I grew up in the 1980s. Those were my teenage years and, like Rob Sheffield in Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, the music of that decade figures prominently in who I was then and the person I am today.

Much of the music that came out of the 80s is still some of my favorite music of all time: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, and The Replacements along with single wonders like "Say It Isn't So," "Don't You Want Me," "Girls On Film," and any hit off of Madonna's first album.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran proves that our memories are undeniably linked to music. Like the flashbacks you get when you hear a certain song, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is a continuous flood of stories triggered by listening to a single song. The stories are Rob's but each of us has our own stories for each song, too.

The book is full of Sheffield's great commentary on 80s pop music gold. For instance:

The Banana Splits didn't look any more ridiculous pretending to play guitars than Missing Persons did.

If you're making fun of somebody for having new-wave hair, the words "You! Flock of Seagulls!" are going to come up.

Of all the complex females in my life, Madonna was the one who taught me how to be completely exasperated by a woman, and how to like it.

The Replacements were imaginary friends who I could practice on while I was learning to have actual friends.

As someone who felt the same way about The Replacements -- and much of the music of my teenage years -- Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is a conversation with old friends over a box of records and cassingles.

Ah, John Waters. Campy, filthy, subversive, delightful.

I'm not a big fan of his films but you have to admit the guy has balls. And in his book Role Models he proceeds to entertainingly write about the people who have influenced his unique style and outlook on life.

For instance, this passage about the great Tennessee Williams:

Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend. I yearned for a bad influence and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing, and dangerously funny. I didn't quite "get" "Desire and the Black Masseur" when I read it in One Arm, but I hoped I would one day. The thing I did know after finishing the book was that I didn't have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society's rules. I didn't have to worry about fitting in with a crowd I didn't want to hang out with in the first place. No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn't want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.

From Tennessee Williams to Johnny Mathis, Lady Zorro (the lesbian stripper from Waters' hometown of Baltimore) to designer Rei Kawakubo, Little Richard to pornographer Bobby Garcia, Waters regales us with stories about his role models as if we were sitting together over cocktails at some Baltimore dive bar on a Friday night. Yes, please.

Blake Nelson has an exceptional ability to tap into what it's really like to be a teenager. Most of us look back on our teenage years with our adult perspective and write them off to the awkwardness of adolescent social life and the transition into impending adulthood. That changes our perspective, though. We forget what it was really like. And that's what Nelson captures so well: that teenage psyche, the internal struggle we forget. The "problems" teenagers have are overshadowed, almost reduced in scope, by the real problems and responsibilities that com with being an adult.

It's those real problems, the very real internal struggle and turmoil, that haunts Paranoid Park. The main character, a 16 year old skater, is so caught up with the thoughts inside him that he can hardly enjoy or even live the life of a "normal" teenager.

From his internal monologue:

It made me mad that people always talked about helping teenagers. There was always some new program, some new plan to help kids. There were ads on TV, on the radio. Hotlines, and this and that. But did any of it work? Not in the slightest. Here I was, with a real problem, with a serious problem, but was there anywhere I could go? Who do you call when something really goes wrong? Those geeks in the student-counseling office? When you had a real problem, there was nothing you could do, no one you could talk to. It was so typical. And so unfair. Why didn't they set up an anonymous number you could call, so you could talk to someone who actually knew something, someone who could give you real advice and tell you what your options were?

For once in my life I genuinely needed help, and where could I go? There was nowhere. There was nothing. And it really pissed me off.

Nelson makes dwelling in the mind of a teenager as interesting and psychologically compelling as dwelling in the mind of an adult.

Here's the thing about autobiographical essays: they matter deeply to the person writing them. Enough to even write the essays in the first place. Yeah, we all like to write or talk about ourselves and, ultimately, when we do it's for our own satisfaction, catharsis, empowerment, or whatever. So does it really matter what other people think?

That's why I like Emily Gould's collection of essays about her life before and upon arrving in New York City, And The Heart Says Whatever. Gould never pretends for it to be a collection of life lessons, for her or the reader. It's one person's story of life as a young adult in one of the most exciting and opportunity-filled cities in the world. Gould feels "the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel." Sometimes you're in control, other times you're not. Sometimes you make the right decisions, other times you don't.

