Posts Tagged blogging

Another posting form my Smith-Corona Super-Speed.

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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MontanaWriter has been quiet again. Blogging demands discipline and discipline is something I have always had in short supply.

My mind is too easily distracted, by books, by the way the sun is shining through the bare trees, by the kaleidoscope of words and images that are always moving through my mind.

When time and attention permit, I have been sitting at my Underwood 319 and re-working poems… and drafts for a few new ones.

When I was in my early 20s, I worked trail crew for the United States Forest Service in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness. One summer we rebuilt sections of the the Continental Divide Trail. The days were long, but the work was honest and rewarding and the views singular and magnificent.

Images and memories of those days come back to me often. The image that is central to this poem “Ahead of the Next Storm” is a place called Goat Flats, a high mountain park above the tree-line.

A cold February day has me dreaming again of summer days I have known.

Enjoy!

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Beware the barrenness of a busy life. ~ Socrates

"Temple Garden" by Paul Klee

Busyness has been the order of the day for me now for quite some time, and hence, there has not been much action at MontanaWriter of late. Being busy is not, of course, my natural disposition… far from it. Poets are not doers but dreamers. And dreaming requires nothing less than plenty of time and quietness. Alas for now… there can be little of either.

While I allude occasionally here at MontanaWriter to my personal life, I notice looking back through posts that I seldom say very much directly. It is the same way in my personal life. I work and hang out with people who have no idea that I blog, or write poems and western short stories, or read poetry, or went to seminary and was once a chaplain and a pastor…. The list goes on. An introverted personality and a natural western reticence to talk about myself keep me from sharing much more than few comments about the weather or last night’s game… even with those with whom I drink beer.

I notice I do the reverse here at MontanaWriter, hardly ever write anything about my life.

I have been thinking lately of how to bring these two sides of my self together, hoping perhaps that bringing them together will give me much needed creative energy. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

For those who know me only through MontanaWriter here is an introduction of sorts, to my non-blogging life these days:

I currently work full-time, 40 hours a week, doing tech support for a public school system here in Minnesota. On top of that, I have also been working a second job, 15-20 hours a week, at one of our local Apple Stores since last August… almost a year now.

Mornings come early when you are working two jobs. I start at 7:00 a.m. on my “day job.” I get home between 9:30-10:30 p.m. from my second, part-time job. Since it takes awhile to “wind down” from that second job, I usually try to read a bit on my iPhone: a couple of blogs I follow, some sports sites to catch up on scores and news, a book on my Kindle app…. just easy, light reading.

It is not the kind of reading that a writer needs and not the kind of time… but it is what I have. I am mindful that Wallace Stevens and Ted Kooser and William Carlos William had full days and still managed to write some of the most original poetry written by Americans. And I am also mindful that in an economy where so many are out of work only an ingrate would complain about being lucky enough to have two jobs they enjoy.

My energy for writing and blogging ebbs and flows… MontanaWriter shows this. During the latest “hiatus” I have done some planning to help make things easier on myself during times when creative energy is hard to find. I am excited about some new directions and trajectories. I hope you will be too.

For now, it is is enough to be writing and posting again….

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Summer in the humid North Country quickly loses its power to surprise and delight. Somehow having to turn on central-air conditioning changes everything. In mid-January we run from heated car to heated home. We stand at windows and watch the world through panes of glass. On humid summer days we do same. Summer, just barely started, has already become a burden.

A brief hiatus at MontanaWriter has me thinking about change and beginnings.  The very first posting here, more than two years ago, began with one of my favorite Yeats’ poems. Since the audience for MontanaWriter at that point was at the most one, I am going to re-post part of that first post here with a few additions and changes.

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The Book of Genesis contains two creation stories. Some biblical literalist would no doubt have preferred that there be just the one. But those ancient redactors who put the bible together knew that beginnings are always messy affairs.

