Art Garfunkel famously keeps track of the books he has read since 1968. As of writing this, the count is 1327 (he does not add a review). I thought I could do something similar but I am adding short reviews of books as I read them, and I rake my brain over what I read over the last decades. This is, evidently, a work-in-progress: there are 566 reviews so far. Titles marked with a * are particular favorites.
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems *
Right. Larkin was a miserable misogynist, a racist, a drunk, and a general nuisance. He was, however, also the one who wrote some of the best English poems of that century, poems that manage to straddle the fine line between being generally popular and, actually, being ‘high literature’.