This is one of the most painful things about getting older, especially getting older in the same place where you were young: the constant realizations that you could have been doing everything better all along, if only you'd known how to read the map more accurately.

While at times I found myself pushing myself through to the end of a story, what I took from most of the essays is a sense of no regrets. Sure, some things could have been approached or carried through differently, but Gould did the best she could -- like each and every one of us has in our own lives, good results or bad -- and "would do it all again."

It's pretty obvious by now that I love to read. I'm not always good about following through with recommendations from others, though. I have pretty specific tastes as far as my fiction goes.

So in an effort to open myself up to the recommendations of others I signed up for The Rumpus Book Club.

The Rumpus is one of my favorite websites. Books, music, film, comics, art, sex -- they cover it all. Our tastes jive. I trust them. So it was a no-brainer to let them pick one of the books I read each month by joining the book club. (Get more details about The Rumpus Book Club here.)

The inaugural The Rumpus Book Club book is the John Brandon's second novel, Citrus County. (The Rumpus Book Club members received this one a month or two before it's release date from McSweeney's -- another club perk.)

So here I go opening myself up to the recommendations of others and the first book is mainly about a sociopath that does some pretty disturbing shit. So disturbing, in fact, that I find it difficult to continue reading the book after the first 75 pages or so.

This passage is from the first part of the book:

As far as Toby could tell, Uncle Neal's business was to clean things that nobody else would clean, from grimed old engines to abandoned slaughterhouses. Toby's uncle, it was safe to say, was a pariah. He lived in a world of regret, if not remorse -- about what, Toby couldn't say. Toby's uncle always joked about killing himself, and Toby had begun to suspect he wasn't joking. He didn't have much incentive to stay alive. Uncle Neal, like everyone else, believed Toby was a run-of-the-mill punk, another angst-ridden adolescent. He had no clue what Toby was capable of.

But here's the thing about a damn good book like Citrus County: as disturbing as the story is, Brandon's writing is so methodical and intriguing that you can't stop reading. I wanted to stop a few times but couldn't. I had to find out what would happen, how the characters would deal with their predicaments, and how Brandon would twist and turn the tale towards the end -- despite the disturbing shit.

I stuck with it, putting my faith in Brandon's writing to get me through it. It was worth every word.

Reliable mediocrity, I've decided, is the most important thing for the continuation of human existence. We can't get by on Romantic disaster. We would die of exhaustion.

The words of Addison Schacht, our hero in Sam Munson's wonderful debut novel, The November Criminals.

Addison spends most of the novel -- which is actually his rambling and blunt admissions essay to the University of Chicago -- confessing to everything that is on his mind as he finishes his senior year in high school. The confessions are anything but typical for a white, Jewish seventeen year old.

That fact coupled with Munson's wonderfully descriptive and empathic prose make for an engrossing read.

For instance, this passage about the gun Addison and his girlfriend Digger have just acquired for "protection":

A huge percussive cough, from nowhere. A simultaneous kick from the gun itself. My nerves sang. And a reverberant gong-beat rose from the car heap and indistinct night birds took flight on both riverbanks. "Jesus fuck," Digger screamed, scuttling even farther away and shifting her hands: the right now tented over her heart, the left still over her ear. Posed like an old-timey phone operator. You know, a switchboard girl or whatever? Listening to some outrageous conversation. The swift, tremendous noise of the shot itself thrilled me. Just that simple: it thrilled me. I won't lie. Although the weird target we'd set up had survived my assault untouched. Digger walked back and slumped against me, shoulder-to-shoulder, in comradely praise. Her heart was vibrating, and I caught her scent as I massaged my tingling shooting arm. "Holy shit, man," she whispered. "Holy shit. Can I try?"

Joshua Braff's Peep Show is a messy tale of an extremely dysfunctional family. How dysfunctional, you ask? One parent is Hasidic (mother) and the other a reluctant pornographer (father). The sadness and hilarity take off from there.

