Some of My Favorites, 2011

It has been a strange year for entertainment: huge amounts of movies (my boyfriend has netflix), a loaded but desultory reading list that dropped from novels over tea at 7:00AM into criticism and theory at 2AM halfway through the year. Some great concerts and plays, though I would have loved more of those nights. Without further ado:

Books
the tastiest of the classics:
The Beautiful and the Damned- F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Moveable Feast- Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood- Flannery O'Connor
Howards End- EM Forster
The Voyage Out- Virginia Woolf

and a few sundries:
The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction- Nicholas Dames
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects- Charles Altieri
Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?- Blakey Vermeule
That Used to Be Us- Tom Friedman (inflammatory, and I disagree, but in a healthy way)

Concerts
Joe Pug at the Grey Eagle
Mount Moriah and Mandolin Orange at LAB
Bon Iver at Raleigh Amphitheater
Gillian Welch at the Orange Peel

Films
Blue Valentine
La Fille Sur le Pont
The Tree of Life
The Debt
Incendies
Beginners
Melancholia

Performances
Ruth (Magnetic)
Songs of Robert (Magnetic)
Middletown (Manbites)
Glass (LGP)
Henry V on Trapeze (Delta Boys)
Endgame (The Gate Theater at Historical Playmakers)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Playmakers)