Jake Kilroy's 2014 Year of Reading

In 2014, I read a lot of books and graphic novels, and I listened to a lot of audiobooks. These were my favorites.

Novels, Novellas & Collections
1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugendies
What a gorgeous, honest read. What a vivid, heartbreaking, wonderful history created from nothing. All the weirdness of existence is here, especially for a character that thrives as their own anomaly. Cal(liope), the intersex narrator of the tale, reccounts the family's progression through the whole of the 20th Century. Real life is almost impossible to write, and it's done here with majesty, enthusiasm, and sincerity, painting a rich portrait without ever overusing literary devices.

2. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Even at his supposed "most accessible," Pynchon and his chaotic tale criss-crosses itself a dozen times a paragraph. It's all-out jivey in narrative, not just dialogue, and it's written in the immaculate slang of a doper, not as one of the most enigmatic authors of the 20th Century. It's got a mouthful of noir with tastes for surf lit, and it's totally wild to read and rewarding to dissect.

3. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
This book is so much goddamn fun, both in dialogue and narration. Philip Marlowe is the smoothest blend of tough guy, goof, and wise-ass. It allows him to be capable of pretty much anything (without having the luck of a saint). Sly and stylish.

4. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
With Gaiman, it's always the real world that's been shaken up. And he makes it seem easy, almost obvious. Why not? Why can't our perceived reality be just a shred of existence?  Here, a boy narrator takes notice of the very great darkness that lurks in the corners of the quiet countryside, and then everything goes haywire.

5. Without Feathers by Woody Allen
This collection is just as silly, satirical, and ridiculous as it is thoughtful, philosophical, and diligent. It's so precise with its absurdism with each short story, essay, or play. It knows the bounds of every joke, with a tone that could challenge an academic or crack wise with the class clown.


Graphic Novels
1. Scott Pilgrim (Complete Series, Volumes 1-6) by Bryan Lee O'Malley
All of the details of a man's early twenties can be found here. Those minute, tiny, perplexing cracks in existence every young adult has are evaluated here without ever dwelling too long. This series is so over-the-top goofy (with the premise of a spaz musician defeating Nintendo-like exes) and yet strangely accurate in its tenderness and "What am I doing?" moments of hopeless efforts. It's also legit funny. I loved the shit out of it.

2. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi 
This should be required reading. Written with the ease of a conversation, we witness extremists employ Islam as a cultural weapon and turn Iran into a different country altogether in the late 1970s. Told from the point of view of its author, evolving from naive girl to worldly woman, it's charming, painful, educational, and, above all, sincere. Easily one of the most triumphant examples of memoir.

3. Saga (Volumes 3 & 4) by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples
It's still Star Wars with sex, violence, and swear words, and it continues to be so rad. That's all. It's just cool as hell. You should be reading this.

4. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Memoirs are an especially delicate bag of tricks, and Bechdel nails it as true without glory and emotional without tragedy. It's breathtaking in its scope of reality, with themes ranging from sexual discovery to familial loneliness. With a focus on the complicated relationship with her father, Bechdel  remembers summers and holidays of the 1960s and '70s. Expansive and engaging.

5. Astro City (Volumes 1-4, 8) by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross
No other series crafts its own world of superheroes so articulately and passionately while remaining so balanced. Heroes and villains are created and then given histories and identities as defined as DC and Marvel characters, but their stories are told with way more focus on humanity than unreality.

6. Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá
A beautiful story, and an equally alluring collection of artwork; a man's life measured if he died continually. Nothing sci-fi, mind you. Just an abstract acknowledgement that life is valuable and fragile. It takes its time to set a tempo of experience, noting how magical and important the mundane can (or should) be.

7. East Of West (Volumes 1-3) by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta
Sci-fi, fantasy, and western genres mash up and kick ass in one of the coolest, loudest outings ever. Three of the four horsemen show up for the apocalypse. Death's missing, and it pisses off the other three. This is all while the dystopian U.S. comes to a boiling point because of the cowboy-twang of a quasi-religious war.

8. Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon
A balanced work, Vaughn tells the story of a pride of lions that escape the Baghdad Zoo after the city is bombed by the U.S. in 2003. The animals' interpretations of the fallen world around them is extraordinary (what great beast a tank is, why their keepers have fled, etc). So basic to mean so much.

9. Sex Criminals (Volume 1) by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky
So witty, so endearing, so fun, so self-aware, so alluring, so real, so out there. It's fantastic. A man and a woman can stop time when they have sex. They decide to rob a bank. It naturally gets complicated, and its voice is the best narration in comics.

10. Superman For All Seasons by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Loeb takes everything I've ever liked about Superman and carefully assigns him a deep, thorough identity and then examines it. It's a strange, fragile existence for the Man of Steel, as someone who sees the world as a human with entirely different capabilities and, therefore, fears.

11. Ex Machina (Complete Series, Volumes 1-10) by Brian K. Vaughn (and various artists)
Former superhero with enduring power to communicate with machines becomes mayor of New York City and deals with his past heroism and current politics. Humble in its humanity, wild in its weird, the story balances it all. It even makes use of some of the damn good political debates.

12. Pretty Deadly (Volume 1) by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Ríos
Contemporary magical realism meets old-world fable, featuring Death's daughter riding a horse made of smoke. Reads like it's told around a campfire in the Old West. Lush, mystic, and unruly.

13. Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown
Crudely drawn, but conveyed with joyous awkwardness and honesty, Brown tells the story of his first love and adult relationship. It has the most complete collection of scattered moments that I otherwise thought only existed in somebody else bringing them up. Fleeting instances of sex, fights, tenderness, all of it is remembered here in glorious true detail.


Nonfiction
1. Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut understands and explains humanity as if he were an alien doing a century-long thesis. He gets the humor of bullshit, and, here, he really comes to terms with how much mankind is destroying the planet and, more accurately, mankind. This is the angriest I've seen the poet laureate of the humanist movement, and it's really just a super pleasant man pretty damn annoyed.

2. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Success is a hard thing to articulate. This might be the closest we ever get to process: what matters, what should, what doesn't, et cetera. It's easy to get ramped up on rags-to-riches tales, but it's better to look at how and why. Often, it's the right person at the right place at the right time. They definitely work their asses off, but circumstance lends itself to the thrilling story more often than not, and it's so very easy to forget that.

3. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
Like its predecessor, this was a grand time. The economy is a spectacularly bizarre deal, and there's so much happening in the crevices, and the larger picture isn't typically even econ. The book jumps between bold stats and human interest stories, showing how cause and effect might be much different from what you thought.

4. Thunderstruck by Eric Larson
Total history, told like fiction. Mixes the Northend Celler Murder with the development of wireless communication. Carefully crafted, extraordinarily well-written. History is fascinating. It just needs a good storyteller.

5. I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections by Nora Ephron
I just enjoy Nora Ephron. This collection was fun. Even the most saddening observation of aging is told with a "oh, well, you know" class. As a human semi-landmark of the last era of "classic" New York (to me anyway—that late 20th Century New York—pre-9/11, I guess), her writing style reminds me of someone's favorite customer or client recounting a story.

10 Books That Made/Make Me Want To Be A Writer

My friend Valerie tagged me in a social media chain that drew up my immediate interest: 10 books that have stayed with you (in some way). Don't have to be favorites or classics. Just gotta be books that dove into ya and swam around each summer since. Shouldn't take much thought.

So here now, in order of my age reading them, are the ten books I remember finishing and thinking, "Dear god, be a writer."

• The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman

*Most Honorable Mention*

The book Australia: Land Of Contrast by Lesley Van de Velde was the first book to really blow up my imagination. It's just a gorgeous photo collection of Australia, but it's stayed with me in a powerful sense since I was in grade school. It made me want to travel and tell stories.

Tim Duncan's Pump-Up Mix

A list of the songs Tim Duncan (assumedly) listens to all day to get pumped up for the NBA Finals, with takes from Tony and Carlos.

