This event recognizes the best published works of 2015 and celebrates Northern California authors. Berkeley eco-feminist author Susan Griffin will be honored with the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement and service. The NCBR Recognition Award will be presented for California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, Prints and History by Tom Killion, Gary Snyder and Heyday Books.

We will be book-selling up a storm after the event!

When: Sunday, May 15, 2016 / 1:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Where: Koret Auditorium / Main Library / 100 Larkin St.

It’s a fantastic event to honor our local literary talent. And for a little extra fun, we’ve heard rumors that a certain global music icon and a certain superstar tight end might just make a surprise appearance—yes, we’re talking about the one and only Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce!

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, August 4th, we are excited to have Julie Rogers and Adrian Arias read!

Julie Rogers began reading her poetry in San Francisco cafes in the late 1970’s. She has published six chapbooks, and a Buddhist end-of-life manual titled, ‘Instructions for the Transitional State’ (Vimala, 2007), around which she founded a non-profit program last year, ‘TLC Transitional Life Care’. Her recent books are a full-length selected, ‘House of the Unexpected’ (Wild Ocean Press, 2012) and Street Warp (Omerta Publications 2013).

She has read her work on public radio, television, and at many venues in the northwest. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, literary journals and anthologies such as Beatitude – Golden Anniversary 1959 – 2009, Poetry Flash, Sparring with Beatnik Poets, Big Scream, The Cafe Review, Abalone Moon, the Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others.

Last year, she and her husband, SF Beat Poet David Meltzer, put out a CD, ‘Two-Tone Poetry & Jazz‘, with saxophonist Zan Stewart. “Few poems are written as close to the heart — no extra words just soul meanings…” Michael McClure, beat poet, novelist, artist.

Here

just to look past this face
at anything else

the calendar is full
of other names

the page empty
with thoughts

gazing across a ravine
sky is everywhere

fear shoots through
a falling star

i cannot find myself
in the light

as i watch
a map unfolds

directions depend
on how they are given

where is someone
who knows them?

lost, a word
i am

here is the body
i live in

where is mind?

- Julie Rogers

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, July 14th, we are excited to have Devereaux Baker & Sharon Doubiago read!

Sharon Doubiago, a native of Southern California, was first moved to poetry by Jack Hirschman in the mid 60s, through a close friend of his, her Cal State/LA professor, Peter Marin. She experienced two readings by Jack that impacted her. Still, it was ten years before she became friends with Jack, by way of a significant poetry event in Point Arena, California. She has published many poetry and prose books since, Hard Country, The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, South America Mi Hija, Psyche Drives The Coast, Body and Soul, Love on the Streets —those from the University of Pittsburgh perhaps the most significant. Currently she is working on five books, all ten years so far in process. She and Devreaux Baker have been near life-long poet sisters.

Loving Her At Last: The Girl
By Sharon Doubiago

My fifteen year old self, naked
walked into the room awhile ago
here on 64 Elgin Park, San Francisco

She just came in, moved around, then sat on the edge of the bed,
the first time I’ve seen her since back then.
I didn’t move for fear she’d disappear
though she was so ominous
that seemed impossible

Eidolon, her breasts
were blue-veined beneath white marble.
I smelled her. I could have touched her blue-veined muscled thigh.
I was breathing inside her. I was
bleeding

I saw for the first time that she was beautiful.
She who had made me so miserable, a spectacle, a freak
her body her thoughts her heart her presence
I’ve fled ever since

I had not realized my impoverished self, the state
of my soul until she walked into this room.
I had not realized how much I had aged
but in she walked, o my
in perfect preservation

just hiding all this time.
Moved around for my observation
as if she’d never left

The Boy
By Sharon Doubiago

I dream the boy again.
He lies on his back on the blanketed ground
in a tent west of Julian in that convoluted land
Vulcan, Mesa Grande, mountains
erupting, ravines splitting open
I’m kneeling at your head, my family
gathered behind me, watching to make sure
you take your last breath. I note
the slight bulge in your white pants

and when you die I touch you. Very lightly
your left arm. And come awake

in grief, shock, dread, in sex, my body
exploding our collective sorrow, but the horror too
suffered separately by each of us who’s ever loved

this procession of ridges that twist and turn

an adolescent boy, a boy I don’t recognize. A boy
I’ve dreamed ever since. The first boy I loved, the boy
I am, the boy I deserted

dead at the bottom of the ravine
filled to the top now with all the boys and girls

every boy’s required divorce from love
to become a man

though in the rock paintings
an erection on a body lying on the battlefield means
the boy comes back to life

