The Pleasure of the Text

By Roy Trakin

As I get older, I'm reading more and more voraciously, trying to squeeze in all those books I've been meaning to get to, knowing that time is so fleeting. I wander the aisles at Barnes & Noble, and wonder who has time for all the wonderful individual worlds created by the separate authors. Man, I wonder what Chuck Klosterman's novel is like. Dude's already on his second novel and I'm still blogging. I'm impressed. I never did read all of Burroughs or Bukowski. Wonder if I should start now. That Dave Eggars is sure busy. I still like the feel in my hands of a well-made trade paperback, with a cover that cries out: "You mean you haven't read Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes?"  The more illiteracy you see in cyberspace, the more we must value the well-written book, a cool narrative, the creation of an alternative universe that swallows you up and spits you back a week or two later.  And it's even OK if you consume it on a Kindle, but I'm not about to give up my physical tablets just yet. So here's my list of my own favorite reads of the year, totally arbitrary, of course, because I may go back at any point and intersperse a classic, like I did this year with Anna Karenina, alongside something that just came out.

1. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage)/The Girl Who Played With Fire (Knopf): This is the publishing story of the year, the posthumous "Millennium" trilogy of translated novels (the third is not available in the States until next year) penned by a left-wing Swedish journalist who passed away before the books came out and proved an international sensation. The most promising mystery writer since Caleb Carr drags the Agatha Christie whodunnit into the 21st century with the first book, then does the same for the policier procedural/spy thriller in the second. These are genre works that succeed on the strength of their compelling main characters--the author's dogged, hyper-rational stand-in Mikael Blomkvist and his foil, Lisbeth Salander, a remarkable post-feminist, androgynous, bisexual punk computer hacker, a completely modern creation that gives the stories their rock and roll kick. Throw in tantalizing tidbits of Swedish economics, politics, pop culture, geography, street names and, intriguingly, sexual mores and you have the ingredients of the year's best read.

2.  Zachary Lazar, Sway (Little, Brown): Lazar's fevered psychedelic meditation on the ‘60s weaves together overlapping mythologies in the Stones, Kenneth Anger and Charles Manson into a sardonic and satanic web.  With an apocalyptic flair, Sway explores the dark side of the peace and love idealism like some kind of Rock & Roll Babylon.

3. Deirdre O'Connell, The Ballad of Blind Tom (Overlook/Duckworth): A remarkable history of a forgotten 19th century pop culture hero, a blind Civil War era slave, classical piano prodigy and expert mimic, turns into a fascinating meditation on the nature of race, culture and creativity set against an America trying to heal after the Civil War. O'Connell's tale touches on the strange, ephemeral nature of show business celebrity in a way that has much to say about our own tabloid-ridden times.

4. Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, edited by Anthony DeCurtis (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)/Robert Hilburn, Cornflakes with John Lennon (Rodale): The reigning pop music critics for the N.Y. and L.A. Times, respectively, contemporaries for many years, couldn't be more different in their approaches. Palmer is rigorously analytical, roots-driven, a musician himself, while Hilburn puts himself more in the position of the wide-eyed fan and creative enabler. Still, there are similarities in that each put their subjects at ease and masterfully draw them out about their motivations and ambitions in creating music, while each tries to get at its spiritual and transcendent essence--Palmer as a player, Hilburn a listener. Both practiced daily newspaper music journalism in its glorious ‘60s-‘90s heyday when they were fortunate to preside over a period of almost uninterrupted growth and limitless possiblities. Unfortunately, it's left to the rest of us to sift through the remains.

5. Janis Ian, Society's Child (Tarcher/Penguin)/ Tommy James w/Martin Fitzpatrick, Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells (Scribner/Simon & Schuster): Two autobiographies from a pair of survivors, who started out as starry-eyed teenage pop idols, then learned the hard way about the realities of the music industry. Ian's sardonic, sometimes bitter, but never-less-than impassioned look is filled with tremendous anecdotes, especially of her days in the ‘60s Greenwich Village folk scene hanging out with Jimi Hendrix and avoiding a young Bob Dylan's lecherous advances. James rides a similar path, from a Midwestern That Thing You Do!-style hit single in "Hanky Panky," breaking in Pittsburgh, of all places, to his stormy relationship with legendary Jewish music mogul Morris Levy at Roulette Records, long rumored as a front for the mob. 

6. Harvey Kubernik, Canyon of Dreams (Sterling Publishing): A remarkable pop history of L.A. music, this feverish, stream-of-association rap enclosed inside a lavish, coffee-table tome, comes courtesy of the City of Angels' most indefatigable cheerleader and keeper of arcane cultural ephemera. Here he uses the mythic Laurel Canyon as a jumping-off point to riff on Hollywood's own musical footprint from the roaring Twenties to present-day, interviewing both the familiar and the not-so-familiar to paint a full portrait of a city's soul by one of its chief chroniclers, with reproductions of classic Henry Diltz photographs and the author's own memorabilia making it a must-own.

7.  Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road (Broadway/Crown/Random House): Considering its reclusive subject Tom Waits wouldn't even grant him an audience--and did his best to scare his friends and associates away, too--Hoskyns gives a remarkably even-handed, sympathetic analysis of the calculations behind the boho poet-turned-Beefheartian punk provocateur's carefully constructed public image. As always, his strength is in locating the link between Waits' work and events in his personal life, and even better, he sends you back to the original music with a deeper appreciation.

8. Larry Harris, And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (Backbeat Books): Those were the days, and one-time label exec Harris doesn't hold back on the sex, drugs and glittery heyday of the legendary Neil Bogart-led label that brought the world Donna Summer, disco and Kiss. Reads like a great movie screenplay ... call it the sequel to Thank God It's Friday.

9. Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (Oxford Press): Before the estimable researcher and convincing polemicist gets to his wrong-headed, hysterical conclusion, he constructs a compelling argument about how some pop music artists are underrated because of their popularity, which he traces back to the dawn of the recording era.

10. Paul Shaffer, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives (Flying Dolphin Press/Random House): Don't shoot the piano-player. Our genial Thunder Bay landsman MC offers a breezy, anecdotal view of his life in show business, bridging the divide between pre and post-Beatles hip with an Ed Sullivan Show view of the world, featuring fun he-was-there reminiscences about the early days of Second City, Saturday Night Live, his years as David Letterman's second banana and musical director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.