TIMMY DUNK-DUNK'S JAM SESH DELUXE
1. "Jump, Jive an' Wail" - The Brian Setzer Orchestra
2. "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" - Wang Chung
3. “Hey, Soul Sister” - Train
4. "Wild Wild West" - Will Smith
5. "Mambo No. 5" - Lou Bega
6. "Uptown Girl" - Billy Joel
7. "Macarena" - Los Del Rio
8. "Don't Stop Believin'" - Journey
9. "We Built This City" - Jefferson Starship
10. "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" - Bryan Adams
11. "Iris" - Goo Goo Dolls
12. "Amish Paradise" - Weird Al
13. "Love is a Battlefield" - Pat Benatar
14. “Hotel California” - Eagles
15. "Come With Me" - Puff Daddy
16. "Livin' la Vida Loca" - Ricky Martin
17. "You Oughta Know" - Alanis Morissette
18. "Born In The U.S.A." - Bruce Springsteen
19. "One Of Us" - Joan Osborne
20. "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" - Green Day
21. "Closing Time" - Semisonic

4 Things I Feel Like You Can Stop Saying on Social Media

This is in jest, and I wasn't thinking of anyone in particular when I wrote it. It's just recurring phrases I've seen across the breadth of social media, and I think they're fascinatingly ludicrous.

1. "I can't even handle this."
By this point, you've probably experienced the rampaging adrenaline-fueled sweep of flames and madness that is love, and you've just as likely done that dry-stare harvest of heartache, but, sure, this eight-second video of a baby penguin tripping into the water has finally broken your brain. If it's limited to just "I can't," then it's nothing short of a miracle that you made it out of kindergarden with your debilitating sense of wonder. You must've shat yourself for days and begged some sort of god for the apocalypse upon witnessing the first 10 minutes of Avatar.

2. "This is seriously the most amazing thing I've ever seen."
Oh, not a majestic sunset after an already good day? Not the first time seeing a person naked? Not anything you've seen on any trip you've ever taken? This old picture of your friend with slightly longer hair is the most unbelievable sight you've ever had the absolute privilege to behold? We already did this to the word "best," and I don't know if we can afford to lose "amazing" to such totally concentrated and controlled hyperbole as well, because it may just be the single thing that will with take down American society and, in turn, western—nay!—all of civilization do you see how this fucks up the scale and makes everything crazy.

3. "Sorry not sorry."
Next time Fugazi is blasting of our your car speakers when your Camaro jumps the curb and sends your arch-nemisis to an early grave after you strike him on only two wheels, you should yell this. Next time you post a picture of a slightly messy burrito, maybe tone down the sass with your hashtags. Leave this to people who worship the Kardashians like goat-gods and blaze up their controversy level by dropping truth-bombs like, "I don't care what anyone says, I love spring."

4. "All the feels."
This is straight up inaccurate. If you are, for some insane reason, experiencing every emotion that exists, then I have a hard time imagining what you're looking at beyond a potentially Lovecraftian scene of Cthulhu and his minions overwhelming your nervous system. If "all the feels" isn't proceeded by a feverish exclamation of "dear god," as you clutch your head, while it pulsates in the presence of a horrifying alien existence that causes your nerves to slam together, as your own mindful wires get crossed and cut up inside you, I kind of feel like you could just say, "This picture of an otter cuddling another otter is pretty cute."

Jake Kilroy's 2013 Radical Year In Reading

I love end-of-the-year best-of lists. I like them for music, movies, babes you noticed at the local Chipotle, whatever. And my favorite is when friends' do it, because there's a 90% chance it's going to be less snooty and more excitable than critics. My main bag is reading, so that's what I bring to the table around new year's. The problem is that I jump around when it comes to what's on the shelves, so my annual end-of-the-year best-of sorts it out from what I read this year, not what came out this year.

Anyway, here are the best of the books, graphic novels, and audiobooks I took into my mangled brain in 2013! Woo!

NOVELS & NOVELLAS
1. Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
For some reason, it's a stunning achievement to make fiction real, and this had the precision of a daily sharpened blade. It wasn't always enjoyable, as life can often prove uneasy, but I had to know if The Corrections was a fluke. It wasn't. This book was just as vivid and huge and beautiful and infuriating (with even less likable characters, really). Just another American family from the midwest, afraid of everything and hungry for anything, simply trying to figure out one aspect of life after another, tripping over nostalgia and desire.

2. Bluebeard
by Kurt Vonnegut
In every work by Vonnegut, there's comedy in the tragedy, no matter how big or small. There's a tone of whimsical shrugging, even when life is explained as one big terrible impractical joke. It's never worked better than in this "autobiography" of the artist Rabo Karabekian, who has an item locked up in his barn that he doesn't feel compelled to show the world. It's absolutely gorgeous.

3. The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass
by Philip Pullman
This series had a pretty wild start with The Golden Compass, but part two and part three of His Dark Materials go for the weird dark madness of kid's imagination and adult-shaped reality. It's atheist mutiny along several worlds (including the land of the dead) that the good folks and bad people are leaping in and out of. The series expects the best of its young characters as well as its young adult readers, and it's one of the most articulate, intelligent young adult series ever. And it's kick-ass fantasy.

4. Live By Night
by Dennis Lehane
In this semi-sequel to one of my favorite books, The Given Day, the youngest member of the Boston cop family, The Coughlins, starts out on his own in the petty crime world as everything goes full swing into the Jazz Age. After getting mixed up with a few bruisers and dames, he takes on the grand, beautiful, illustrious world of Cuba and becomes a benevolent king of the whiskey trade during Prohibition. It doesn't romanticize anything, and it doesn't go over the top with grit. Tremendous.

5. The Garden of Eden
by Ernest Hemingway
It's hard to believe Hemingway wrote this character-driven sexy game. It's about a honeymooning couple that gets involved with a French girl, both in lust with her. Released more than 20 years after his death, after he worked on it for the last 15 years of his life, Hemingway's classic prose is present, along with his borderline poetic and hard-to-follow conversations, but it's unlike any of his other work. It's  wonderfully constructed by the hands of a writer who I assume was losing his grip at the time.

6. Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Yes, it took me way too long to finally read this book. If this had been my first Vonnegut, I would have a different opinion.  He cracks the jokes and he crafts the misery, and it's beautiful as always (though you can tell fine-tuning was coming in his technique). It's such a wonder how easy and impossible Vonnegut can make life seem simultaneously.

7. 1Q84
by Haruki Murakami
Even though it's one of the strangest sci-fi stories I've ever read, it's not too weird at all. The sci-fi is an element of a love story, but it's slow, meticulous character development instead. It's frustrating at times, since you want it to go big and wild with what's hinted at, but it sticks to the hearts and minds of two central characters accidentally wrapped up in another dimension of 1984.

8. Florence Of Arabia
by Christopher Buckley
A satire, this was among the first to joke about post-9/11 "war on terror and Islamist extremism." The main character, a CIA operative named Florence, travels to the fictional Middle Eastern country of Wasabia to start a women's television channel that suggests equality and pokes fun at male-established power. It's intended to start a culture revolution, but it spins out of control into cultural anarchy.

9. Eragon
by Christopher Paolini
An epic was written by a 15-year-old who understood the elements of good old school fantasy, it legitimately has everything you need or expect from an alternate medieval tale of dragons, wizards, trolls, rogues, and everything in between. It's strong, but it never gets brutal. It hits the spot if you're looking for the most thorough collection of medieval fantasy traits in one series.

10. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
This is a gorgeous book, but not because of the story or the narrative. It's actually because of what the book allows you to do on your own. A single sentence about a water drop on a leaf in a Japanese garden gives you an entire scene. It's breathtaking, but it's also tedious as hell for some of the first two-thirds. This book takes patience. The last third is perfect, but the first two acts are a bit slow-going and gives you significantly more than you need to follow the events of late 18th/early 19th Century Japan with employees of the Dutch East Indies settling themselves in and figuring out a new culture.