Devreaux Baker is a 2011 recipient of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Poetry Award, a 2012 Hawaii Council on Humanities International Poetry Award and the Women’s Global Leadership Poetry Award. She is a 2014 recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Poetry Prize for her poem, In The Year Of The Drone. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has taught poetry in the schools and produced The Voyagers Radio Program of original student writing for public radio. She has led writing workshops in the United States, France and Mexico. Her books of poetry include Light at the Edge, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, Red Willow People, and out of the bones of earth.

Recipe For Peace
By Devreaux Baker

Bare your feet, roll up your sleeves
oil the immigrant’s bowl.
Open the doors and windows of your house
invite in the neighbors, invite in strangers off the street.
Roll out the dough, add the spices for a good life;
cardamom and soul, cumin and tears.
Stir in sesame and sorrow, a dash of salt
pink as new hope.
Rub marjoram and thyme, lemon grass and holy basil
on your fingers and pat the dough.
Bless the table, bless the bread,
bless your hands and feet.
Bless the neighbors and strangers
off the street.
Bake the bread for a century or more
on a moderate heat
under the olive trees in your back yard
or on the sun-filled stones of Syria.
In the white rocks of Beirut
or behind the walls of Jerusalem.
In the mountains of Afghanistan
and in the sky scrapers of New York.
Feast with all the migrant tongues
until your mouth understands
the taste of many different homes
and your belly is full so you fall asleep
cradled in the skirts of the world
curled in the lap of peace.

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

This Thursday, June 30th, we are excited to have Melba Abela & David Meltzer read!

Melba Abela is a Filipno-American immigrant artist and poet. Her early work has been shown in galleries and published in art and literary anthologies in the United States. Currently her work centers on text + images that comment on breaking news-worthy problematic events. She has also undertaken the translation into English of some poems in Pilipino by E. San Juan, Jr., a world- renown Filipino-American academic, writer, poet and activist.

David Meltzer’s most recent publications include: Stuntman (Omerta Press), S.F. Beat: Talking With the Poets (City Lights), When I Was a Poet (City Lights, Pocket Poet 60), and Two Way Mirror: A Poetry Note-Book (City Lights).

COWBOY
By David Meltzer

Cowboy’s trumpet
in a paper bag
in the backseat
of his clunker
going down Green
to Grant to
the Coffee Gallery
jam session

Cowboy & me
are weed whacked
& he drives very slow
we could do it faster
walking
yet dream serene
it all makes sense
& he murmurs
“Man, don’t
dwell in the bug”

Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library

Tonight we are excited to have Chun Yu & Kevin Simmonds read!

Kevin Simmonds is a poet and musician originally from New Orleans. His poetry collections include Mad for Meat, Bend to it, and the edited anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality. He composed the score and cowrote the text for the Japanese noh-inspired theater work Emmett Till a river, commissioned by the Creative Work Fund and debuted at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen. He’s also collaborated extensively with poet Kwame Dawes, setting a number of his works to music, including Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country, HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, which won an Emmy Award, and Voices of Haiti, which debuted at the National Black Theatre Festival and became an award-winning interactive e-book. He’s received fellowships and commissions from Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, Fulbright, Napa Valley Writers Workshop, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner. He lives in San Francisco and Tokyo.

An Old Man Carrying His Catheter Bag
By Kevin Simmonds

white-haired vapor
in khakis
shuffling down a street

held it waist high
a flag
signaling the body

solid   liquid   gas
the body comes
to all three

I am bile
as I am wit
I drink to live in this body

See to it that you revere
this gold
this gold

Chun Yu is the author of the award-winning memoir Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and one of the authors of the award-winning anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. She will be reading from her new collection of bilingual poetry in English and Chinese which merges science, art, and spirituality. This work is supported by a cultural equity grant from San Francisco Arts Commission.

High Above
– for those who chose to leap
By Chun Yu

He stood on a tall chimney
looking down on the crowd below
a bottle of alcohol in one hand
a bag of sugar in the other –
the rarest in the year of starvation
bought with the money
Mother made from weaving baskets.

The mass below moved
squirming
eyes like fallen stars
scattered in the dust of the earth.

