January: A fascinating study of subconcious thinking.  One of the best non-fiction books I've read in a long time.

January: Newest collection from one of my favorite writers.  "All the Wrecks I've Crawled Out Of" is great, but "Tooth and Claw" and "Dogology" were probably my favorites.

January: Read my full review here.  All the stories are excellent, but my favorites include "Ironhead" and "Dearth."

January: Read for class.

January: Read for class.

February: Lots of good stuff here, ranging from pure science fiction to realism.  Highlights include "The Vision" and "Access Fantasy," but everything is pretty good.

February: I haven't read the whole collection, but two of my favorite stories from last year are included: "Bohemians" by George Saunders and "Anda's Game" by Cory Doctorow.

February: Read for class.

February: Read for class.

February: The second of Steve Martin's novels I've read.  Both were enjoyable, smart reads, but The Pleasure of My Company was both funnier and more touching than the colder Shopgirl.

March: The best stories in this collection include "Free Burgers for Life" by Ryan Boudinot, Aimee Bender's "Tiger Mending," and an essay by Jeff Gordinier entitled "The Lost Boys."  Also includes George Saunders's "Manifesto," which I wrote about here.

March: Excellent collection edited by Ben Marcus.  Proposes to highlight twenty-nine different styles of storytelling in the short story.  Includes "Sea Oak," by George Saunders, one of my favorite short stories of all time plus stories by A.M. Homes, Aimee Bender, David Foster Wallace, and Sam Lipsyte.

March: Anne Lammott is, as always, inspiring and confidence raising while providing both practical and spiritual advice about writing.

March: Highlights include an essay entitled "13, 1971, 21," about the summer he saw Star Wars 21 times while his mother was dying.

March: Funny, insightful, and somewhat obsessed with the strangeness of the body, it was good to finally read something by the owner of the "hairy call."

March: The first great novel I've read this year.  Read my full review here.

March: A nearly 400 page graphic novel so gripping that I read it in a single day.  Set in 197os Seattle, Black Hole follows a group of teenagers as they become infected with "the bug," a sexually transmitted disease with unpredictable symptoms.  Some of the teenagers begin molting and shedding their skins, some have hard bumps grow on their face and necks, and one girl even grows an iguana-like tail.  Written and drawn by the official cover artist of The Believer, Black Hole is terrifyingly stunning, from the retro-style art to the story itself.  Highly recommended.

March: Ander Monson's stories are experimental but grounded in character.  Monson uses radio diagrams along with small poetic sentences throughout, creating an interesting effect that I'm not sure I understand just yet but definitely like.  Very cool book.

March: Eggers might be even better at the short story than he is at the novel or the memoir, and I think that's saying a lot.  "Up The Mountain Coming Down Slowly" is the main attraction, but there's a lot of great stuff here.

March: Read for class.

April: Written by a good friend of Dancing On Fly Ash, this is a great collection of Richard Lawrence Cohen's blog postings.  Full review coming soon.

April: A good collection, if not as good as 2005's collection.  Still, Mark Bowden's "Tales of a Tyrant," K Kvashy-Boyle's "Saint Chola," and Ryan Boudinot's "The Littlest Hitler" are all great pieces.

April: Read for class.  I actually really enjoyed this.  It's amazing how complex a book this is, considering it's size.

April: A great collection of very short stories (most under two pages).  Powers writes sparely but poetically, creating small magic spaces for her characters to inhabit.

April: One of Philip K. Dick's best, I think, and a nice contrast to some of the other stuff I've been reading lately.  Number 25 for the year.

April: Lots of great stories here.  I'd mostly seen the sub-par movies inspired by them.  The stories have a lot more wit and heart than their film versions, which seem to only capture the technology.  I keep hoping someone making a Philip K. Dick movie will realize how funny he is instead of just how smart his ideas are.

April: I bought this book over a year ago, when it first came out but waited to read it.  I'm glad I did, because another year of seperation between 9/11 (which figures prominently into the book) and my reading probably helped keep the book from being too much, too soon.  This is an amazing leap from Foer's first novel, and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it.  The stories told in three voices (a young boy, plus his grandparents on his father's side), each one alternatingly funny and sad.  The grandfather especially is a heartbreaking character, and the first section in his voice was something I read over and over.

April: An amusing book of mostly fake or sarcastic writing advice by the editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency.  A pretty fun, quick read, which I'll have to pass on to my friend Josh sometime.  Then again, maybe he doesn't need it.  Does the author of "Bibliophalic" really need a book called Fondling Your Muse?

April: Best book of writing exercises I've seen.  I've done a few of them so far and have had really interesting results.  A good way to jump start the engine on those writer's block mornings.

April: A very informative book full of what seems to be good advice.  Let's hope it helps.

April: Very good collection of current MFA students.  Jennifer Shaff's "Leave of Absence," Amber Dermont's "Lyndon," and Andrew Foster Altschul's "A New Kind of Gravity" were all excellent.

April: Another great collection from Saunders.  This was the first short story collection I've ever bought where I'd already read over half of the stories in magazines before reading the book, which made In Persuasion Nation less surprising for me than his other collections.  Still, amazing stories here, especially "Comm Comm," "The Red Bow," and "Brad Carrigan, American."  (It's unfair of me to even list standout stories-- They're all excellent.)

April: Etgar Keret is a writer from Israel, where this book originally appeared in 2002.  Just translated and released in English this month, this was a great collection of very short, modernist fables.  Standouts include "Fatso," "One Kiss on the Mouth in Mombasa," and the title story.  Highly recommended.