I have seen sketch drafts of poems that W.B. Yeats wrote. The finished product often-times bears little resemblance to the sketched idea. In one of his final poems, “Cuchalain Comforted,” written just a few weeks before his death, for example, the note “A shade recently arrived went through a valley in the country of the dead,” became:

Cuchalain Comforted
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone.  He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen.  Shrouds by two and three

Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
“Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

“Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

“We thread the needles’ eyes, and all we do
All must together do.’ That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.

“Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

“Or driven from home and left to die in fear.’
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of
birds.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of
birds.

The simple dictated sketch, like the “bird-like” things, needed to be fully fleshed out. And so Yeats did… with 70 years of poetic skill, language, and symbolism.

It is difficult to “pull-out” just a few lines from this poem because I love the whole so much. It is the perfect summation of Yeats and Yeatsian themes. It is the perfect last poem of a great poet… it is the perfect poem.

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One of the most remarkable things about blogging remains the number of strangers that email me that they have read something I have posted and like it. I assume that there are many who do not like what they read here, but they do not bother to write.

My blog statistics tell me that the number of people coming to  MontanaWriter continues to grow. In the month of March, there were almost 12,000 unique visitors from all over the world. By blog standards, that is a modest number. But since MontanaWriter began two years ago with zero readers, I remain amazed.

One of the other things my blog statistics tell me is that the search term that brings the most people to MontanaWriter is one for John Wayne. The numbers are not even close. On a blog that is mostly about poetry, that has many more references to W.B. Yeats and lyric poetry than to movies, it is curious that so much traffic comes from The Duke.

It is not surprising, though. More than 30 years after his death, John Wayne remains the definitive movie star: iconic and bigger than life. For many he is also symbolic of something vital that it “feels” like we have lost.

What that thing that we have lost is is difficult to define.  It is also difficult to know if it really ever existed at all, or is merely something we wish once existed: some golden era of shared values and understanding that made us all better. Either way John Wayne the actor, the icon, represents something more than just movies or Hollywood or acting technique.

I have loved John Wayne movies all my life. Growing up when and where I did it was natural to love westerns. And if you love westerns, it is inevitable that you will love John Wayne movies because most of the best westerns ever made starred The Duke. There are a handful that star other actors, but they are just that: a handful.

I have always felt more than a bit sorry for those who say they do not like westerns. It is the same way I feel when someone says they do not like baseball (or basketball or football), or reading, or jazz, or poetry, or bourbon, or country music. It is unfathomable to me that someone can live without those things that seem to me so essential to life.

I hope that those who stumble upon MontanaWriter while looking for articles on The Duke are not greatly disappointed to find poetry reviews here, or articles about baseball, or theological comments. I also hope that those who came here for a review of a poem by William Morris or William Blake are not disappointed to find articles about westerns and John Wayne here. For me, all these things seem inseparable, naturally related: Yeats read dime westerns, John Ford read Yeats, theology of culture is all inclusive.

The blogosphere is about interconnectivity… not just of people but also of ideas. In the end, I think it is this “new community” of ideas that is the web’s greatest promise. Poetry, John Wayne, and jazz can inhabit a place together on the web that they could never have in the old, pre-digital age. In fact, in 2012, poetry, John Wayne and jazz seem inextricably mixed, pilgrim.

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Mt. Baldy (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Today is the second anniversary of MontanaWriter. That very first post from March 10th, 2010, contains a Yeats’ poem, “Cuchalain Comforted,” and a reference to the Book of Genesis. Little has changed it seems. Yeats and theology remain a significant part of  MontanaWriter after 24 months.

Surprisingly that first post did not have a purpose statement or mission statement of any kind. I say “surprisingly,” because in my memory I thought I had created one. I suppose “books, art, sports, and the big sky” functions that way.

In two years I have posted more than 340 times: poetry reviews, books reviews, music videos, my own poems, links to articles I have found interesting, and a few guest posts. I have posted about basketball and baseball, comic books and westerns, poems and poetic criticism.

