ruark - Something of Value
18. Alan Lomax - Mr. Jelly Roll
19. Mark Baker - Nam
20. John Clellon Holmes - Go
21. M. Ageyev - Novel with Cocaine
22. Felix Feneon - Novels in Three Lines
23. Nathanael West – Miss Lonely Hearts & The Day of the Locust
24. Mezz Mezzerow – Really the Blues
25. Gary Marmorstein - The Label: The Story of Columbia Records
26. George Gaylord Simpson – Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal
27. Philippe Diole - Okapi Fever
28. Eugene O'Neil - the Emperor Jones
29. Steve Almond - My life in Heavy Metal
30. James J. Davis - the Iron Puddler
31. William Burroughs - The Burroughs File
32. Christopher Morley - Exlibris
33. Aage Krarup-Nielsen - Hell Beyond the High Seas
34. W.H. Hudson - Tales of the Pampas
35. Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps
36. David W. Elliot - Listen to the Silence
37. Charles Michael Boland - They all Discovered America
38. Harry Frankfort - Bullshit
39. Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
40. Lazlo Beke - A Students Diary: Budapest 1956
41. Jack Paar - I kid you not
42. John O'Brien - Better
43: Nick Tosches - In the Hand of Dante
44: Ludwig Lewisohn - Upstream
45: Andre Gide - The Immoralist
46: Lester Bangs - Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
47: Steve Almond - Candy Freak
48: John McPhee – The Pine Barrens
49: John Fahey – How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
50 Daniel Duane - Looking for Mo
51. Josephine Johnson - now in November
52. Scott Huler - Defining the Wind
53. Walter Yetnikoff - Howling at the Moon
54. Robert Ruark - The Old Man and the Boy
55. Linda Stratmann - Chloroform: the Quest for Oblivion
56. Theodore Roosevelt - Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & Hunting trips on the Prairie and in the Mountains
57. Elliott Schwartz - Electronic Music a Listeners Guide
58. Henry Miller – the air conditioned nightmare
59. Mary King ODonnell – Those Other People
60. William Warner - Beautiful Swimmers : Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay
61. Bill Hicks - Love All The People
62. Caleb Earle - Martha Furnace Diary
63. Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
64. Grace, Beverly & Charles Smith - Through the Kitchen Door
65. James A. Michener - The Quality of Life
66. Meredith Wilson - And There I stood with my Piccolo
67. Susan Seligson - Going with the Grain
68. David Yeadon - Secluded Islands of the Atlantic Coast
69. P.V. Glob – The Bog People
70. Ernet Hemingway - Green Hills of Africa

Beautiful Swimmers

William W. Warner died last year and is often the case I come upon these works after it's too late to ever ask the author themselves. Beautiful Swimmers has been in print continually since 1976, and rightly so. He wrote one other work abotu the sea Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman which was very similar to Beautiful Swimmers but with a different region of fishermen. He also published a collection of short stories that was quite good and strangely a dull as dry oatmeal treatise on Catholicism.

The strength of Warners work is in it's clean prose. This passage could have been reams longer detailing the disappointment, the emptiness or the dead grasses surrounding the square patch of bate earth. Instead Warner says everything by saying very little.

"Reaching Wenona, I was surprised to find an empty lot where Corbin's trailer home had formerly stood. Only a few cinder blocks of the foundation, a broken child's tricycle and some rusty crab pots remained."