Narrator and budding photographer David Arbus is seventeen years old and lives, almost reluctantly, with his father and his stripper girlfriend. Meanwhile, his younger sister Debra lives with their mother and is entrenched in the life of a Hasid. The conflicts, both in his head and with his parents, fill David with immense turmoil. For instance:

Tuesday morning is my graduation. My father wakes me with another new camera. It's a Graflex, a Crown Graphic 4x5 with an Ektar 127mm f/4.7 lens. He puts it in my hands before I even open my eyes and it's beautiful and thoughtful. "Got it for dirt cheap," he says, and I hear Brandi in the hallway, "It's from me too."

"I love it," I say, and when she pokes her head in, I think of my mother and whether she knows what day it is. If I call her, she'll say, right, right, I'm so sorry and tell me it's some Jewish holiday like Erev Stinchus Pinchus. I'll tell her she's a better stripper than a mother, a better liar that a Hasid. Yeah. That'll make her love me.

Peep Show is sad, sensitive, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking.

Check out this reading of Peep Show by Joshua Braff's brother, Zach Braff.

I'm on a roll with contemporary fiction. Sam Lipsyte, Nick Hornby, James Hynes, Per Petterson, and, now, Jonathan Tropper.

This Is Where I Leave You is one of the most entertaining, laugh-out-loud books I've read since Lipsyte's The Ask a couple of weeks ago. The family in the book, The Foxmans, are funny, vulnerable, sarcastic, misguided, smart, and so alike that they can't stand being around each other for any extended amount of time, let alone the time it takes to sit shiva after the death of a the family's patriarch.

This passage, immediately following an episode where a piece of a toddler's poop goes flying through the dining room and onto the plate of one of the Foxman siblings, is particularly telling:

We are all standing now, posed around the table like a painting, the Foxman family minus one, contemplating the steaming, erudite turd on Paul's plate. It's utterly inconceivable that we will survive seven days together here, caroming off each other like spinning molecules in a chemical reaction. There's no way to know how it will all shake out, but as far as metaphors go, you can't do much better than shit on the good china.

Stop reading this blog post right now and go get a copy of This Is Where I Leave You.

Now!

Calvin Tomkins' Lives of the Artists profiles ten major contemporary artists: Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, and John Currin. (Each profile was originally published in The New Yorker during the last decade, compiled, and, if necessary, updated here.) Each of these ten has made a significant impact on the art world in the last 40 years, some not even by way of the art they've created.

Tomkins, from the preface:

[Contemporary] art, it seemed, could be whatever artists decided it was, and there were no restrictions on the new methods and materials -- from video and verbal constructs to raw nature and urban detritus -- that they could use. The limitless freedom of the modern artist has been an unending burden. If art can be anything, where do you begin?

Where to begin, indeed. This collection features many different starting points, both in the artist's place in the world and in the artwork itself. However, it's by no means a ten best or meant to be representative of art today. Tomkins doesn't imply that and neither do I. "Common denominators are notably absent," he writes.

Lives of the Artists, though, is a good intro to the lives beyond the work of some artists I didn't know much about (Turrell, Currin, Barney, Hirst) and a refresher of sorts to some I did know quite a bit about (Sherman, Schnabel, Johns, Koons). And in Cattelan's instance, it made me like him less while giving me a greater appreciation of his work. Go figure.

Mother, wife, doctor, adulterer, protagonist, and human Katie Carr from Nick Hornby's novel How to Be Good:

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

You just have to love someone.

Yep, that about sums it up.

I love Michael Chabon's writing. As a fan of his work -- and a husband, father, and son -- I couldn't resist picking up a copy of his collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.

It's actually one of the most impulsive book purchases I have ever made. I saw it on the "New in Paperback" table at Barnes & Noble, read "Michael Chabon" and the title, picked it up, and went straight to the checkout line. That's some devil may care book buying.

Reading Manhood for Amateurs I felt as if I was sitting next to Chabon at a bar, each of us (well, mainly him) telling each other stories about our lives as husbands and fathers -- talking to your kids about drugs, our relationships with women, geekdom, being handy around the house, and so much more.