Mother
the dusk sun in the distance
once shined
with a thousand lights
already gone.

He, the brilliant life
who has spoken a thought
is about to be forsaken
on a chimney built from
ten thousand red bricks
was looked up to
by the crowd below
in ten thousand thoughts
silenced.

In his eyes
the world had fallen into darkness.
Looking up to the sky
he knows, with one leap
he will be a star next to the moon.

His life can no longer
be taken by human force
or saved by its conscience

which, however
will carry the bricks
even when the force is gone.

Our citywide poetry contest and reading series collects poems from every San Francisco neighborhood and features poetry readings at branch libraries in each of the City’s 11 districts.

Submissions open now through June 15th, 2016

Local poets are encouraged to submit up to three poems. Poetry is chosen by poet-in-residence Jack Hirschman and selected poets are announced at each SFPL branch event.

All types of poetry are accepted. Writings which reflect San Francisco’s diversity of language and culture and those written in languages other than English are highly encouraged.

Selected poets will be presented with a \$50 honorarium and their poems will be published in an anthology.

Now in its sixth iteration, Poets 11 continues to celebrate San Francisco’s rich literary life and thriving poetry community.

Beginning this summer, selected poets will take the microphone and share their works in a variety of languages and topics.

Eleven events will take place at branch libraries, concluding with a final event featuring all participating poets at the Main Library’s Koret Auditorium in the fall.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Must be 18 or over to participate.
• Must reside in one of San Francisco’s 11 Districts.
• Submissions must include a return address, email or phone number and district number for response.
• The deadline for all submissions is June 15th, 2016.

Poets can submit up to three poems or by mail to:

Readers Bookstore Fort Mason
ATTN: Poets 11
2 Marina Blvd
San Francisco, CA 94123

Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis is a writer and a poet. She received an Associate of Arts degree from City College of San Francisco, before beginning her university studies at the renowned Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

Her first poem was published in a CCSF anthology followed by three poems published in a SFSU anthology, published by the Humanities & Women Studies Departments.

In 1987 she self-published a 50 page poetry chap book entitled Inquire Within, and is currently completing a poetry anthology entitled Faces: The Nine Stations of Pain and Joy.

Zarou-Zouzounis co-authored an historical fiction children’s book as part of a series about the ancient world for young readers. The first story, Asham and the Smart Ox, is set in ancient Jericho after the last Ice Age. Another work in progress is a memoir – a collection of stories about her mother’s life in Ramallah.

Zarou-Zouzounis has performed hundreds of readings in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, beginning in the late 1980’s at Small Press Traffic Book Store with friend and well known Lebanese poet and writer Etel Adnan.

Many of her poetry readings have music accompaniment.

Zarou-Zouzounis has been published in numerous magazines and her poems published in the following anthologies:

• Out of the Maze-Ink Magazine #5; SFSU
• Food For Our Grandmothers; South End Press
• The Space Between Our Footsteps; Simon & Schuster Children’s Division
• The Flag of Childhood-Poems from the Middle East; Simon & Schuster Children’s Division
• War After War-City Lights Review #5; City Lights Bookstore & Publishing-S.F.
• A Different Path-An Anthology of Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI)
• The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; Interlink Publishing Group
• Two poems published in 2013 in Heartfire-Second Revolutionary Poets Brigade Anthology, Kallatumba Press, San Francisco.

Our Mother Is Watching Over Us 

 

If I were to call you brother,

you might take me for

a religious well-wisher,

a spiritual soul by nature,

or a servant of the cloth.

 

You might think me

African-American, Chicano,

Native American, Arab or Asian.

You may call me a masquerader,

or an only child lonely for a sibling.

 

You might not hear what I call you.

You might not have learned to listen.

I might not hear what you call me,

and I too, might not listen.

I call you brother

in the spirit of love and oneness.

 

If I were to call you sister,

you might think me

suffering from an emptiness

acquired by having only brothers;

or perhaps I like using tantalizing words–

sister, sister, sister,

never tiring on the tongue or psyche

when repeated over and over.

 

Think again,

I might be a feminist, a flower child,

or that spiritual searcher,

wandering, reaching out to what pulls.

 

Think again,

I might be reaching out to convert you.

We humans need transformation

with the aid of conversionary souls,

that are not satisfied with the human

that is racist, ignorant, violent, greedy.

 

You might see me as a nun,

or I might mistake you for one.