GRAPHIC NOVEL (SERIES)
1. Saga
by Brian K. Vaughn
It straight up feels like a wilder take on Star Wars with sex and swear words. But it's never gimmicky. It has touches of Firefly and Game Of Thrones, and it gives the story all the room it needs to be breathe.  Snarky and wise-ass romantic dude with ram horns and a brutal sword marries an honorable ex-soldier babe with the look of a punk and the wings of a fairy. Fairy has their lovechild, and the two lovebirds are on the run from just about everyone in the universe. This story could legitimately go in any and every direction, and I'm beyond stoked.

2. Top Ten
by Alan Moore
Alan Moore created a city where every single person is a superhero or supervillain, from movie stars to bums. They take the subway, they have day jobs, they have special powers, and they're always wearing costumes. This series follows a particular precinct as they battle radioactive drug dealers and alien prostitute serial killers. It's all so nuts, but the characters are human and complex and surprisingly real.

3. Morning Glories
by Nick Spencer
Described as "Lost at a boarding school," it has all the potential to learn from its predecessors. And if it doesn't, I'm going to lose my mind. If it does, it could be one of my all-time favorites. It's also crazy violent. I guess it's more like Lost meets Hunger Games meets The Faculty meets Archie in a way.

4. RASL
by Jeff Smith
As Smith's Bone has gone down as one of my absolute favorite things ever, I bought volume one of this series on a whim. Turns out it's fantastic, and it's done with bare-bone dialogue and a very small story with a huge sense of history. Former young scientist uses the Tesla's lesser known technology to drift between worlds and steal art to pay for his revenge plan. Yup.

5. JLA
by Grant Morrison
This series crafts these long-known superheroes as their most ideal and definable. It makes each member of the Justice League vivid and concrete. They have motivations, hesitations, and regrets. It's the strongest, most legit version of everyone.

*Special Shout-Out*
I read the entire DC Crisis storyline this year, from Crisis On Infinite Earths to Final Crisis, along with all of their lead-ups. That shit's too hard to gauge or even coherently explain, considering all of it being one massive clusterfuck of every hero and villain ever in the DC multiverse. It's a hell of a time though. I suggest you dive into that madness if you want to understand how DC's universe of characters (Batman, Superman, etc) exist in different variations of past, present, and future. It's not always great, and it almost never makes total sense.


GRAPHIC NOVELS (STAND-ALONES AND COLLECTIONS)
1. Identity Crisis
by Brad Metzler
This is what happens when you give a political thriller author a chance to fully embrace graphic novels and get buckwild with it. You get a murder mystery story with the Justice League that doesn't seem silly. It's personal and emotional, and it focuses on history and human interaction instead of anything super.

2. The Joker: Death Of The Family
by Various Authors
After a year-long disappearance, Joker returns more gnarly than ever (cutting off his own face and wearing it as a mask, for starters) to bring individual and very personal trauma to each member of the Bat Family to show how they slow down his beloved Batman. It's dirty and violent, with Joker showing what real insanity is (where murder is indistinguishable from a handshake).

3. Batman: The Black Mirror
by Scott Snyder
This made me feel so weird. In it, Commissioner Gordon's unhinged son is an all grown up serial killer taunting and teasing the Gordon family. It's tightly written and uncomfortable at every turn, and it's pacing and character vulnerability are on-point.

4. Batman: The Court Of Owls & The City Of Owls
by Scott Snyder
It's hard to do something new in a well-known history, but the whole Court of Owls rhyme/legend is slipped in the Gotham mythos so perfectly, it reads as if it was always there. It's a finely tuned Batman working with a fresh, exceptional history of his surroundings and the men that build the doomed city.

5. The Silencers: Black Kiss
by Fred Van Lente and Steve Ellis
A semi-comic story about villains, it makes it all seem plausible within the realm of superheroes (who they refer to as "The Tights"). You never see heroes beyond their arms and legs, but you get the evil-doers in all of their human glory, with the criminal leader, Cardinal, trying to retire and make a quiet life for himself.

MISCELLANEOUS
1. What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire
by Charles Bukowski
After enough Bukowski, a reader can anticipate him. He gambles at the horse tracks, he's always involved in some weird relationship with a woman that reeks of desperation, he can't stand the upstarts, he acknowledges his fame, he listens to classical music, he watches the city breathe, sure. But as the list grows longer, it becomes this breathtaking observation of everything and nothing. It's an astounding belief that life can be documented and detailed in poetry. He'll write about the grocery store, he'll write about dinner parties, he'll write about writing. I've read a lot of him, and this long-ass collection was the first time it felt like a conversation with the great poet laureate scoundrel.

2. Barrel Fever
by David Sedaris
This was a rare instance of reading a style that I tried to do when I was young. These were just absurd stories of things going wrong for people, and it made me laugh. Sure, short stories can be a powerful, moving, extraordinary medium...but they can also be great for nonsense. A collection of ridiculous premises (one actor's several-page-long Oscar speech, a mother/wife falling apart in a holiday newsletter, etc) that are articulate and well-crafted, so the silliness shines through as a glorious fiction.

3. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
This was more societal causes and effects than anything else really: how abortion in the '70s caused a decrease in crime in the '90s, how real estate agents go about selling their houses versus selling other people's homes, et cetera. It gets convoluted at times, and there's an air of "this is the real truth" when, in some cases, it seems like that's the entire argument against previous theories. It just doesn't carry the brute arrogance. Instead, it makes me appreciate data for being the truth-sayer it's always been and will always continue to be, boiling it all down to fun, wild, and accessible knowledge.

4. Wake Up: A Life Of The Buddha
by Jack Kerouac
As a total surprise to me, Kerouac wrote a true book about the life of Buddha. It's not jivey or jokey either. It's his retelling of Siddhartha Gautama and how he became the Enlightened One. It goes over concepts as part of the narrative, its dialogue is vibrantly religious, and it's a wildly good take on spirituality in general.

Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing

Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing
by Jake Kilroy

1. Read everything from western novellas to cereal boxes.

2. Let people know you write in your free time, so you appear deep and attractive, but don't boast enough to where they ask to read your stuff.

3. Don't date a writer that's better than you.

4. Briefly hate the entire activity of writing from time to time.

5. Have one moment in your life that you can definitely cite writing as something that saved you.

6. Impress someone you're attracted to with the written word every so often.

7. Write in different places and settings.

8. Be practically turned on by the sheer thought of publication.

9. Acknowledge that you're better than your peers, but not as good as the greats.

10. Steal.

2012: My Life In Books

For the last few years, I've set myself a goal of taking in 100 stories. This includes books, graphics novels, and audiobooks. I've always fallen short, except for this year. I finally did it, and, hot damn, I still think I need to make reading more of a priority. Anyway, as I've done before, here's my end-of-the-year recap of the best pieces of the written word that I read/listened to in 2012 (with the past and present tense battling each other pretty hard below).

Novels, Short Story Collections
1. House Of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
The most "book" I've ever read, this heavenly monstrosity went far beyond what I thought was capable of literature. It's the only thing I've ever read that honestly made me think "it's unlike anything else I've ever read." It terrifies me to own it, and I'll always, always, always want to talk about it.

2. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
An epic tale of gods in the modern world, this gorgeous read was violent, weird, wild, crazy, serious, and incredibly done, as it took the madness of fantasy and applied it to real-world darkness, leading up to the young gods of America battling the old realm gods of everywhere else.

3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon
It was Jewish noir, and it was unreal fantastic. I'd kill to be able to write noir like Chabon. Dead junkie in alternate history of Alaska sparks a detective stumbling upon a great conspiracy of politics and religion.

4. The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman
Young adult has seen a brilliant evolution in the last decade, and this book may be the best proof. It maturely and patiently took dark religious cynicism and smoothly stirred it together with wide-eyed adventure and exploration.

5. Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane
The follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, it's totally crime fiction, and it's totally the best example of the genre. It stomped the shit out of other mystery tales of by crafting real characters with real problems, real motivations, and real reactions.

6. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
After a lifetime of hype, this thing followed through with being the most stand-up, firmly articulate observation of southern culture. An immaculate read, it gave the world Atticus Finch, and he's just as amazing of a character as society has built him up to be.