These lines ring especially true, for some guys more than others:

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls.

But what really makes Chabon's essays shine is when he hits on our human condition, not just as men, but as parents and people who care about things.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that "our most precious resource is our children." But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; and then you're gone, and it's time for somebody else to have the floor.

That's the thing that always gets me about Chabon's work, be it in these essays or the magnificent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: it's the experiences we share, not those we own or keep to ourselves, that make us who we are.

The Ask is one of the funniest and saddest books I've read in a while. Sam Lipsyte has introduced us to a bunch of people, just like each and every one of us, the main one being self-obsessed protagonist Milo Burke, who are full of delusions and anxieties on everything from parenting, marriage, and medocrity to office politics, work, and wealth.

Milo coming to a realization that will stick with him until the page turns:

But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.

The Ask is a marvelous book that shows us just how funny our deepest fictions can be.

Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Her prose is magic, regardless of the subject matter. So when I came across her non-fiction book Miami recently at a used bookstore it was a must have.

I was born and raised in Miami, the son of Cuban immigrants. I'm a first generation American and am strongly defined my the culture I grew up in, which, in turn, was still very deeply rooted in the norms of life and living in Cuba.

Didion's book attempts to capture the dichotomy of living in Miami, an American city, after Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba sent thousands of exiles, Cubans who never wanted to emigrate in the first place, there to live in the late 1950s and on. So many Cubans, in fact, that the majority of the population in Miami by the end of the 1970s was Cuban.

Didion does an amazing job capturing Miami during the Reagan years. The book was researched and written in the 1980s so much of the book revolves around the Miami characters and events of the time: Jorge Mas Canosa, Xavier Suarez, Raul Masvidal, Reagan himself, Orlando Bosch, and the list goes on.

This was my Miami. I was a teenager there in the 1980s, coming into my own ideas, not my parents' or the community's, about being Cuban American, about Castro, about la lucha, and el exilio. This book takes me back and gives plenty of new perspective and history I was too young to understand or even know about.

It's too much to go into here so I recommend reading Miami. One line from the book, among many, resonates:

The scars el exilio inflicts upon its own do not entirely heal, nor are they meant to.

The Cuban experience in Miami is a complicated one. One thing's for sure, I'm very proud of who I am: a Cuban American with an emphasis on the latter and filled with the pride of the former.

Only in Miami...

Jack Kerouac.

It should come as no surprise when I tell you that Jack Kerouac has been a big influence on me. Yep, I'm one of those guys that read On The Road at 20 or so and in no time at all was zippin' across the country and back. Not on a freight, mind you. Instead there was a trusty Toyota, airplanes, Greyhound buses, friend's cars, and the traveling caravans known back in those days as Grateful Dead shows.

When I finally settled on a place to live -- Asheville, North Carolina, on my own, no old friends, and a whole life out there for the makin' -- I read The Dharma Bums for the first time. It was the perfect book for my next phase of my life.

Twenty odd years later The Dharma Bums still stirs me up. It's like reading an old journal. I can picture the exact place where I spent my days reading and living it out. It was the perfect book for that phase of my life.

It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.

Amen, Jack.

Every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

This wonderful graphic novel -- David Mazzucchelli's first -- is the story of a self-centered, pompous architect/professor named Asterios Polyp. It's a fascinating story of how changing the way you look at and live your life can alter your whole perspective.

Mazzucchelli's use of color, white space, the panels, and different design styles and type for each character also makes the novel very intriguing. This panel, for instance:

A pretty good story with amazing graphics and design. Well worth the extra reads, too.

My son brought a book home from library recently called Too Many Toys by David Shannon.

After reading it to him a couple of times I kept thinking that this illustration looked really familiar.

Then it came to me. It reminds me of the cover of the King Crimson album In the Court of the Crimson King.

Prog rock meets children's books. Worlds collide.

I wonder if David Shannon is a King Crimson fan?

"You'll pardon my saying so," says Claudia, "but you seem to be a man who jumps to conclusions."