You might think my jargon is

 

typical talk in a diverse community,

speaking American vernacular.

I call you sister

in the spirit of love and oneness.

 

If I were to assign everyone on planet Earth,

(which I call Mother)

a mantra, it would be two words,

brother, sister.

Repeated daily by every able living soul

around the world–

brother, sister, brother, sister, brother, sister,

(translations permitted)

could result in positive global change

for a species not loving unconditionally,

and has not co-existed peacefully.

While repeating, the voice and heart will soften.

Updated version 5-16-08

Oakland native James Cagney is a storyteller, poet and Cave Canem Fellow. He has appeared as a featured artist at Midnight In Mumbai, The Shout Storytelling Series, and the Mahogany Urban Poetry Series. James has also facilitated writing workshops at the San Francisco Public Library. His work has been published in Eleven Eleven Journal, Oakland Local, Ambush Review, Fresh Hot Bread, and Sparring with the Beatnik Ghosts.

Bandon Beach – James Cagney

 

We race a drowsy sunset & storm

barrel rolling the ocean to return

after 10 years to Bandon beach.  Rain

pin-wheeling before the cars headlights

like sparklers.  We park at the belly

button of sentient sand dunes sprouting

sea grass & let the motor idle.

We stand at cliffs edge, turn our backs to

the firing squad of the ocean (this

is ill advised)

& lean into the soft coffin

of impatient wind racing up from

the beach 2 stories beneath us at

sixty, seventy miles an hour..

I turn towards my friend, his eyes fevered

with joy & watch as he slides down the

staircase to a shoreline of boiling milk.

 

Basalt boulders rise from the surf

in natural totems, bellowing

to the blackening sky like Shakespeare’s

    Everything around us wails.

He runs into the black portal of

a nearby cave & screams. Here, in the

 

chaos & shrapnel of falling night,

a scream seems appropriate

shorthand for prayer.  I run in after,

lighting the cold torch of my cell

    He rinses the peppery sand

from his palms beneath the alabaster

light, confessing then how he’d fallen

while skipping down stairs rendered soft

as flour.

 

The cave, its scalloped, reptilian

walls, the soft palate of its floor,

is dependable & safe while

outside, the sea roars its death song

& waves chew the shoreline.

 

We dare one another to leave first

while the tide soldiers forward

& night falls hard drunk against the ocean.

All while the sea clamors towards us

harvesting screams from both our mouths

leaving us, as one leaves a lover,

speechless & swallowed by darkness

 

Requiem – James Cagney

 

Shut down the highway

there’s nothing up ahead.

the catfish have stopped biting.

the great man is dead.

 

Board up the liquor stores

hide our guns beneath the bed

old river has run dry

the great man is dead.

 

Jump out the back window

your shirt quickly shed

hit the ground running

the great man is dead.

 

Gamble your last check

the chil’ren don’t need bread

our cupboard will remain bare this year

the great man is dead

 

A fight breaks in the bar

broken glass, razor, hot lead.

fire one off for Cowboy.

the great man is dead.

 

Momma dances alone

an old 45  replays in her head

all love is now rationed

the great man is dead

 

This trail leads nowhere

in whose steps shall we tread?

fill up that hole, boy.

the great man is dead.

During a commercial break, Noah informally polled the panel, asking if any of us had actually read the book. All of us shrugged, laughed uncomfortably, and said some version of “Um…no.”

Not having read the book did not in any way, as far as any of us were concerned, disqualify us from defending the author’s right to write it, the publisher’s right to print it, the bookseller’s right to distribute it, or the public’s right to read it.

After all, we were on the radio and the people out there listening weren’t.

In the end I guess it did make me feel a little uncomfortable—once I’d gotten off the radio, of course—as if we’d committed some kind of literary fraud on an unsuspecting listening public or something.

Ever since then I’d had Verses on my list of books to read at some point in the future, as if I could undo the semi-fraud retroactively by reading the book twenty years after the fact.

Now, that hope has been dashed as well. Now only guilt remains with no redress at hand. And, admittedly, a certain measure of relief.

Not having read the book does, however, disqualify me from participating in my book group in any meaningful way.

The biggest problem with not being able to get through this damned thing was that snotty email I had written. Humiliation in the form of the book group was peeking over the horizon, its eyes focused directly on me.

Eventually the problem solved itself, as problems oftentimes do.

