Started and finished since last time:

Trick Pear, by Suzanne Cleary
Blue Angel, by Francine Prose
The Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham
Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami Haruki (translated by
Duane's Depressed, by Larry McMurtry
Discretions, by Mary de Rachelwiltz
Seven Japanese Tales, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Howard Hibbett)
Goldengrove, by Francine Prose
Naomi, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Anthony Chambers)
Blue Genes, by Christopher Lukas
Flaubert and Madame Bovary, by Francis Steegmuller
Some Prefer Nettles, by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker)

Also read parts of

Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way, by Robin Gerber
Page by Page, by Heather Sellers
Van Gogh's Blues, by Eric Maisel
Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose
Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes

Francine Prose and her work occupied me for a good deal of this time. I think it began when I dipped back into her Reading Like a Writer, rereading the delightful chapter "Learning from Chekhov," and endlessly (and I do mean endlessly, perusing her list of "Books to Be Read Immediately" at the back, which led our household to a number of new acquisitions, and me to read one great book already, Steegmuller's Flaubert and Madame Bovary, which can justifiably be called a page-turner, even though the subject--how Flaubert came to write that masterpiece--doesn't sound like like it would be conducive to such a label. Steegmuller somehow weaves together excerpts from the author's letters and diaries in such a way that you just want to keep reading, in part because it's just so darned entertaining and in part because you do want to learn how he went from spending years feverishly writing a book that his two closest friends, after listening to him read the entire thing aloud for hours on end, told him was no good.
Rather than just read books Prose recommended, I decided that I ought to read a book she had actually written, which lead me to Blue Angel. It's a funny and sad story about a male college teacher of creative writing. Then, I happened to be in the Strand and found out that she'd be reading from her new novel, Goldengrove, there. She read part of the first chapter and I inhaled that sad (the title is an illusion to Hopkins' tragically beautiful poem), exquisitely written book over the following 24 hours or so. Prose took questions from the small crowd at the Strand very willingly and gave open, honest, and funny answers, especially to the sweet young aspiring writers. My librarian friend Susan and I enjoyed chatting with her as she signed books for us afterward; I asked if she was familiar with Joyce Carol Oates' story about Marilyn Monroe shopping in the Strand, since Prose had said that the store was like a second home to her. She hadn't. I need to look up the title of that piece since I do go around mentioning it to people.
I had read somewhere that Larry McMurtry's Duane's Depressed was a really good book, and since he's been in the book reviews lately because of his new nonfiction work--I think it's called Books, about his huge used bookstore and antiquarian book sales operation in Texas--I decided that he must be a more serious writer than I'd thought, so I'd give him a try, and I was well rewarded. The book is the third in the trilogy that begins with The Last Picture Show, which I now have bought and plan to read. Duane's Depressed is funny, and melancholy, and brings in Thoreau and especially Proust in a creative way (when am I going to read all of Proust?!?).
Three things I read were variations on the theme of surviving the suicide of a close relative, and all moved and inspired me. Joan Wickersham organizes The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (I still haven't checked to see if this is fiction or nonfiction--it feels like the latter but was in the former section at Borders) as the title indicates. Each chapter describes an aspect of the author's (or first person narrator's) experience of her father's suicide, such as "Day after," "Anger about," and "Finding Humor in." It seemed to me like a creative and logical way to deal with this difficult subject.
Alison Bechdel's The Fun Home is another take on paternal suicide--in graphic novel form. It's only the second in that genre that I've ever read (I'm counting both of Spiegelman's Maus books as one--interesting that his parents commit suicide in the course of those as well). Bechdel's drawings, many of the eccentric, antiques-filled house she grew up in, are stunning. The fact that she is a fellow Oberlin alum gave the work extra interest for me, of course. I'm not sure how to describe it or praise it, except to say that it's one of those books that you immediately want all of your closest friends to read, because it is so well done. But I haven't tried to sell it to anyone yet. My younger sister, who, like Bechdel, is a lesbian, may be my first customer--this is partly a coming-out story.
Blue Genes annoyed me in some ways--it just needed to be edited and wasn't, but I'm still glad that Christopher Lukas gave us that book, which is his attempt to understand the suicide of his brother, the award-winning nonfiction author J. Anthony Lukas, and also to figure out how he managed to survive the traumatic childhood (mother slit her wrists and throat when they were little boys, but no one talked about it) they shared without succumbing to the depression that killed not only his brother but also his mother and a shocking number of their other relatives, several after his brother's death.
The Tanizaki books I'm reading for grad school in preparation for my PhD comprehensive exams, so I am not going to talk about them here, but I'm enjoying them tremendously and reading each twice before each class. Discretions is by Ezra Pound's daughter, whose work is the subject of an article I am going to write, so I won't say much about it, either, except that I am now looking into some biographies of her father and the Cantos also.
Speaking of poetry, Trick Pear is a collection by a talented neighbor of mine. It was an amazing experience to read it while sitting on my front porch, with her house in view--one of the poems even mentions our street by name. But that's not why I love the work. They are well-wrought poems accessible in a Billy Collins way--some funny, and many more poignant, and even sad.
Often when I hear that a novel has elements of the fantastic I run the other way, and that is what I did for years in the case of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, despite having heard it praised by several friends not in the Japanese lit field. But I had been depriving myself of a great book. Read it now! The characters are just plain lovable, and the elements of the fantastic that occur somehow aren't off-putting, even to the most reality-bound among us.