April: The last book in what has been a great month of reading.  I was worried that Bender's mastery of the short story might not translate well to the length of the novel but I was wrong.  This is a surprising and touching coming-of-age story embedded with strange mathematics and Bender's usual fairy tale outlook on life.  Definitely worth a read, especially if you already like Bender's short stories.

May: This is the first novel of Philip Roth's I've read to the finish.  The others I've tried to read never captured my interest, but this newest novel (novella, really) I read in two sittings.  In focusing on one man's life, Everyman uses illness and injury to sharpen the focus of its title character's meditation on his lifelong struggle for sexual freedom and morality (which, at least here, are not truly opposing forces).  Best line: "Old age isn't a battle; Old age is a massacre."

May: I didn't realize how short The Metamorphosis was.  I should have, since Norton Critical Editions always have a bunch of other stuff in them, but I didn't realize the story was only forty pages long or so until I was almost at the end of it.  An interesting read and my attempt at the classics for the week.

May: I'd read the first half of this two years ago, but just returned to finish it after seeing the excellent movie adaptation.  Lots of good stories here, especially "Chunky in Heat," "Looking for Johnny," and "The Bullet Catcher."

May: This is the first Cormac McCarthy book I've read, after being turned on to him by Josh Maday.  What at first seems to be a fairly standard (if fantastically written) crime novel turns into something more, especially in the second half.  The crime part of the plot climaxes early (mostly because nearly everyone is dead, which is apparently pretty standard fare for a McCarthy novel), but the novel goes on to a powerful close.  I "read" this on audiobook and greatly enjoyed the reader as well as the novel itself.

May: This collection from Keret is again brilliant in it's small, fable-like stories.  The novella that closes the book, "Kneller's Happy Campers," is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read in a long time.

May: Interesting graphic novellas drawn from Keret's short stories.  In some cases, actually seeing the story illustrated kills some of the mystique (the title story, in particular).  The adaptation of "Margolis," on the other hand, adds quite a bit to the excellent original.  Overall, a good quick read and an interesting attempt at translating a short story into another form.

May: Less than 150 pages, The Age of Wire and String was probably the most challenging read I've had this year (and maybe any year).  I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I'm not sure I can write very lucidly about it yet.  A structural and narrative experiment, Marcus's novel/short story collection/memoir/philosophy text seems to create a completely new world in which definitions and terms (hell, even physics) from our world cease to apply.  Dealing at least in part with the death of his brother Jason, this was an almost oddly emotional book, considering that it almost totally lacks characters or a recognizable world.  The book ends (as do all the sections) with a list of terms, finishing with the brilliant definition of "the wire," "the only element which is attached, affixed, or otherwise in contact with every other element, object, item, person, or member of the society."  The rest of the definition is both inevitable and perfect, creating a powerful feeling which made the struggle of reading the book well worth the effort.  A great read, although very challenging and probably not for everyone.  When people say "experimental fiction," I wish work this ambitious and daring was what they usually meant.

May: Amazingly brilliant.  I'm sure there's not much I can say that hasn't been said before (and probably better), but 1984 is certainly a timely book not just because of the current administration but because of all administrations still possible in this country, as well as our corporations and our media.  The practitioners of doublethink are everywhere in the news and in our lives.  OK, maybe that sounds a little paranoid, but this is a paragraph about reading 1984 so you'll just have to excuse me.

May: The Box Man is a very interesting surrealist novel, the first of several of Abe's I intend to read.  Concerning a man who hides from society with a cardboard box over his head and torso, Abe's novel has a shifting and perhaps insane narrator, whose unreliability extends not only to what he tells the reader (by scribbling on the inside of his box) but also to what he tells himself.  The narrator's struggle to rid himself of the life of a box man is constantly at odds with his self-inflicted limits of freedom, leading to (possible) confrontations with a man with an air rifle, a easily undressed nurse, and a doctor who wants to become the box man himself, leading to a sense of reality hastening away from the narrator's grasp.

May: French, overtly philosophical, obsessed with masturbation and narcissistic sexual acts, this should have been easy to hate, but it wasn't.  Instead, I found myself fascinated by the philosophy of science and manmade evolution described within, as well as the argument that the sexual revolution of the sixties had made it easier to have sex but harder to connect with other people through the sex act itself.  A truly ambitious novel and a surprisingly easy read, considering how heavy some of the subject matter is.

June: The Effect of Living Backwards is the witty telling of a hijacking by potentially fake terrorists whose aims are more small-scale psychology than massive political or idealogical warfare.  It's also an excellent exploration of sibling rivalry, both on and off the airplane.

June: The title story here is worth the price of admission.  Eisenburg's written a haunting story out of post-9/11 confusion and uncertainty combined with the tenuous nature of twenty-something city life.  Great stuff.

June: A great debut collection.  Read my review.

June: I easily read this whole book in a single sitting, which wasn't really that challenging.  It's really only a single short story with illustrations.  Still, it's a beautiful volume and a great fable-- It may be intended for children, but I think it easily ranks up there with the rest of Saunders' adult works.

June: A collection of lengthy short stories that, as always, experiment with form as much as subject matter.  I especially liked "Little Expressionless Animals," a story involving what might be considered a trifecta in certain circles: Jeopardy, autism, and 1980s lesbianism.  It didn't all work for me, but what did was fantastic.

June: My friend Jeff Vande Zande's debut novel, out now from March Street Press.  Click here for more information.  Also, my fiftieth book I've read this year.