I’d managed to screw around for so long, watching stupid stuff on TV, reading Fitzgerald stories (or, actually, the introduction to them) and trying to tape bricks to my head, etc., that I finally ran completely out of time.

When I got around to recalculating the rate at which I would have to read to make the deadline, three days hence, it totaled up to something like 150 pages a day.

I hadn’t even been making the five-pages-a-day goal I had set out for myself. More like two. Well…one.

No, The Satanic Verses defeated me.

My failure was complete. I just had to admit it. I’m a moron. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t read another page, another paragraph, another word.

I had to just add it to the list of books I will never, in my lifetime, ever read. Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow (loved V. though), JR, The Magic Mountain, Dune, anything in The Borrowers series.

So, with two days to go, I started another book.

A book from the 33 1/3 series, Continuum’s continuing issuance of little books, each discussing a favorite record album, this one on the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls.

Much more my speed. It took me back to New York City and it was 1977.

I’m on the sidewalk outside of CBGB, standing around in the cold, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my jeans, like the other guys, ‘cause we’re all way too cool to wear winter coats.

I’m taking girls to discos and dancing all night, fueled by cocaine and cognac.

I’m seeing ancient and bent jazzmen in seedy bars on Third Avenue for the price of a couple of drinks I’d’ve bought anyway.

I’m always broke.

Most of all, I’m reading about music I love.

It’ll take about four hours to read the thing from cover-to-cover, if that, and by then it’ll be way too late for Verses.

I’ll just have to suffer the humiliation, the scorn.

But at least the late nights and early mornings are mine again.

I feel my keel cutting keenly through the water and steadying my course, even if I do still feel like a moron.

I started a mass market edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Philosophers, figuring reading short stories wasn’t going to be as much of a commitment as trying to read, and keep straight, a second, simultaneous novel.

I started, as I imagined one should, with Arthur Mizener’s introduction. Maybe I am a moron. I don’t know who this dude Mizener was, or who he knew, or was possibly sleeping with, at Scribner’s, but he really wasn’t the man for the job.

He first gets you right in the mood to read these stories by practically coming out and saying that F. Scott wrote them for the money and for no other purpose. Then he tells you flat out that Fitzgerald himself had a low opinion of the stories — an opinion Mizener clearly shares, writing stuff like:

“Their [the stories’] smart observations on ‘Life’ are immature, their literary references are often inept, their feeling are often superficially handled—‘passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half-hour in a dental office,’ as Fitzgerald himself said of them.”

and;

“The evident defect in ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ is the inadequacy of the symbolic bowl itself.”

and;

“The superficiality of ‘The Offshore Pirate’ is less disturbing than the priggish sentimentality of a non-commercial story like ‘The Benediction.’”

Not exactly the man I would nominate to write intros to my books were I a world-famous author, alive or dead.

It occurred to me that Mizener might have been happier introducing Ernest Hemingway’s stories. Or Faulkner’s. Perhaps he was beaten out for the plum Hemingway job by way of some misadventure into the political skirmishes that proliferate in publishing and academe and was still pissed off about it when he wrote the Fitzgerald intro.

Perhaps he should have found another line of work entirely. Better yet, perhaps he should have been hired to write an intro to The Satanic Verses and saved everybody a lot of time and trouble.

Jettisoning Flappers and Philosophers, I revisited the pile on the nightstand.

David Byrne’s How Music Works had been screaming out to me since well before this whole Satanic Verses debacle began. I could easily see myself picking that up and immediately, and without a single shred of regret, forgetting that Salman Rushdie had ever been born.

The new Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins, did not look particularly sexy when I first glanced at it but was by then starting to look like the last girl in the saloon at two in the morning.

My wife told me the Charles Woodrell stories, Outlaw Album, I gave her for our anniversary was very good. That, too, waited.

A mediocre-looking biography of Doug Sahm started looking more and more like a Robert Caro-style masterpiece.

And those were just the ones I could pull out without tipping the entire stack onto the floor and waking up the whole Goddamned building.

I thought of taking a pair of bricks and taping them to either side of my head with several winds of gaffer’s tape, thinking I couldn’t possibly fall asleep so encumbered, but we only had enough tape in the junk drawer to go around my head once, so the whole contraption wouldn’t hold together.

I thought I might be becoming just a little bit unhinged at this point, but dismissed the thought as paranoia run wild.

