Thread by @ZoharAtkins

To celebrate the decade, I went through my Amazon book orders for 2009 and 2019 and this is what I discovered (it's a 'thin slice,' since I buy books through other channels)

In 2009, I mostly bought works of philosophy and "theory" (with history in second); and in 2019, I mostly bought works of poetry. 2/

In 2009, many (most?) of the people I read were dead (and canonized), non-English speaking/writing, and authors of long, dense works. In 2019, a majority are living, comparatively obscure, English-language, and brief. 3/

I bought many more books on Amazon in 2009 (107) than 2019 (51). 4/

The simple explanations include that I'm no longer an undergrad, no longer hoping to write a PhD dissertation (finished in 2014); I work full-time as a rabbi; I now use an IPhone and know what Twitter is. 5/

In 2009, I read 5-6 hours a day; today, I'm lucky to have 1-2 hours a day for targeted reading, most of which goes to Torah study. 5a/

Deeper explanations include that I got 'theoried' out; life + exposure to pastoral care helped me appreciate in a direct way that there is more to life than having good or even true theories about it. 6/

The whole time I wrote my PhD, I wanted to break out into poetry. 7/

Writing on Heidegger, I came to feel that art, spiritual practice, and authentic relationships are the best ways to express/extend/honor/respond to Being's call for thought. For me, a prose dissertation was a performative contradiction. 8/

In rabbinical school, my response to Talmud was a desire to respond with poetry of my own. I still regard the great Jewish texts as great for their poetry as much as for their thought (this holds as much for Maimonides as for the Mishna). 9/

I do not think I abandoned theory/thought/philosophy; it gave me and still gives me so much. Meanwhile, much contemporary poetry disappoints by over-promising. 10/

But poetry is what Heidegger calls the "wholesome danger." It is the ringing silence where thought is nearly found. Its generative and generous work, even in and as failure, reveals what it means to exist right now. 11/

My capacity to read and enjoy contemporary work in English is deeply enriched by time spent with ancient and non-English speaking thinkers (if mediated by translation) 12/

I still consider my training in philosophy, in abstract reasoning, in Plato's (Socrates's) critique of art and rhetoric to be fundamental to my enjoyment of art and rhetoric. 13/

Without Plato, I likely would not be able to regard 'art', as I often do, to be a more awe-inspiring source of wisdom, insight, and delight than systematic thought. 13/

Most thinkers probably get most things--even everything wrong (whatever wrong means); just as most art does not stand the test of time. But this errancy is necessary and patience is required to endure it. 14/

So my advice is to love the process of a life of reading and of discovering new and contradictory tastes, my gratitude is to thinkers and artists past and present for responding to what deserves awe with work that is awe-inducing; 15/

and my blessing is that we continue to light up with awe, in all its forms. I like film-maker Werner Herzog's statement that the best moments in life ought not be filmed. 15a/

So, in celebration: here's the 2009 list
15b/:

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Richard Rorty

Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
Martha C. Nussbaum

Aminadab
Maurice Blanchot,

Trauma: Explorations in Memory
Cathy Caruth

On Beauty and Being Just.
Elaine Scarry
16/

The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century
Shoshana Felman

The Body in Pain
Elaine Scarry

Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History
Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub

17/

Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations
Friedrich Nietzsche, et al

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
Carlo Ginzburg

The Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt

Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Carl E. Schorske

The Discourses
Machiavelli

18/

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Jacob Burckhardt

The Book And The Sword: A Life Of Learning In The Shadow Of Destruction
David Weiss Halivni

On Religion
Friedrich Schleiermacher, et al

Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life
Gillian Rose

Souls on Fire
Elie Wiesel
19/

The Fateful Question of Culture
Geoffrey H. Hartman

Literature and Psychoanalysis
Shoshana Felman

Difference and Repetition
Gilles Deleuze

The Politics of Cultural Despair
Fritz Stern

Of Spirit
Jacques Derrida

The Great War and Modern Memory
Paul Fussell 20/

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Shame and Necessity
Bernard Williams

The Vehement Passions
Philip Fisher 21/

Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity
Dr. Geoffrey Hartman

Strange Defeat
Marc Bloch

The Historian's Craft
Marc Bloch, et al

Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
Eric D. Weitz

Love and Saint Augustine
Hannah Arendt

22/

Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger
George Pattison

Men in Dark Times
Hannah Arendt

God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars
Benjamin Lazier

The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature
Paul S. Fiddes
23/

German Jews Beyond Judaism
George L. Mosse

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
Mark Lilla

Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation
Gillian Rose

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics
@samuelmoyn
24/

The Life of the Mind
Hannah Arendt

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
Susan Neiman

Judaism Musical and Unmusical
Michael P. Steinberg

Humanism of the Other
Emmanuel Levinas

The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
Cleanth Brooks

25/

Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings
Emmanuel Levinas

The Blue and Brown Books
Ludwig Wittgenstein

State of Exception
Giorgio Agamben

On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life
Eric L. Santner

Minima Moralia
Theodor W. Adorno

Oneself as Another
Paul Ricoeur

26/

Orthodoxy
G. K. Chesterton

The Symbolism of Evil
Paul Ricoeur

Language and Myth
Ernst Cassirer

The Political Theology of Paul
Jacob Taubes

Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
Paul Veyne

Power/Knowledge
Michel Foucault

Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida

27/

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
Slavoj Zizek

Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Peter Gay

Empire
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

When Words Lose Their Meaning
James Boyd White

The Time That Remains
Giorgio Agamben

28/

Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida

Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Allegories of Reading
Paul de Man

Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer

Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks

The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Walter Benjamin

Madness + Civilization
Foucault

29/

The Book of Margins
Edmond Jabes

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Oliver Sacks

Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream
Denis Diderot

The History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault

Sincerity and Authenticity
Lionel Trilling

The Complete English Poems
George Herbert

30/

Ecrits
Jacques Lacan

A World of Difference
Barbara Johnson

The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolano

The Gift: Creativity + the Artist in the Modern World
Lewis Hyde

Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty

Latin: An Intensive Course

Ambiguous Adventure
Cheikh Hamidou Kane

31/

Carnal Israel
Daniel Boyarin

Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash
Daniel Boyarin

Justice Accused
Robert M. Cover

Zakhor
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

God, Death, and Time
Emmanuel Levinas

The Jargon of Authenticity
Theodor Adorno

32/

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll

The Angel's Corpse
Paul Colilli

Selected Writings
Meister Eckhart

The Epistle to the Romans
Karl Barth

Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures
Emmanuel Levinas

In the Time of the Nations
Levinas

33/

Martin Heidegger
George Steiner

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil
Rüdiger Safranski, Ewald Osers

34/

Now, for 2019:

Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions
@ChrlesBernstein

Selected Poems 1965-1990
Marilyn Hacker

The Tradition
@jerichobrown

Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky

Walking Backwards: Poems 1966-2016
John Koethe

35/

The Notion of Authority
Kojeve

Blackacre
@MonicaYoun

The Gilded Auction Block
@akasomeguy

Debths
Susan Howe

Be With
Forrest Gander

Pitch of Poetry
@ChrlesBernstein

Wobble
Rae Armantrout

The Laughter of the Sphinx
Michael Palmer

feeld
Jos Charles

36/

@MonicaYoun @akasomeguy @ChrlesBernstein Citizen
Claudia Rankine

Creation and Anarchy
Giorgio Agamben

Radical Coherency
David Antin

It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems
Scalapino, Leslie

Complete Stories
Lispector, Clarice

The Book of Disquiet
Pessoa

Three Poems
Hannah Sullivan

37/

@MonicaYoun @akasomeguy @ChrlesBernstein Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012
Geoffrey Hill

Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God
Tony Hoagland

Ema the Captive
César Aira

Hard Child
Natalie Shapero

Human Hours: Poems
Catherine Barnett

My Emily Dickinson
Susan Howe

Hymns & Qualms
Peter Cole

38/

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine

ARK
Ronald Johnson

Plain Talk Rising: poems
Mark Dow

Like
@ae_stallings

Call Me Ishmael
Charles Olson

What Belongs to You
@GarthGreenwell

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
Christian Wiman

39/

Bright Dead Things
@adalimon Limón

Winnicott
Adam Phillips

A C.H. Sisson Reader
C. H. Sisson

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
Kay Ryan

Significant Other
@IGalleymore

Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems
Christian Wiman

The Topeka School
Ben Lerner

40/

@adalimon @IGalleymore Lima :: Limón
@nascenters

Asymmetry: Poems
Adam Zagajewski

A Woman of Property
Robyn Schiff

Sin•a•gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought
@DBashIdeas

Kenneth Koch: Selected Poems

Selected Poems
James Schuyler

Collected Poems of Donald Davie

41/

Jack and Jill in Troy
Bob Perelman

The Marginalization of Poetry
Bob Perelman

42/

Deep thanks to the many wonderful writers whom I read this yr, but whom I bought in a bookstore, read online, read in a library, re-read or read for the first time off my bookshelf; (includes my first Mishna Kehati full-set purchase) 43/

2019 was the year my first book of poems, Nineveh, came to light (amazon.com/Nineveh-Zohar-…)! I hope these limited lists demonstrate that the work of writing is but a small fraction of the work of reading and learning from so many others. 44/

I am a deep fan of the Nietzschean/Benjaminian idea that each life is a unique anthology of its influences 45/

Some of the books that have moved me have been read my millions, others by less than a few hundred. But as the Mishna says, "these and these are words of the living God." "These and these are organs of Torah." 46/

Neither obscurity nor popularity, so-called accessibility or so-called esotericism, can obstruct our capacity to find what we need, and what needs to find us. 47/

"Mighty waters cannot extinguish love; rivers cannot sweep it away" (Song of Songs 8:7) 48/

"Of making many books there is no end."
(Ecclesiastes 12:12) 49/

"We will return to you and you will return to us."
(The "Hadran" prayer) 50/

And now that 2020 is upon us, dear Lord, source of Life, please sustain me through my first 7-year cycle of daf yomi (a page of Talmud a day), "and grant that we may see each other" (Ashbery)

FIN