7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

It's a satirical dystopian masterpiece, and it's written by one of the most energetic typewriter maestros. Every character lives in a tender moment of existence and offering up profound perspectives of literature and life. Also, it's fun as hell, even when it's serious.

8. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
I wish the adventure genre was still as mysterious and chilling and bold and wild as it used to be. This was exceptionally written, maddening and thrilling, while also posing as a thoughtful musing on man, nature, and the constant battle and love affair between the two.

9. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, by Kurt Vonnegut
A quick, delightful read, Vonnegut has the Doctor of Death kill him in each vignette and awakens to engage the most varied characters of history. It's light and silly while offering up some of the best philosophy of the 20th Century, but, then again, what Vonnegut work isn't and doesn't?

10. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson
The third installment of the Millennium Trilogy, it solidified the series as one of the most well-written "international sensations." It was strong and heavy while somehow seamlessly moving into the legal thriller genre.

11. The Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, by Elmore Leonard
All of the wild west tales from crime fiction's poet laureate, the short story collection rocked like a runaway train and moved carefully like a cautious outlaw. It had every pulpy move of cowboy classicism without ever doing cheap shots of Americana prairie.

12. B Is For Beer, by Tom Robbins
It's a kids book for adults and an adult book for kids, and it's about the righteous foamy brew. It carries innocent childhood fun as well as it does the straightforward dilemmas of adulthood.

13. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
Sort of like The Empire Strikes Back of young adult lit, this was a more in-depth outing of the trilogy (all before everything gets unnecessarily hectic in the third installment). Twas wild, fun excitement.


Graphic Novels
1. Bone, by Jeff Smith
A magnificent piece of the medium that works tremendously well for both kids and adults, it's like Lord Of The Rings meets Three Amigos. It's a solid reworking of medieval fantasy with stellar pacing, and it's funny, goofy, sad, strange, and, above all else, epic. I could've read it forever.

2. Habibi, by Craig Thompson
With gorgeous, immaculate artwork, it became a resounding non-linear story tied directly to the Quran. Beautiful, tragic, haunting and superbly told, the narrative of Muslim characters and culture was old world and majestic, and the epic was richly, wonderfully unraveled.

3. Funny Misshapen Body, by Jeffrey Brown
A sketchy graphic novel memoir, it was like catching up with an old friend who doodles. Nothing crazy, nothing tragic. It's just a nice dude recounting how he got through an average life and into art.

4. Hellboy (#1-12), by Mike Mignola
Outrageously self-aware pulpy horror tales, Hellboy and his crew take on one monster after another, and every creature of darkness hides a sly grin of the apocalypse. So, so, so fun.

5. Sin City (#1-7), by Frank Miller
Always violent, always brutal, always on the verge of a dirty joke, the neo-noir saga is intense and light somehow from start to finish. Pulpy and messy, it's wild and weird through and through.

6. Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent, by Ed Brubaker
It had nostalgia pluck away at the heartstrings without giving up the noir self-indulgence. The real world is gritty and dark, but the main's character's memories of childhood and his adolescence are done up like an Archie comic. It makes everything seems weirder, and it works really well.

7. Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol
Simply done, thoughtfully crafted, it's a high school tale of woe, brimming with ghost story entanglements and swimming with observations of Americanization from an endearing Russian teenage cynic.

8. Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes
Without a real plot, it's mostly just two teenage girls wandering their own world that bores them, so they criticize and imagine. It's overly realistic without trying to be, which makes it all the more honest and beautiful.

9. Blacksad: A Silent Hell, by Juan Díaz Canales 
With rich dialogue and richer animal humanoid characters, it's a dark and straight up cool classic noir with a swirling, almost Disney touch. I just wish the stories were longer.

10. The Man Who Laughs, by Ed Brubaker
The best incarnation of The Joker is the one that loves being crazy and admits that there's no alternative. It's why he's one of the best all-time villains: precision mixed with chaos. Poor Batman, with the most exhausting bad guy around.


Non-fiction, Plays, Poetry
1. Bossypants, by Tina Fey
Honestly, it's probably the funniest book I've ever read. It's funny almost line by line, and she doesn't fall back on memoir cliches or lose steam like a humorist. She chooses select moments in her life to utilize as chapters, and it's goddamn hilarious.

2. Pawnee: The Greatest Town In America, by Leslie Knope
It's pretty difficult to write a television companion book that doesn't suck, and this collection from the writers of Parks And Recreation posing as every single character, major or minor, was brilliantly done. It added a rich history to a fictional town that's silly and somehow believable.

3. No More Poems About The Moon, by Michael Roberts
I like the world within his poetry. It's everyday nonsense mixed with anything-is-possible-but-not-precious consideration. Butterflies in the kitchen, palm trees in the living room, hope in every heart.

4. My Life, by Bill Clinton
The start to finish life reflection of a charming goof, the memoir is so damn conversational, you almost expect him to use your name in the middle of the text. It's traditional, but so fun and engaging.

5. The Year Of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
In one year, Didion loses her husband and daughter, and the memoir documents the tiny details of grief while offering up a life meditation rarely seen so articulately done.

6. Churchill, by Paul Thompson
Winston Churchill was a lunatic, and it's impossible for anyone not to be fascinated by him. Teddy Roosevelt though Churchill was a brute, and Churchill thought Gandhi was an asshole. This biography, and probably every other Churchill biography, is amazing because it has history's best character.

7. Homegrown Democrat, by Garrison Keillor
One long, all-over-the-place musing on politics and growing up, Keillor recounts life in Minnesota and why it matters to be in the liberal crowd of America. It's whimsical and sly, even when it borders on preachy.

8. A Coney Island Of The Mind, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Purchased solely because of the name, the collection of titleless poems bounced around, all colorful and chiming. Twas the noises and images of an America you'd hope to find in a jazz club, read by a drinking buddy romantic with a lust for life.

9. The Importance Of Being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde
A play of and on the trivial, it's Victorian Era meets vaudeville, tripping over itself with boundless wit and goofy grace. It has every madcap farce cliche before they were cliches, mixing mistaken identities with societal scandals.

10. The Audacity Of Hope, by Barack Obama
Almost terrifyingly articulate, Obama observes his American life versus the American life in a slow, engaging musing posing as a memoir. It reads superbly clean.

Special Mention: Reread

On The Road, by Jack Keruoac
Not only does the book hold up, it's an entirely different story as an adult reader. I only recalled the wild hooligan fun and it being about adventure. But it's a tragic saga of men who can't give up their youth and freedom, and it's more about escape and desperation. The idea of "it" isn't cool, poetic gibberish. It's recognizing the failure of maturity.

Rex & Jake's 50-Book Reading Challenge

Many of you know Rex. If you don't, you should. He's a terrific individual.

But he's also a son of a bitch.

When he heard (from me) that I had an ongoing list of books I wanted to read before I die (Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, etc), Rex announced that he could and would read them all before I did. This would explain the week we spent in Mexico with Rex referencing "Ulysses by The James Joyce." As of this writing, he has read less than 40 pages of it (which beats my total page count of 0), but the challenge still loomed. Soon enough (as in just last week), the ante was upped when it was proposed that we challenge each other to the 100 books every person should read, made up by some blog/newspaper/thing. Realizing that we didn't care about half the books (fuck you, Scarlet Letter), we decided to make our own (surprisingly well-rounded) list of 50 books that neither of us have previously read and then "race" to finish the collection. We don't know what the prize will be yet, and this is going to take us years, but, as of September 1st, this is the our 50-book reading challenge list:

1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
2. Foundation And Empire by Isaac Asimov
3. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
4. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
5. Fool by Christopher Buckley
6. Women by Charles Bukowski
7. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
8. The Stranger by Albert Camus
9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
11. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
12. Absolutions by Patrick DeWitt
13. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
14. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
15. I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan
16. The Beautiful And The Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
18. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
19. To Have And Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
20. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
21. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
22. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
23. Ulysses by The James Joyce
24. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
25. Immortality by Milan Kundera
26. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
27. The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin
28. Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin
29. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
30. Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
31. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
32. Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
33. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
34. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
35. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
36. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
37. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
38. Half Asleep In Frog’s Pajamas by Tom Robbins
39. Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins
40. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
41. Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
42. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
43. Anthem by Neal Stephenson
44. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
45. Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
46. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
47. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
48. Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
49. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
50. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

First person to finish the list wins.