"You need to pay attention, man."

The latest novel by James Hynes is called Next and, it's funny, because the protagonist -- Kevin -- spends the whole book never really knowing or stopping to truly think about what's next for him. Never has, actually. He speculates, assumes, and jumps to conclusions, all the while cursed with fear and sadness for his past, present, and future.

Throughout the book Kevin marks his past according to four significant women/lovers in his life and plans his future with every woman he glances at or talks to in the present. One of those significant women from his past is referred to as "the Philosopher's Daughter." No real name, just a distinctive title given to a woman he was in love with over 25 years ago. You know this girl is on a mighty high pedestal.

"Meantime, I'm half-watching this goddamn movie, and half-watching the Philosopher's Daughter nestled in the arms of this asshole who has no idea how lucky he is. And the thing is, she knows I'm watching her. She catches me at it, and she doesn't look away. She doesn't say anything, doesn't smile, doesn't frown, just watches me back until I can't stand it anymore, and I have to look back at the screen. And that's the moment I knew I was in love with her, and it's also the moment when I knew that I was as big a pussy as Gregory Peck in that movie, because I was afraid to do anything about it.

It's hard to really talk too much about this book and not give it all away. It's an amazing piece of social satire that reflects the world we live in now, haunted by the world we lived in -- or created in our minds -- before.

Since this novel just came out last month there's a lot of talk going on about it around the internets right now. Much worth reading. For instance:

James Hynes does Book Notes over at Largehearted Boy (where "authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book").

An excerpt of the novel over at James Hynes' website.

Worthy reviews of Next by author Claire Messud at The New York Times Book Review and the venerable Bookslut.

...and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.

I first heard about Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses a few years ago when The New York Times was raving about it in the Book Review. (They even excerpted the first chapter, available here.)

Having just finished the book I can see why they drooled all over it. The story is as dense as a Norwegian forest and just as beautiful. Petterson's prose is rich with descriptions of the landscape of both the physical and, especially, the mind.

The protagonist, sixty-seven year old Trond Sander, on why he moved to the woods by himself:

In the course of one month they [ED: his wife and his sister] both died, and after they were gone I lost interest in talking to people. I really do not know what to talk to them about. That is one reason for living here. Another reason is being close to the forest. It was part of my life many years ago in a way that nothing later has been, and then it was absent for a long, long time, and when everything around me suddenly turned silent, I realised how much I had missed it. Soon I thought of nothing else, and if I too were not to die, at precisely that point in time, I had to go to the forest. That's how it felt, and that simple. It still is.

They felt no need to question the logic of it, and simply accepted its presence gratefully.

Every now and then you find a book that appears interesting, pick it up off of the shelf, read a page or two, become intrigued, take it home, and, upon finishing the book, realize you've been given a wonderful gift.

That's what reading Shaun Tan's graphic novel Tales from Outer Suburbia is like. We've all experienced pragmatic variations on the tales themselves, which makes them all the more poignant. And each story is lovingly wrapped around Tan's beautiful illustrations.

From the tale "Stick Figures":

Are they here for a reason? It's impossible to know, but if you stop and stare at them for a long time, you can imagine that they too might be searching for answers, for some kind of meaning. It's as if they take all our questions and offer them straight back: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want?

It only took me 19 years to read this book about my generation, good ol' Generation X. Talk about a slacker.

One of the things I love most about Generation X is the collection of pre-web "hypertext" information throughout the book. Small chunks of defined slang and illustrations to guide non-Gen X'ers along, if you will.

Some of my faves:

VEAL-FATTENING PEN: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

CLIQUE MAINTENANCE: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: "Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain."

CULT OF ALONENESS: The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

It's a lot of pressure for a single book to represent a whole generation. In fact, it can't. But as I read this book there were a few things here and there that made me think "yeah!" or prompted fond looks back to the early to mid 1990s.

I like my nostalgia in small doses. So after reading Generation X and listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magik a couple of times I was ready to return to the present and look longingly towards the future.

That is, after I cynically complained about kids today and all.