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.