Let's do this.

Five Things That Are Rad

1. TV SHOW: Boardwalk Empire
I, like many other kids raised on old movies, have a fondest for the 1920s. As a teenager, I found myself profoundly interested in everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Al Capone. Alcohol was a celebration and a secret, gangsters were ruthless and classy and the country went through its only decade of severe moral high ground, which of course led into low points and rock bottoms. But there was a reason they called it "The Roaring '20s." So, an entire television show about the whiskey trade at the base of Coney Island, that promise land of pinball machines and roller coasters, is like a homecoming for me. It hits every bit of me: the kid who wanted to see the sights, the teenager who discovered jazz and the adult who can't kick the habit. The actors are flawless, the writing is perfect and the story is mesmerizing. And it takes its sweet time to tell it, as if it's savoring the flavor and smiling at its taste.

2. BOOK: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
I've never read anything so culturally involved while still being so out of genre. The noir mystery unravels against the backdrop of a fake Jewish history out in the umbrella top of America. Let's say that Berlin was nuked at the end of World War II and Jewish refugees were given a territory in Alaska. But, now, 60 years later, the deal the U.S. government struck up with the world and the chosen race is up. Jewish residents are facing reversion and the territory will be up for grabs. One down-on-his-luck Jewish detective finds a dead man in his hotel and it turns the murdered Jew might have been the partial divine, a once in a generation miracle when the equivalent of Jesus's second cousin comes about. Something's wrong in Sitka and the cold landscape shakes as the trail of blood heats up. It's the best noir I've ever read and it's slung together with swear words and Jewish slang. It's a serious read, but Jewish writers always have a sly grin tucked away somewhere.

3. BAND: Matt And Kim
I can't imagine a duo that would be more fun to hang out with. They skateboard, mosh and put on free concerts in Brooklyn parks with a tiny keyboard and a drum kit made from cardboard boxes and random metals. Somewhere in the archives of this blog, there's a post called "I Wish It Was Matt & Kim & Jake," written some years ago when I first heard the song "Daylight." Well, a few weeks ago, I bought their latest release, Sidewalks, and it's just as fun as ever and it hasn't strayed far from my car stereo. It's straight up indie pop for twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings that want to ride bikes and hustle bars forever (and who have a fondness for peppy synth sounds poised against a modern interpretation of punk drums). There isn't any strange depths of lyrics or personal reproaches. They're the musical equivalent of meeting friends for lunch on a Saturday afternoon.

4. MOVIE: Singin' In The Rain
There are few films that continue to impress me. But Singin' In The Rain blows me away every time with its perfect grasp of joy. It handles love, friendship, work ethic and artistic integrity with as much silliness as it does earnestness. Nevermind the showmanship of tap dancers and sultry voices. This movie was made for every possible stunning glow a person can find radiating within themselves. Sure, that sounds like a lot, but, come on, this movie put me in the best mood as a kid (when all I wanted was anything and everything) and it still does as an adult (when I'm not ever truly sure what I want). I've watched this movie in all kinds of weather, including a tremendous Midwestern thunderstorm, and it's spectacular every single time, but it's perfect on a rainy night.

5. RANDOM: Heaven's Gate
Look how goddamn ominous this thing is. "Heaven's Gate" is the nickname given to the water-eroded cave with the highest elevation in the world. In 263, the massive cliff of China's Songliang Mountain (now Tianmen Mountain) broke open and gave the world what looked like a door to the heavens. And now it sits there...waiting.

Seven Things That Need Reviving

I had one hell of a summer-in-spring day yesterday. The weather was perfect, I spent the day well and it got me thinking about the coming string of hot days and warm nights. Even though I'm a working man, I still get all stoked on summer.

Sure, there's no big change in my schedule come summertime, but my weekends and weeknights get a whole lot cooler. All of a sudden, I'm hanging out in everyone's backyard and sleeping in my bathing suit. And, unlike last summer, I won't be stuck doing busy work in a cubicle. Instead, I'll be wearing shorts to work in our refurnished warehouse-office with the huge doors up and a basketball court in the parking lot. I'm amped. But, last night, I realized that I used to have a better hold on cool shit before I became a careerist instead of just a dude with a job.

Summer is the best possible time to bring out the best, right? So why not revive seven cool things that I don't do anymore?

1. Revive travel.

I haven't been on a plane since New York City last June and that's of tremendous bogusdom. I've done traveling since then, but it's all been by way of motor vehicle, which, in truth, is cool(er). However, my last real trip (even by car) was Mexico for New Year's. That was nearly four months ago. I was regularly doing at least two trips a month last year. I've missed out on a few trips lately because of work, but I miss my "hey I seriously need to skip town as soon as possible." Maybe I'm happier just staying local. Maybe I've gotten boring. Maybe I have a disease. I used to have gunning-for destinations and I think I may need that again. My parents visited Paris a few years ago (my father's second time and my mother's first) and they love talking about going back, and it's even got me excited about revisiting Paris (though it'd be hard to top my last trip there). I need to put together an adventure soon that's not somewhere I've been before (Internationally: Italy; Domestically: Hawaii). Let's revive travel.

2. Revive mixes.

I used to make mixtapes all the time. In 2006, I tried out Cameron Crowe's ongoing project/hobby of recording what he listened to over the years. He has a wall at home with cassette tapes, reading things like "1979, May-August" and "1992, Spring." My attempt lasted all of six months. But it made sense to do, since I drove cars with tape players throughout college. I recorded and decorated mixtapes for myself and anyone else that wanted one. They're cooler than mix CDs, as they carry the old school and have more room for artistic endeavors. Still, even if I don't return to the glory days of mixtapes, I should at least get back to making mix CDs all the time. We used to do Music Club at Entrepreneur, and I scored a ton of radical new music from that. I used to make mixes for every stupid occasion I possibly could. Let's revive mixes.

3. Revive letters.

I've only had three real pen pals in my life (with handwritten letters of frequency by way of the United States Postal Service): in second grade, my grandfather, who only lived in Villa Park and saw me all the time; in third grade, when my friend Julio moved to Lake Elsinore, which I thought of as the other side of the world; and The Jen, when she lived in New York City and both of us were profoundly interested in everything. As I suppose The Jen counts as my only adult pen pal, and "pen pal" seems like a peculiar term for those letters (as they were semi-poetic musings on the world-at-large), I'm interested in engaging by way of the written word once again. Everything's prettier to read, more heartfelt and, altogether, just dangerously more altrustic. It doesn't even have to be romantic. Have you ever read a handwritten letter from your friend? It's rad. It's also not bills. Do you know how cool it is to get something in the mail that isn't a bill? It's kind of the best. Let's revive letters.

4. Revive bike rides.

When I was 20, I bought a beach cruiser that I named the Kilroy Avenger. What was it avenging? Who knows? Probably everything. It was dark green with white army stars and "Kilroy" tagged on it. I rode it every afternoon I could (usually listening to the Stars album Set Yourself On Fire). Somehow, I've left it to disrepair in my parents' garage, which, I agree, is supremely bogus. Also, I have a new neighborhood to explore that, thus far, seems incredible for bike rides. Let's revive bike rides.

5. Revive making music.

After I gave on loops and The Bloodlit Stars, I learned one or two strumming patterns on guitar. I wrote some songs on guitar and it thrilled the hell out of me. Sometime later, I recorded an EP called Great Western Skies and was wildly proud of it, despite only being an indefinite beginner at guitar. However, a week or two ago, I recorded a song in the basement and it brought back that feeling of wanting to high-five everything. I'm also more than halfway done with another EP. Hey, I may not be good, but I have a lot of fun. Let's revive making music.

