Book, Poetry, and Film Log

This is half-hearted attempt at comprehensiveness. It is inspired by Jason Somers' log at his website. I also love Maggie Appleton's division of her online log into a Library and an Antilibrary.

The title of the book generally indicates the language in which I read the book. For example, I read The Castle in English, but I read Die Verwandlung in German.

For authors associated with more than country, I generally list them with the country they settled in last, unless scholarly opinion inveighs against this: T. S. Elliot is British, but Isherwood is American.

Short stories and poems are indicated with quotation marks. Long works of fiction (novellas, novels, etc.) and long poems are not.

Film and television is divided by country at the top level, but most of the films and TV shows I have watched lie in the "Anglosphere," dominated by the United States. I've divided these up into large-scale genres. Not every film and television show is tracked, but a great many viewed during my early adult life are. Some of nostalgic value are from farther back.

Not every poem I've ever read goes here — just the ones I deem important and want to remember that I've read. Sometimes I include an anthology if I engaged with it intensively.

Many authors and artists appear with their work on one line; others may have one work listed underneath their name, with their name serving as a heading. This is inconsistent, but the heading approach generally indicates that I'm likely to read more works by that author in the future. The inclusion of a work and author on a single line or with a heading is not an indication of my level of respect for that author or an indication that I have closed off further reading opportunities with that author in mind.

It's also important to note that "modern" non-fiction mostly refers to popular works (those intended for mass consumption, such as popular science). This log is by no means a list of the hundreds of scholarly articles I've read, with obviously various and hard-to-discern levels of attention and care. The vast majority of these are tracked in Zotero and stored in various bibliographical files. Thus, the linguistics and literary theory sections can read a bit thin, as does quantitative work in digital humanities (my main areas of training). But some of the works are printed here. The categories themselves are subject to change as they are quite arbitrary — but really no more arbitrary than dividing the world into hedgehogs, foxes, and magisters' poxes.

Lastly, the inclusion of a work here does not imply that I endorse its contents. And the absence of a work means I forgot I include it, never heard of it, won't be bullied into reading it, or realized I'm mortal.

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