Five Books I Loved This Year, And One I Hated

The now traditional list of five books I read this year that I loved, plus one I really disliked. These are books I read this year, not necessarily ones that came out this year (though several did).

Stay Crazy by Erica Satifka. I blurbed this one! "Had Philip K. Dick lived through riot grrrl and the collapse of the America's industrial economy, STAY CRAZY would be his memoir. Erica Satifka is a prophet." I think this book was hilarious, telling, and raw. It definitely worked hard to avoid crazy-person-is-magic cliches at the same time. Plus, after the largely unexpected election result, the United States will become more and more like the town in Stay Crazy. I'd said that Satifka was a prophet before Trump won the election—I hate to be a prophet myself, but...

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn. I loved the Patrick Melrose books a few years ago, and this...was not the same. Lighter, but funnier and a real page-turner, which one would not expect from the theme of the jurors of a major UK literary award and the ridiculous writers whose books are in contention. St. Aubyn casually shows off his utter mastery of everything by producing several paragraphs from this or that book, like a commercial thriller and that the supposedly gritty Glasgow realism of a novel called wot u starin at. I usually read during my commute, but sometimes my phone is more interesting. Not this time, it was book book book, to the point where one day I forgot the book on my desk and realized it as the train was pulling out of my station. I got off at the next stop, walked back to my office, and collected the book to read.

The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band by Michelle Cruz Gonzales. I don't even like Spitboy all that much.


They weren't great.

And the book, a slim volume, read like a series of blog posts. But the story was still immensely compelling to me, as was the look at an already forgotten moment in music history. I do like a memoir that chugs along, with political asides about race and gender and music and the usual. This is a good one of those. It was ultimately much greater than the sum of its parts, perhaps because the writing was effortless and read like reportage rather than memoir. Think of it as an extremely interesting conversation with someone you just met who did a lot of fun, and some scary, things as a teen while you were just sitting home playing video games during those years.

Heart of the Original by Steve Aylett. If you haven't ready Aylett you're...like most people. Too bad! I think he's a wonderful writer, a bon mot generation machine. Heart is non-fiction, a work about creativity. Or rather, it is a work that attempts to rewire your mind in order to help remove the obstacles to creativity you face: society, countercultural ideas, bipedalism, that sort of thing.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. Sometimes a writer deserves to be a best-seller. Flynn, she dirty. Man, this is a rough book, and creepy as shit. It was the first book I read this year. Due to a problem with a SuperShuttle, I ended up accompanying my wife and kid to the airport via the Long Island Railroad after spending New Years with my folks, only to get right back on the train and travel two hours back out. My phone was dead, so I bought this book as it was The Only Acceptable Title at the Walgreens across from the Jamaica LIRR station. I would have missed my stop, but it was on the end of the line. Flynn is a master of punching you into unconsciousness, and then when you wake up you realize that she sliced off your nose and replaced it with your toe, forever, while you were out. A year later, I still remember every horrifying moment.


And now...

Diary Of An Oxygen Thief by Anonymous. Molly Tanzer once told me, "All your favorite books are the same—some asshole is a wreck for 80,000 words." That's accurate. But I still didn't like this book, about some asshole from Ireland who emigrates to the US, works in advertising, is a wreck even after he stops drinking, and meets a girl who makes fun of him a bit at some gallery opening. There was a lot of rhetorical build-up from the narrator about a whole lot of nothing. I have fond memories of worse relationships than the ones this guy is whining about so giddily. It's the worst example I've ever encountered of my favorite book; it's what people who are very suspicious of books about the low life think books about the low life are actually like. As the President-elect likes to say: Sad!