There have been times when I have felt great energy and passion for blogging and posted often… and there have been times when I have felt like saying, “the hell with it,” and not posted anything at all. In that way blogging is a little bit like life. There are times when you feel great passion for the life you live… then there are times when you feel only its weight and gravity.

After two years of doing this, I have come gradually to think of blogging as a creative and spiritual”discipline” of sorts. But it is one that you do in a very public way.

One of the criticisms that St. Paul faced in his life was that “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account” (2 Corinthians. 10:10). I have often thought those words describe a writer perfectly. In print we are often confident and self-assured, certain of what is truly important and what is merely dross. But in person… we more often than not come across as insecure wrecks. Two years of blogging have further convinced me of the truth of this.

I am excited about the new feature here at MontanaWriter I am calling ”Hugh’s Journals” and have a few more ideas in the works to beef up things up a bit. The number of unique visits and visitors continues to go up each month. I only wish that more would take the time to comment, good or bad, on what they find here. But I know that I seldom do so when I visit blogs, and so cannot really chide anyone.

Two years down the road a lot has changed here… and very little. In that way also, blogging is a little bit like life. People grow but they really do not change very much. Blogs grow readers and numbers of posts, but in the end they change very little. 

When I started MontanaWriter I had a vague notion that I wanted to write about poetry, and books, and sports, and Montana, and theology. Two years down the road, I have a vague notion that I want to continue to write about poetry, and books, and sports, and Montana, and theology… and so I guess I will.

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

The unseasonably warm winter continues here in the North Country. Each day the sun climbs just a bit higher and burns just a bit brighter and longer. The longer light lightens the load, quickens our step.

In Florida and Arizona spring training is beginning, another sign of spring. The local 9 coming off an historically bad year look pretty much the same. An addition here or there. It does not engender great confidence. But if Morneau’s issues are finally behind him and if Mauer… if Mauer could become another player than he is….

I wrote last spring here about the Twins 200-million-dollar man (Puckett vs. Mauer). After last year’s debacle, I feel even less confident of the Twins’ future. But since it is spring and the season of hope, I hope to be proved wrong.

Pre-season time is like springtime for a sports fan. So is having a team that is doing well. It puts a little extra bounce in your step, makes it much easier to enjoy the littlest things of life.

Non-sports fans seem always bewildered by this. Sometimes arrogantly so. I never leave a conversation though with someone who says they do not watch sports without shaking my head and thinking, “poor, dumb bastard.”

Life without sports and the arts is an empty thing. Life with just one or the other is a life just half lived.

MontanaWriter as a blog is, as emailers sometimes remind me, unfocused… one day a poetry review, the next a western, the next something about sports or theology. To grow a blog, they say, you need to have one central theme and post everyday. I know the latter is true and something I want to move toward. But the former….

Life is too full of too many fascinating things. There are too many books to be read. Too many poems to be read aloud. There are too many games to watch. And the sky is too big to settle on just one thing under it.

MontanaWriter reaches its two-year anniversary next month. It is still still evolving and settling in… just as its creator is still evolving and settling in.

Pitchers and catchers have reported. Spring is just around the corner. Hope in the air.

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Forgotten Ways (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

I have commented on this before, but it bears repeating… editing yourself is an impossible task. To paraphrase the famous quote about being your own lawyer: the writer who edits himself has an ass for a client.

Exhibit A: An hour ago I discovered that yesterday I had inadvertently posted an unfinished review of Arthur Symons’ “White Heliotrope.” Yesterday afternoon I had spent some time working on the review, but did not have enough time between jobs to finish it. When I was done working on it, I intended to save what I had done so far. But I accidently chose “publish” instead of “save draft.” And just like that… for over 24 hours my unfinished draft was live for all the world to see. It is a mistake I have made before, but it is one that I have always caught right away.

Oh well… that is the lot of the blogger.

In 300 plus blog postings I have learned that blogging is not like writing poetry. Imperfections are not just allowed… they are to be expected. They are inevitable.