6. Revive evening runs.

I used to go on evening runs with my family dog, but I haven't done an evening run since I moved out, which was six months ago. It's not like Charlie was a motivator. He can't even talk. He's a fucking dog, people. Recently, I took up evening walks (something I picked up from my parents). It's relaxing and I've discovered that my extended neighborhood has some impressive lighting and landscaping. But walking doesn't do the same radicalness that running offers. Let's revive evening runs.

7. Revive the James Bond Project.

Around the summer of 2008, I found myself binge-watching James Bond flicks. After catching myself in Wikipedia traps, one after another, I suggested to the Superfriends (James, Keith, Zuhair and myself) that we should be more like the British super-agent. They agreed and thus began the James Bond Project (or Project: Class, or a dozen other names, because we really like naming things). The plan was simple: we get classier. At the time, I was showing up with whiskey breath in dirty jeans that were routinely stained with hot sauce. We were slobs, men of high potential and low caliber! So, we collected articles about what men should know, how men should dress, when men should order something edgy at the bar. I began buying one nice clothing item with each paycheck, I researched fine scotches and I read up on history. Obviously, the project was doomed to fail eventually. But we all got somewhat classier on our own. Still, there's more class to be had. Let's revive the James Bond Project.

YES.

Now, you may be wondering, why did he make this post sound like Mega Man with phrases such as "let's revive fire power?" Because summer is a big game where everybody wins. Yesterday felt like summer, and I've got a big backyard for playing croquet and a basement for drinking lemonade now. Who's not stoked on going barefoot during the day and sitting in a jacuzzi at night? Come on, let's keep the windows open and travel, mix, write, ride, shred, run and get fuckin' classy. Summer's almost upon us! Woo!

Travel Photos vs. Everything Else On Pinterest

Some months ago, I realized that I needed to be more proactive about the internet. I know that sounds like something Bill Murray would say in a Wes Anderson movie, but, given my past, present and probable future of working in online advertising, it's true. When a young person discuss the main sites of the internet (Facebook, Twitter, etc), you can notice an older person's eyes draw a blank and then shrug it off. When you see a young person mention hip, slightly-lesser-well-known sites (Visua.ly, Mashable, etc), you can see the uneasiness in another young person. They're losing touch with their own generation and it freaks them out.

So, I signed up for Pinterest, and that paragraph above was the best segue I could come up with while I'm all laid up sick in bed. My night table is the laziest impression of Hunter S. Thompson's briefcase right now. I should be seeing things with all these pills and syrups. Instead, I've just been reading Hunger Games and Sin City while layered up under some blankets and a sleeping bag to sweat out this distress call somebody named the flu for whatever fucking reason, so my nights have largely consisted of having really exciting half-dreams until 2 a.m. Last night, I thought I was a detective. The fevers at night are getting weirder. But, in the morning, I wake up feeling like I've just come home from an adventure. Then I get in the car to work and slump over myself like I've been shot and I'm driving myself to the hospital.

Fuck, I can't believe this is my segue into Pinterest.

And it's not even really about Pinterest.

Pinterest was the segue.

Ugh. This is why I haven't written anything longer in a spell. I can put together a poem like a solider can put together a gun. But I'd be straight drowning in stream of consciousness. I blame it on this last month. My brain has been fried and eaten, and I couldn't even tell you when that happened.

Anyway, I don't know why people are passing around photos of shoes and scarves on Pinterest when they could be repining the hell out of travel photos. Yes, we'd all love to find out what you're planning on doing with mason jars and sticks and how you're turning some old ribbon from your prom dress into a wedding accessory, but, come the fuck on, these travel photos that are being pinned are downright outstanding.

Here's ten travel photos on Pinterest that are just rad:

1. Singapore

2. Bern, Switzerland

3. Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina

4. Venice, Italy

5. Fjallbacka, Sweden

6. Kleven, Ukraine

7. Mykonos, Greece

8. Yokohama, Japan

9. Toronto, Canada

10. Huangshan, China

SEE! SEE HOW INCREDIBLE THE WORLD IS? SEE HOW MUCH THERE IS TO SEE? AND I'M AT HOME IN FUCKING BED AND EVERYONE ON PINTEREST IS PINNING THIS SHIT:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME, PEOPLE?

I MEAN, OBVIOUSLY, YOU CAN PIN AS MANY THINGS AS YOU WANT AND NOBODY'S CHOOSING WEDDING DRESS PICTURES OVER TRAVEL PHOTOS, AND IT'S ENTIRELY ALL UP TO THE PERSON AND THEIR INTERESTS, BUT, IT'S JUST, LIKSE...THIS PLACE EXISTS:

Sydney, Australia

I have to get out of this bed. It's making me crazy.

Musical Thoughts

At a constant, I want to:

• Do drugs, clear out the furniture of a living room and dance with my friends to Matt & Kim, Passion Pit or LCD Soundsystem.
• Get drunk in my basement, crowded with friends, and rock out to Against Me! or Motion City Soundtrack.
• Drink alone to Lucero or Johnny Cash.
• Get high to Explosions In The Sky.
• Speed on a crowded freeway to Black Flag or Death From Above 1979.
• Cruise a semi-empty highway to Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen.
• Drive through forest roads to Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
• Terrorize neighborhoods to The Misfits.
• Dance with a lady to Ella Fitzgerald.
• Fall asleep on my floor to Chet Baker or Billie Holiday.
• Listen to The Replacements or The Clash.

Jake Kilroy's 2011 Year Of Reading

In 2011, I set out to read 100 books and graphic novels. I failed. Surprising? Not really. I read around 85, which beat 2010 by about 50 books, 2009 by about 60 and 2008 by about 82. I'm fully in the swing of reading as much as I can get my grim reaper palms on. I like recalling my year of reading as if some fancy magazine executive with a monocle hired me to do a recap, which...didn't happen. But I'm unemployed, so I have time to do this "freelance work" (I commissioned myself to write this, with payments of potato tacos and beer). Anyway, here are way too many thoughts that may or probably won't blow your mind:

FICTION:
1. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" & "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson
Mikhail Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are strong, detailed characters that had lives long before these novels found them. That sounds peculiar, but a whole lot of mysteries and thrillers offer characters by way of the plot and it's hard to imagine what they were doing before murders started popping up. But Larsson gets it. He carefully and then wildly brings light to the darkness of each courageous moralist that make up the dynamic duo in his Millennium series. The motives are believable, the dialogue is realistic and the actions are time-consuming. And every supporting character has a back story. It's the real world, just much darker. These are thrillers without stereotypes or gimmicks, which is so unrelentingly refreshing in a genre that practically thrives on the reader knowing the ending before they start the book.

2. "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak
Every aspect of this book had to be handled delicately and Zusak balanced it all really, truly beautifully. Any story about a German family during the holocaust is no easy task, especially one that's narrated by Death (yes, the narrator is Death).

In fact, my favorite chapter may have been "Death's Diary: 1942." In it, Death reflects on the very human nature of war and how Death must wander through it, picking up souls. He muses on an old phrase (something akin to "war ...moreAny story about a German family during the Holocaust is no easy task, especially one that's narrated by Death. A German girl comes of age in the middle of a war that no one in her family welcomes and finds a strange mixture of joy and sadness as she steals local books with her best friend, listens to her father's accordion, helps with her mother's chores and engages her family's gigantic basement secret, the Jewish fist-fighter Max, in life discussions. While the world is furiously destroying itself, all you find yourself interested in is one street in some small town in Germany. It's a book about people, no matter what violence and history rages beyond the stretches of any neighborhood.

3. "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins
The plot's been done over and over, but the reason The Hunger Games works is that the two main characters, both teenagers, act as muted moral compasses in the dystopian country of Panem (the smoking ruins of America). It's a violent book that paints kids as the only sensible people left in the world without making the adults worthless (hopeless, maybe, but not worthless). It offers a fantastic world for kid or young adult readers that's exciting as hell and also ludicrously addicting once the kids start killing each other like calculated maniacs. You just have to look over some typos and a few poorly worded sentences and you're so, so in.

4. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy
It's the most atmospheric book I've ever read, as McCarthy slides in repetitive descriptions subtle enough to let the reader absorb the dark, gray, bleak and ashy world of the story. And so little happens in the narrative, while still being a captivating read, that you feel the epic hush of the new haunting, decaying world left over after the colorful one failed. I'm not a huge fan of post-apocalyptic tales, but McCarthy's story is so basic, so honest and so very precise that it makes me appreciate post-apocalyptic tales for what can be found in people instead of what happens to them. It's not "what the human spirit is capable of." Instead, it's more just "what the human spirit is" in it's most centralized thought process. To have written it seems almost impossible, because it walks a dozen fine lines without ever letting the reader know that the lines are even being walked in the first place.

5. "This Side Of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald took his main character, the obnoxious, self-absorbed and unrelentingly entitled snob Amory Blaine, and gave him the wide open world, just to let it nearly crush him. You witness Blaine's transition from youthful upstart to conscientious adult, by way of college, where you realize that Fitzgerald's mocking every arrogant university student who churns out the same opinions about poetry, socialism, the military, etc. This Side Of Paradise observes the whole college student's evolution into obsessive academic lingo and thoughtful dinner party philosophy. It's so goddamn well-written and, by the end of it, you have to wonder if Fitzgerald penned one of the best pieces of character development in the 20th Century.

This book was so goddamn well-written. And it was well-written as a novel with random passages as a play or poetry collection.

It was also disgustingly relevant to college students today. In the same way that The Perks Of Being A Wallflower articulated the high school student's typical misadventure of everything being new, uneasy, amazing, terrifying and the like, This Side Of Paradise kind of resonated that perfectly with the whole college student's evolution into obsessive acad6. "The Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett
The film adaption has been one of my favorite movies since high school. The movie is wittier and funnier with a generally better mood, but the book has way more depth. It's a who-done-it with the most engaging (and boozing) couple around, Nick and Nora Charles. They drink, they smoke they solve murders, all while making each other laugh. In the book, Nick's a little crankier, more serious and less light-hearted, while Nora remains just as jovial as her cinematic counterpart. But the book presents a darker world than the movie does, so Nick's sterner demeanor matches the shadows and shifty eyes of the city. In between are some surprising conversations way ahead of their time. Like Raymond Chandler once said, though, Hammett wrote scenes that didn't seem as if they had been written before. Hammett takes murder and gives it a fair balance of gritty and comedic. It's screwball at its most dangerous.

7. "Side Effects" by Woody Allen
After being a long-time fan of his films, I've learned that Woody Allen understands slapstick as well as he does solemnity, just as he knows the dance between thoughtful philosophy and throw-away absurdity. The short story collection has moments of tenderness and poignant observations of human nature, but it's all amid senselessness, craziness and nuttiness. It's so wordy while being so light, with everything from a character leaving his wife to marry an animal to a character abandoning his psychoanalyst for a magician, who then allows him to enter the plot of Madame Bovary to have an affair. It's just silly enough to make it seem whimsical but sweet enough to keep you involved.

8. "Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway
This collection of short stories really puts together what Hemingway was: a reflective lover of life posing as a glorious defeatist. He didn't have to live through his characters. Shit, his characters would try to live through Hemingway if they could. As Hemingway moved through the world, whether it was war in Europe or a safari in Africa, he lived in the moment without having to catch himself. He was thinking what the romantic poets were musing, but he would've informed them that they didn't need all of the wimpy sentiment and that there was something bold and brave about romance. So, even when one story doesn't necessarily stand out, you take his arsenal of worldly tales, whether it's a terrified couple discussing abortion or a major lamenting over the death of his wife, and you hear Hemingway telling you what life is and how it works. It just "is" most of the time and Hemingway will tell you that it's surely enough.

9. "Everything Is Illuminated" By Jonathan Safran Foer
I know Foer is a polarizing literary figure and I seem to only ever love or hate him. In this one, he again impresses and infuriates me. He may tinker with heartstrings in the most sneaky way, but he does give readers a dozen moments to remember, which works well, as the whole book is about containing history and the chance of making it something more that rumors and guise. Within the three main characters, there lies an underlying hope to conquer all memories, dreams and histories like children's stories. But the real world won't ever allow memories, dreams and histories to be our reality, which is what makes them so horrifyingly gorgeous. So, against all understanding, we try and try and try until we fill books about our losses.

10. "Light Boxes" by Shane Jones
I bought the book solely because the cover featured a pretty serious sketch of five thin men in top hats and trench coats standing in the snow wearing colorful bird masks. Well, it turns out those five men and the rest of their small town are planning a mutiny on the brutal month/god of February. The fable-myth-fantasia-novella is written with every contemporary literary device available and it works because the narrative is just as sparse and weird. February grew jealous of man's ability to fly, so he plagues the town with eternal winter. It's a strange tale of misery and violence with poetry weaving in and out, balancing the warmth of hope found in an old world fairy tale with the cold-hearted sadness of modern society's doom.

GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS:
1. "These Days Are Just Packed" by Bill Watterson
When I was a kid, Calvin and Hobbes did a number on me. They were loud and adventurous while, in turn, quietly discussing philosophy. Looking back, I probably scored a heavy helping of social interpretation from the two. It's pretty hard to get a kid to consider morality and mortality, but, somehow, when Calvin posed a question to Hobbes in the woods or in the wagon, there came a serious pondering of existence in this great big world. Bill Watterson spent his years as a cartoonist having an open discussion about the wants and drags of mankind and the nervous wonderment of people, all while letting an uncontrollable kid's imagination run wild with his closest friend. It was perfect then and it's perfect now.

2. "Blankets" by Craig Thompson
This semi-autobiographical graphic novel was honest and sincere without ever becoming uncomfortable. For all of its beautifully bleak setting of Wisconsin and Michigan in winter, it really does take the high road of optimism and realism instead of ever portraying life as unbearable and cold. And that could've been very easy to do, considering the main themes of the book is a teenager discovering love and questioning the church. It's really just about a teenager trying to figure everything out his senior year of high school without ever appearing to be somebody who's doing that. It was superbly balanced and subtle in its brief moments of poetic waves. So, so well done.

3. "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" by Alan Moore
I don't know how Hollywood botched the film adaptation as hard as they did. The whole thing is adventurous, humorous, violent, unsettling and astoundingly literary. While reading these grand tales of famous literary heroes versus villains (Victorian in the first two volumes and all across the 20th Century in the third), you feel like a kid from decades past reading the classic sci-fi and adventure paperback serials as modern storytelling. The tone of each volume reflects the times as well as the varied storytelling mediums. I loved it like a kid reading comic books with a flashlight.

4. "Blacksad" by Juan Díaz Canales
Oh man, I could honestly read a dozen volumes of this series if they existed. It's anthropomorphic animals in a classic noir setting. There's enough brief nudity and violence to make the first three episodes for mature audiences, but enough cartoon bashfulness and concern to make it for earnest youths. It could've easily been stupid, but it wasn't. The type of animal each character is gives something away without having to be explained. It's the 1950s. Hitler existed, the war happened and now all animals are recovering and trying to figure out the world again. There's the Arctic Nation (the KKK) and the Black Claws (the Black Panthers). The Golden Age of Hollywood, the Cold War, the Blacklist Witch Hunt, the Beatniks, the country's move into the suburbs, it's all there. I'll always have a soft spot for classic noir setups and characters, and there's a kid lurking in me somewhere always wanting to be entertained by talking animals. It takes itself seriously enough to be taken seriously, but not enough to miss out on the joke.

5. "Hellboy" by Mike Mignola
The whole premise of Hellboy is cool. It just is. It's old school pulpy monster mayhem mixed with modern sardonic self-awareness. It never leans too far either way. One moment it's classic evil mystic shit, the next it's a gunfight with creatures from another dimension, then it's murder mystery type of wandering, and then it's something else. It always works and it's always fun.

This is the first one, so it takes some time to present the origin story of Hellboy. However, it moves ligh...moreThe whole premise of Hellboy is cool. It just is. It's old school pulpy monster mayhem mixed with modern sardonic self-awareness. It never leans too far either way. One moment it's classic evil mystic shit, the next it's a gunfight with creatures from another dimension, then it's murder mystery type of wandering, and then it's something else. Hellboys a solid character. He's a great structure of ego and wit balanced with regret and wishful thinking. It always works and it's always fun.