With time running out and the deadline descending on me like an anvil dropped from the top of the Seagram Building, I decided the best tack was to reread Alejandro Murguia’s short story “The Other Barrio.”

Alejandro had written it specifically for the San Francisco Noir anthology that Peter Marvelis of City Lights had edited a few years back. Now they’re making a movie out of it and we were going to a benefit that was supposed to raise the money to complete the film.

It seemed important to reread the story before going, in case anybody asked me about it.

Turned out no one asked me about it even once — no one, outside of Peter, talked to me very much at all, in truth — I could’ve read My Friend Flicka for all the good it did me.

Pretty much as a matter of habit I set aside an hour or so each night before going to sleep just for reading. I set aside another hour or so in the morning for the same purpose. That’s almost ten percent of my day.

I know I tend to feel better, emotionally, intellectually, even physically, when I have a have a book going. Reading is a steadying, calming element of my day-to-day life; a keel that keeps everything else upright and on course.

It is a wonderful, relaxing time of day after the stress of the quotidian. It effects my whole day; I tend not to get the blues when I’m involved in a book and if I do, I don’t get them as badly. It has been that way all my life. So you can imagine how important this time is to me.

I have to confess, before we get too far with this and you start thinking I’m holding myself up as an example or something, that some mornings I wake up, fix my wife a cup of tea, crawl back to bed full of good intentions, planning to read, and instead doze off or fool around checking out Facebook or some of the political blogs I follow.

Many evenings I fall asleep quite early in the designated hour or end up screwing around indolently on the internet instead of reading. Even with that, I still end up reading quite a bit, at least when compared to the average American.

Then all of that changed. Instead of relaxation there was only anxiety, worry, depression. Frustration and conflict plagued the hours I until then had held so dear. I found myself with no keel; adrift and veering further off course with each passing hour and day. I felt guilty and anxious.

My book group had assigned a book that was like leaping off the high diving board expecting cool water below and instead hitting a pool full of wet sand.

The Satanic Verses is an infernal work of literature, where—as in Talking Heads’ characterization of heaven—nothing, nothing, ever, ever happens. Except it is not heaven but a species of hell.

It is a work of such depraved stillness, so overwritten, so boring, so boundlessly slow, while being at the same time so exuberantly pretentious, as to become a monument to the very stultification it induces.

The blurbs on the back of the jacket proclaim the book ‘A masterpiece…,’ ‘…exhilarating…,’ etc. They are patent and complete untruths. Just trust me.

It was like having a cement block on my night stand; there was no way to get in without the aid of a jackhammer, it was obdurately and insanely impenetrable.

And I had to have the damned thing read by a certain date; granted, a date that was six weeks out, but still…

Though I realized I was in trouble fairly early on, I, like all morons, had already doubled down.

I had, by the time I realized there was no way out—or in—written a semi-snotty email to the other members of the group. At our previous meeting, we hadn’t spent what I thought was sufficient time on a book that I really loved, Richard Ford’s Canada.

Basically I said we should from here forward spend at least an hour seriously discussing the books we read, not commenting on them in passing while deciding who wants wine and who wants the hard stuff.

You can see my dilemma. I should have seen it coming, too, twenty miles off. Clearly there was no way I was going to get away with not reading the assigned book ever again, much less the one assigned immediately after the email at issue had gone out.

I tried to approach the damned thing from every angle.

I tried to surrender to it by just relaxing and letting it wash over me like a wave, eschewing comprehension entirely, taking it in while in some barely liminal state, thinking about something else, or nothing at all, and hoping for the best.

I just fell asleep quicker.

I tried to force myself to read five pages a day, but that was taking too long. (It would take me 109.4 days, or 3.64 months, to knock it out at that rate. I figured that out instead of reading the book, after I got bored with the Klondike game on my BlackBerry, sick of switching back and forth between Leno and a Ben Stiller flick on HBO, anything but that book.)

A friend suggested listening to it on CD but I was afraid of dozing off halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, having a head-on and embarrassing myself by causing one of those gargantuan traffic jams that stretch practically to Daly City and take weeks to clear.

Apparently there are no Cliff’s Notes. I know, I checked.

Skimming was out as well.

Meanwhile the already alarming stack of books awaiting my attention on my side of the bed grew and began to teeter.

And I was getting more desperate. More anxiety, more guilt. Feelings of inadequacy.