#13 Talking to Girls About Duran Duran Rob Sheffield

Jacket Copy: Growing up in the eighties, you were surrounded by mysteries. These were the years of MTV and John Hughes movies, the era of big dreams and bigger shoulder pads. Like any teenage geek, Rob Sheffield spent the decade searching for true love and maybe a cooler haircut. This is his tale of stumbling into adulthood with a killer soundtrack. Inept flirtations. Dumb crushes. Deplorable fashion choices. Girls, every last one of whom was madly in love with the bassist of Duran Duran. As a confused teenager stranded in the suburbs, mowing lawns and playing video games, Rob had a lot to learn about women, love, music, and himself. But he was sure his radio had all the answers, whether he was driving an ice cream truck through Boston to "Purple Rain," slam-dancing to the Replacements, or pondering the implications of Madonna lyrics. From Bowie to Bobby Brown, from hair metal to hip hop, he loved them all. This book is a journey through the pop culture of an American adolescence that will remind you of your first crush, first car, and first kiss. But it's not just a book about music. This is a book about moments in time, and the way we obsess over them through the years.

Similar to: Chuck Klosterman, Nick Hornby, Fiction (An R.E.M. Biography)
Highlights:
--if you didn't grow up in the 80s, this book will tell you everything you ever need (or want) to know about New Wave music and the subculture that sprang up around its misfit fans
--this is a book for us wallflowers, who live vicariously through music, too shy to dare to live the life of glamour and adventure glorified in the lyrics of our musical heroes
--if you're into "Pretension" as it's own genre of literature, Sheffield's memoirs, along with the essays of Klosterman, Hornby, and David Foster Wallace are must-reads: the canon, if you will.

#12 Love Is A Mix Tape Rob Sheffield

Jacket Copy: Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die in his arms. Using the listings of fifteen of his favorite mix tapes, Rob shows that the power of music to build a bridge between people is stronger than death. You’ll read these words, perhaps surprisingly, with joy in your heart and a song in your head—the one that comes to mind when you think of the love of your life.

Similar to: Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Chuck Klosterman, Nick Hornby

Highlights:

--shows how we all use pop culture as a mirror of our emotional lives

--you would think the idea of a story told through mixed tapes would be unbearably clichéd and corny, but he manages to make this the opposite of that

--a tribute to the parts of the 90s that are most often forgotten but most in need of remembering 

#11 Twitterature Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin

Jacket Copy: Hatched in a dorm room by two freshmen at the University of Chicago, Twitterature is a hilarious and irreverent reimagining of the classics as a series of 140-character tweets from the protagonist. Providing a crash course in more than 80 of the world's best-known books, from Homer to Harry Potter, Virgil to Voltaire, Tolstoy to Twilight, and Dante to the Da Vinci Code, it's the ultimate Cliffs Notes. Because as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?

Highlights:

The Metamorphosis- Kafka: I curse the day I inexplicably transformed into a gigantic, six-legged metaphor!

Harry Potter 5: I AM UNDERGOING A LOT OF ANGST RIGHT NOW. And this Asian girl is giving me a major hard-on. Blue balls suck. No magic potion for it either

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- Joyce: I'm in college. Cool. But I live at home with my mom. That doesn't make me a tool does it? Nah, I'm totally cool. Look, I've got this cool tweed hat. Yeah, I'm cool. Totally. 

The Crying of Lot 49- Pynchon: At the theater. The play also mentions the Tristero thing. Talked to this dilettante director in the shower. He's totally DTF.

The Sound and the Fury- Faulkner: Why won't that watch stop ticking? Also, the image of other men's dicks in my sister plagues me. So many dicks in my dear, dear sister.

#10 Vineland Thomas Pynchon

"Sure, she knew folks who had no problem at all with the past. A lot of it they just didnt remember. Many told her, one way or another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave."

Jacket Copy: On California's fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of Sixties survivors and refugees from the "Nixonian Reaction" still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches him that his old nemesis, sinister Federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed Justice Department strike force. Zoyd instantly disappears underground, but not before dispatching his teenage daughter Prairie on a dark odyssey into her secret, unspeakable past. Freely combining disparate elements from American popular culture--spy thrillers, Ninja potboilers, TV soap operas, sci-fi fantasies--Vineland emerges as what Salman Rushdie has called in the NYTBR "that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years."

Similar to: Bret Easton Ellis' "The Informers," Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Coupland's "Generation X" 

Highlights:

--full of hilarious one liners about everything in American pop culture-- from the Los Angeles Lakers to Hawaii Five-O.

--although the idea that television is bad for us has been beat to death, he presents that message in a new and interesting way, through the use of satire and sci-fi/fantasy fables

--the distinctions "hero" and "villain" are hard to give to any of the characters in this novel, since they are very complex. this encourages the reader to think about whether things in real life are really ever "black and white" or if maybe the truth lies somewhere more towards the middle

--draws a direct line between Americans' obsession with Television and the end of the 60s counterculture movement; a very interesting theory indeed

--i really enjoyed the way the book wasnt entirely realistic but also wasnt entirely a fantasy universe either. For the most part, this was a story that really could have happened, but the parts that are implausible just make the story more interesting, and more, rather than less, powerful. 

#9 Americana Don DeLillo

"That's what we really want. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture."

Jacket Copy: At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a high-powered television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And then the dream--and the dream-making--become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture a sense of his own and his country's past, present and future.