In 300 plus blog postings I have learned a number of things. That is probably why I stay at it… if only intermittently at times. The most important thing I think I have learned is that making a mistake, or making a fool of yourself in public, is not the end of the world after all. When you publicly risk doing something difficult, you are bound, every now and then, to land flat on your ass.

I spent a life writing poems and stories that never saw the light of day. MontanaWriter has for the most part broken me of that bad habit. I am not completely cured… for we can never fully exorcise all our demons… but I am far enough down the road to find my inadvertent posting more amusing than mortifying.

Winter still has not fully come to the North Country. Unseasonably warm days and nights have meant snow-free lawns and roadways. But after last year, few complain. We watch the sun’s low course across the southern sky and dream of spring days and summer days when the sun is high overhead and the trees green and restless in warm breezes.

Mistakes will happen at MontanaWriter, dear readers. Some I will find and fix… others will go unattended. But that is the nature of blogging, the inevitable result of an ass of an editor editing an ass of a writer.

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Today’s posting marks the 300th post on MontanaWriter, a nice round number.

Round numbers are hard to resist. There is a something complete and satisfying in their shape… in what they symbolize: the 20th reunion, the 50th wedding anniversary, the centennial, the bi-centenial.

Round numbers invite reminiscences and memories. They invite self-reflection and nostalgia. They make us reflect upon the very nature of time and the passing of time.

20 months and 300 posts down the line and I am still thinking about what I have been thinking about most of my life: words and poems and books.

In honor of today’s milestone, I am posting a list of 300 books that matter to me. They run the gamut of genres and weight, but in the end they have one thing in common, I am very glad I read them. I enjoyed each and every one of them!

300 books I am glad I’ve read (in no particular order)

1. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
2. Roughing It, by Mark Twain
3. Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, by W. B. Yeats
4. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
5. Karpov on Karpov, by Anatoly Karpov
6. Poems, by William Wordsworth
7. Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James
8. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
9. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
10. Omar N. Bradley a Soldiers Story, by Omar N. Bradley
11. Life Work, by Donald Hall
12. Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn
13. A Sportman’s Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev
14. Parades End, by Ford Madox Ford
15. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
16. The Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway
17. Dyer’s Hand, by W.H. Auden
18. Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas, by Dylan Thomas
19. Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan
20. On Poetry and Poets, by T.S. Eliot
21. I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane
22. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
23. This House of Sky, by Ivan Doig
24. Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
25. The Source, by James Michener
26. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Homage to Robert Frost, by Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott
28. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
29. Essays and Introductions, by W.B. Yeats
30. Autobiographies, by W.B. Yeats
31. Night, by Elie Wiesel
32. The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton
33. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg
34. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
35. The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
36. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
37. Sweeney Astray, by Seamus Heaney
38. Poetry and Ambition, by Donald Hall
39. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
40. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
41. .44, by H.A. DeRosso
42. Can Poetry Matter?, by Dana Gioia
43. For Whom the Bells Toll, by Ernest Hemingway
44. Complete Poems, Marianne Moore
45. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solhenitsyn
47. Idle Days in Patagonia, by W.H. Hudson
48. The Fabulous Clip Joint, by Frederic Brown
49. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
51. At the Earth’s Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
52. On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder
53. Gulag Achipelego,  by Alexander Solhenitsyn
54. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
55. Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
56. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, by W.B. Yeats
57. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul
58. A Day in the Bleachers, by Arnold Hano
59. The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter
60. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. The Complete Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton
62. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
63. My Turn at Bat, by Ted Williams
64. The Plague, Albert Camus
65. Travels with Charly by John Steinbeck
66. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
67. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe
68. Bible
69. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
70. Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges
71. Collected Poems of John Milton, by John Milton
72. The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski
73. Collected Poems, by W.H. Auden
74. The Pitch that Killed, by Mike Sowell
75. Black Elk Speaks, by John John Neihardt
76. Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen E. Ambrose
77. Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
78. Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
79. Portrait of Picasso, by Norman Mailer
80. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, by Hugh MacDiarmid
81. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
82. Chiricahua, by Will Henry
83. Conan, Robert E. Howard
84. Selected Poems, John Donne
85. Riders of the Shadowlands: Western Stories, by H.A. DeRosso
86. Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
87. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
88. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre
89. A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
90. The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanaugh
91. Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, by Elliott Coleman, ed.
92. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
93. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
94. The Empty Copper Sea, by John D. MacDonald
95. Collected Poems 1917-1982, By Archibald MacLeish
96. Night Squad, by David Goodis
97. My Favorite Year, Mickey Mantle
98. Deeper,  by Jeff Long
99. Life of Tom Horn, by Tom Horn
100. Eye of the Storm,  by Jack Higgins
101. Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leornard
102. The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler
103. Collected Stories, by William Faulkner
104. Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy
105. Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, by Paul Klee
106. Mythologies, by W.B. Yeats
107. Damanation Alley, by Roger Zelazny
108.  Weather Central, by Ted Kooser
109. Aran Islands by John M. Synge
110. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
111. Savage Range, by Luke Short
112. Let Me Tell You a Story, by Red Auerbach
113. Field Work, by Seamus Heaney
114. The Complete Angler, by Izzak Walton
115. Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, by T.S. Eliot
116. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
117. The Celebrated Case of Judge Dee, by Robert Van Gulik
118. The Curious Case of Syd Finch, by George Plimpton
119. Iceberg, by Clive Cussler
120. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
121. The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka
122. Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr
123.  Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen
124. The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, by Ed Gorman, ed.
125. Collected Poems, by  Patrick Kavanaugh
126. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, by Robert Penn Warren
127. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
128. Hockey Heroes & Me, by Red Fischer
129. The River Why, by David Duncan
130. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
131. Shadow Prey, by John Sanford
132.  Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins
133. The Goodbye Look, by Ross MacDonald
134.  The Haw Lantern, by Seamus Heaney
135. Three Plays, by Sean O’Casey
136. Collected Poems, by Austin Clarke
137. War and Peace, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
138. El Borak, by Robert E. Howard
139. Black Diamonds, John Holloway
140. Letters to a Young Poet, by Ranier Maria Rilke
141. Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig and His Time, by Ray Robinson
142. Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis
143. The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert Parker
144. Open Net, by George Plimpton
145. Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard
146. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
147. Selected Poems, by Robert Browning
148. Ted Williams Reader, by Lawrence Baldassaro
149.  The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
150.  The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
151. Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
152. The Stanglers, by Loren Estleman
153. The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
154.  Winter Morning Walks, by Ted Kooser
155. Father’s and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
156. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
157. Writers of the Purple Sage: Anthology, by Russell Martin ed.
158. Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
159. The Mooring of Starting Out, by John Ashbery
160. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
161. The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
162.  Far Away and Long Ago, by W.H. Hudson
163.  The Nine Tailors, by Dorthy Sayers
164. New & Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
165. Exodus, by Leon Uris
166. Collected Poems of William Blake, by William Blake
167. Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella
168. Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith
169. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney trans.
170. Savage Night, by Jim Thompson
171. Plays of John M. Synge, by John M. Synge
172.  Battle of the Bulge, by Charles Whiting
173. Tal-Botvinnik, 1960, by Mikhail Tal
174. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
175.  The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
176. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block
177. Selected Poems, by Galway Kinnell
178. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
179. Christianity and Culture, by T.S. Eliot
180.  Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
181. Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam
182.  A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
183.  War of the Rats, by David L. Robbins
184. In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, by James Lee Burke
185. Sacred Hoops, by Phil Jackson
186. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
187. The Blizzard Voices, by Ted Kooser
188. The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich
189.  Plays of Henrik Ibsen, by Henrik Ibsen
190.  Penquin Book of Irish Verse, by various
191.  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King
192. The Flying Frenchman, by Maurice “Rocket” Richard
193. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
194. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, by Ezra Pound
195. Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, by Bill James
196.  Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
197.  Mr. Samler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow
198. The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler
199. A Continuing Journey, by Archibald MacLeish
200. Indemnity Only, by Sara Paretsky
201. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, by Satchel Paige
202.  Together We Kill, by Mickey Spillane
203. Preoccupations, by Seamus Heaney
204.  All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
205.  Lions in Winter, by Allan Turowetz
206. Walking Down the Stairs, by Galway Kinnell
207. My Greatest Game, by Ralph L. Finn ed.
208.  Dune, by Frank Herbert
209. The Moving Target, by Ross MacDonald
210. In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, by Jack Henry Abbott
211. Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block
212. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
213. The Inner Room, by James Merrill
214. Cancer Ward, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
215. The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
216.  Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, by Michael Seidel
217. Selected Letters, by Ernest Hemingway
218. Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman
219. Complete Plays, by W.B. Yeats
220. End Game: Kasparov vs. Short, by Dominic Lawson
221.  The Castle, by Franz Kafka
222. Selected Poems, by John Ashbery
223. Cobb: A Biography, by Al Stump
224. Trinity, by Leon Uris
225. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
226. Selected Poems, by Tomas McGrath
227.  Washington Square, by Henry James
228. Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by W.P. Kinsella
229.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
230. The Second Coming, by Walker Percy
231. Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott
232. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee
233. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
234.  Gustavo Gutierrez: Liberation Theology, by Robert McAfee Brown
235. Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
236. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
237. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen E. Ambrose
238.  A Fine Red Rain, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
239. Dubliners, by James Joyce
240. The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
241. The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, by Elmore Leonard
242.  St. Francis, by G.K. Chesterton
243. Poetry and the World, by Robert Pinsky
244. The Zebra-Stripped Hearse, by Ross MacDonald
245. Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
246. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by John Paul II
247. The Black Company, by Glen Cook
248. Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
249.  Jesse James, by T.J. Stiles
250.  Sez Who? Sez Me, by Mike Royko
251. A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, by Lawrence Block
252.  The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
253. Timbered Choir, by Wendell Berry
254. Poems, by Wallace Stevens
255. Paper Lion, by George Plimpton
256.  Theology of Culture, by Paul Tillich
257. My Life in Hockey, by John Beliveau
258.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
259.  D-Day June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose
260. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
261. Selected Poems, by Ranier Maria Rilke
262.  Here at Eagle Pond, by Donald Hall
263. Collected Poems, by Robert Frost
264. The Long Walk, by Stephen King
265.  Theology in a New Key, by Robert McAfee Brown
266. Under the Burning Sun, by H.A. DeRosso
267.  Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly
268.  Slick, by Whitey Ford
269.  A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan
270. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carre
271. First & Only, by Dan Abnett
272.  Selected Poems, by William Carlos Williams
273. Farewell My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
274. The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
275. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery
276. The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth
277. August 1914, by Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn
278. Brand, by Henrik Ibsen
279. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
280. Bunts, by George Will
281. Daily Horoscope, by Dana Gioia
282. Out of My League, by George Plimpton
283. The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson
284.  Selected Poems, by Mark Van Doren
285. Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, by Donald Hall
286. The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
287. Either / or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, by Carl  E. Braaten, ed.
288. Washing of the Spears, by Donald R. Morris
289. The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle
290.  Love and Responsibilty, by John Paul II
291.  High Priest of Califorina, by Charles Willeford
292.  Explorations, by W.B. Yeats
293.  West of Honor, by Jerry Pournelle
294.  Some Imagist Poets, by Richard Aldington and various
295.  The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie
296. The Boat of Quiet Hours, by Jane Kenyon
297.  The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
298.  Robert Browning, by G.K. Chesterton
299.  Short Stories of Henry James, by Henry James
300.  Complete Poems, by e.e. cummings