Similar to: Nicholson Baker, Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," Nathanael West

Highlights:
--dripping with irony and sarcasm, yet still manages to be authentic and sincere
--trains a keenly perceptive eye on the darker parts of being American that people are reluctant to acknowledge
--this book is about the passage of Time and the inevitability of death more than anything. It's about how we as Americans attempt to deal (and not deal) with those twin inescapable realities

#8 Looking for Alaska John Green

Jacket Copy: Miles 'Pudge' Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole existence has been one big nonevent, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave the 'Great Perhaps' even more. He heads off to the sometimes crazy, possibly unstable, and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed-up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young, who is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart.
Similar to: Catcher in the Rye, Jay McInerney's The Last of the Savages, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep
My Take: Rarely do I read a book that changes the way I look at things, by giving me a new perspective to consider that I'd never thought about before. This is one of those books for me, and I'd venture to guess that it could be one of those books for anyone who reads it.

#7 The Mezzanine Nicholson Baker

Jacket Copy: In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive novel, best-selling author Nicholson Baker uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. At first glance, The Mezzanine appears to be a book about nothing. In reality, it is a brilliant celebration of things, simultaneously demonstrating the value of reflection and the importance of everyday human experiences

My Take: That's bullshit. This book is really just about nothing. It's kind of cool for the first 50 pages... but after that it just gets oldddddd.

Similar to: If you want to make a (big big) stretch, you could compare it to Nabokov's Pale Fire, James Joyce's Ulysses, Tristram Shandy (i wouldnt know, but the NYTBR compares the two books). But really, there isn't any other book even remotely similar to this one (thank god), so, yeah.

#6 Stories I Only Tell My Friends Rob Lowe

Don't read this book. Just don't.

#5 Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity Elizabeth Gold

"Anger these days has gotten a bad rap, but it has its purposes. Sometimes it is the only thing that frees you to speak the truth."

Similar to: Miles Corwin's "And Still We Rise"; "Educating Esme"

Book Jacket Summary: Elizabeth Gold's memoir of four months spent at School of the New Millennium, where the idealism of a progressive education and the reality of a city classroom collided. Charged with taking over 3 classes of 9th grade English in the middle of the year, Gold arrived with some lofty dreams of sharing her love of literature with her students. Instead, she ended up teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Provocative and hilariously sobering, Gold's story is a vibrant portrait of a multiethnic urban high school and the people who inhabit it, and a poetic meditation on adolescence and the difficulty, sometimes, of being an adult.

Highlights:
--beautifully written prose; almost poetic in nature
--surprisingly (sometimes even shockingly) candid and honest
--points out the Truth: that all these efforts to reform schools are futile if we don't first reform the American Culture at large
--Not cliched, as memoirs in this category invariably seem to be. A fresh, original take on the idea of writing about a year of teaching in a less-than-ideal school
--if, as some claim, the highest goal any writer can aspire to is to create a work of art such that it evokes a raw emotional response from the reader...Gold certainly has set the bar high

#4 Cold Spring Harbor Richard Yates

"Apart from knowing I'll love you forever, I seem to have lost confidence in just about everything else. I've come to believe that only a very, very few matters in the world can ever be trusted to make sense."

Book Jacket Summary: Evan Shephard was born with good looks, bad luck, and a love for the open road. But it was on one such drive, with his father from rural Long Island into lower Manhattan, that Evan's life would be changed forever. When their car breaks down on a Greenwich Village street, Evan's father presses a random doorbell, looking for a telephone. Within hours, two families--sharing equally complex and addled histories--will come together. There will be flirtation. There will be a marriage. There will be a child, a new home...But as Evan moves further into the uncharted land of manhood, as the women and men around him come into focus, he faces roads not taken and a journey not made--in Richard Yates' haunting exploration of human restlessness, family secrets, and a future shaped by them both.

Similar to: Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," Nicholas Sparks' "The Notebook"

Highlights:

--portrays WWII America in rural New York accurately and in great detail
--tells the story of lives forever changed (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) by sexual encounters, at a time when sex was something you did in private, not something you ever discussed
--will resonate with anyone who has ever thought they've fallen in love with someone, only to realize it was someone else entirely that has had their heart all along

#3 Generation X Doug Coupland

“It’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”

Book Jacket Summary: Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit “pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause” in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they’ve mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory.

Highlights:

--accurate, keen observations about the restless and disaffected segment of society

 --funny, but not in a laugh out loud way, more subtle humor/irony

--absurdist/bizarre short stories

--the characters ARE your friends...everybody knows someone like the people in this book 

Similar to: Joan Didion’s “Play It As it Lays,” Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” 

#2 The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion

“After I married and had a child, I learned to find meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking…These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother”

Book Jacket Summary: From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Highlights:

--plain, yet eloquent prose: each sentence is a joy to read, not only for its content, but also for its style

--tribute to an extraordinary marriage: although ostensibly about her husband’s death, this book is really more about his life and her life and their life together

--this autobiography/memoir provides fascinating context for Didion’s novels

Similar to: Virginia Woolf, Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Informers” 

#1 Everything Matters! Ron Currie

Book Jacket Summary: Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine in a time of Atari, baseball cards, pop Catholicism and cocaine. He also knows something no one else knows—neither his exalted parents nor his baseball-savant brother nor the love of his life (she doesn’t believe him anyway): the world will end when he is thirty-six. While Junior searches for meaning in a doomed world, his loved ones tell an all-American family saga of fathers and sons, blinding romance, lost love, and reconcilation—culminating in one final triumph that reconfigures the universe. A tour de force of storytelling, Everything Matters! is a genre-bending potpourri of alternative history, sci-fi, and the great American tale in the tradition of John Irving and Margaret Atwood.

Similar to: Kurt Vonnegut, Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”

Highlights:

--morbid, dark humor

--science fiction that people who much prefer literary fiction will actually enjoy

--this book makes you THINK…the ending just might change the way you look at the world and your role in it