6. "Marvel: 1602" by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is one hell of a writer. He took characters that everyone knows, tossed them back to the year 1602 and it didn't come out campy. In fact, it came across as a serious observation of history with mutant transplants. Professor Charles Xavier became Carlos Javier, an compassionate Spanish cripple. Doctor Doom becomes Count Otto Von Doom, a powerful Latverian ruler. Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto becomes Grand Inquisitor Enrique, a leader of the Spanish Inquisition. The list goes on. Mutants are ...moreNeil Gaiman is one hell of a writer. He took characters that everyone knows, tossed them back to the year 1602 and it didn't come out campy. In fact, it came across as a serious observation of history with mutant transplants. Professor Charles Xavier becomes Carlos Javier, a compassionate Spanish cripple. Doctor Doom becomes Count Otto Von Doom, a powerful Latverian ruler. Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto becomes Grand Inquisitor Enrique, a leader of the Spanish Inquisition. The list goes on. Mutants are instead called "witchbreeds" in a time of urgency, as England tries to keep its hands on the New World without falling to Scottish rule themselves. The story's never gimmicky, the characters are always of depth and the combination of fantasy powers, time travel and legitimate historical concerns makes it one radical package. It's confusing at times, but, as you know these characters as the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, you know who to root for. Wonderful drawings, wonderful writing, just a wonderfully fun read.

7. "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames
Maybe the most honest narrative I've read, it feels like a thinly disguised memoir, though I couldn't guess how much is real. It discusses life without an arc, as more of a series of events that come at a person over the years. Some are tragic, some are funny, some are cool, some are pathetic. Each moment seems to be observed with the same grace of "this is how it is." He doesn't relish in his drinking, he doesn't relish in his women, he doesn't relish in what surrounds him. Though the character feels like the kinder gentler younger brother of Bukowski, and discusses an affinity for Hemingway, the alcoholic Jonathan doesn't sway and march through life with the force or authority of a "man's man." Instead, he kind of chirps along like a bird with a broken wing. It could've easily been one long epic of self-praise and moments of "Wasn't that cool when I got drunk and did all that hilarious shit?" But it wasn't at all. It was very much "This is me, this is life. Sometimes, things go well. Sometimes, things go bad. I wish I wasn't this way and I hope things get better."

8. "The Adventures Of Tintin (The Black Island & The Secret Of The Unicorn)" by Hergé
Honestly, Tintin is like the Archie comics with balls. It's playful and innocent, but it still includes whiskey and guns. It brings you into the era it was written and you feel like some imaginative boy in 1930s Belgium reading this at night, saying dumb things to yourself like, "oh boy!" I can see how this sense of adventure came to influence other storytellers of the 20th Century. The Tintin comic strip started in 1929, so this was before the era of "we need a big twist." It's just a pleasantly wild, sometimes funny, mostly straight-forward, do-the-right-thing-at-all-costs, mystery-solving adventure serial. I feel like it'd be harder to market someone like Tintin now. Either it would be pushed towards more gritty or more family-oriented. Tintin stories just include whatever Hergé felt was necessary. Murder and booze are always hanging around the boy-wonder journalist and his dog, as they do everything can to solve every freakin' mystery in Belgium.

9. "Lions And Tigers And Crocs, Oh My!" by Stephen Pastis
Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips, mostly because it has the sharpest wit in the newspaper. It's for the cynical strokes of humor. It pays tribute to the greats and shreds the worst. Featuring a rat, a pig, a zebra and a goat named Rat, Pig, Zebra and Goat, the strip follows the group of animals through their hyper-weird lives, whether it's Pig falling in love or Zebra trying his hardest to not be eaten by the crocodile fraternity next door. It's sardonic and sarcastic while still being goofy and fun. In this collection, Pastis adds his own commentary below each strip, which is actually funnier than each strip most of the time. The dude just writes like he's already your drinking buddy and you've spent a half hour making light of his profession.

10. "Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid In The World" by Chris Ware
Jimmy Corrigan is uncomfortably bleak. It's not a roller-coaster of emotions with epic highs and crushing lows. No, instead, it's just a long, thick feeling of sadness that rolls around your insides. But Ware's idealistic and flawless art, combined with his flowing cursive of poetic narrative, brings about a weird sense of curiosity. Also, it's mostly Jimmy's grandfather's parallel story that brought about a sincere satisfaction. The mix of 1980s Michigan and 1890s Chicago intertwines without getting tangled, as it never makes it obnoxiously obvious what's happening, even though I would've thought it to be a much, much better book if there had been a bigger pay-off. I enjoyed reading it, though I thought I was reaching a destination. It never truly comes and you wonder if that was the whole point.

NONFICTION, POETRY & ESSAY COLLECTIONS:
1. "A Short History Of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson is a genius. And it's not just because he knows everything that he explains, but because he can explain it to me. Science is awesome, sure, but it's rarely ever presented to me with the excitement and easy language that I need. Save for a few friends, I usually get the droning narration of textbooks or the pompous and purposefully complex speeches of windbags. But Bryson explains everything from dinosaurs to volcanoes to chemistry to the universe to mass extinction (as well as the funny, weird and peculiar stories behind the scientists). Honestly, it was one of the most fun times I've had learning. Since I'm not well-versed in science, there weren't very many moments of, "Ah, I knew that." It really was mostly just me repeating, "OH, WHAT THE SHIT!?"

2. "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safron Foer
I've been vegetarian since I was 10 and I've gotten shit for it since I was...10. And, I must say, it was refreshing to read a book that wasn't angrily arguing "eating animals is wrong" or"eating animals is right." Foer gives his readers extensive research that one would expect to find in a thesis while retelling stories from his childhood, like it were some conversation at a party. He makes it personal with numbers and interviews. The book is written with some of Foer's traditional emotional and empathetic style, with moments of over-the-top literary devices, but it's a beautiful, disgusting, overwhelming, horrifying, excellent text. It's more of a long musing on eating animals while campaigning against factory farms instead of a straight-forward academic thesis.

3. "Wild Ducks Flying Backwards" by Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins writes unlike anyone else. It's so far removed from the writing process and grasp of language that I understand as proper. His novels are like attending a music festival on drugs...though somehow contained between front and back covers. In his only collection of articles, essays, poems and the rest of his bag o' random, the wildfire novelist shows that he can seriously exist in other mediums. He talks art in essays for museum magazines as well as he can use poetry to describe the Devil coming down the stairs in a Raiders jacket. A few articles drag on a bit (because without wacky made-up characters, real people tend to look about confused), but then you look at your bookshelf and realize you have no interest in reading anything else.

4. "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" by Sarah Vowell
Vowell has stunning wit about her with a deadpan delivery. It's hard to write deadpan in reflective essays of your life, conjuring up jokes at your own expense and presenting them like nonchalant throwaways for the sake of a bit, all while laying out groundwork for political, historical and contemporary observations. But she does it with a familiar NPR narrative pacing and a tremendous appreciation for essay-writing. The book is sincere, using humor as a tool instead of a force. It's a thoughtful and genuine collection about a nerdy leftist New Yorker who loves history and politics. She's timid but critical, soft-spoken but loud, small appearance but big personality. She's also a whole lot of fun.

5. "Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit" & "Burning In Water, Drowning In Flames" by Charles Bukowski
I think Bukowski just sees the world in poems. That's why he writes on everything from specific arguments with women to really trivial shit, like getting the mail. It's sometimes hard to be sure of where Bukowski's brilliance ends and his rambling starts. He says enough to cover the entire spectrum of genius and idiot, though this collection leans much more towards the former. You see an almost depressing decline in the man's hope, as this particular book is broken up by Black Sparrow years. In ...moreI think Bukowski just saw the world in poems. That's why he wrote about everything from specific arguments with women to really trivial shit, like getting the mail. It's hard to be sure where Bukowski's brilliance ends and his rambling starts. He says enough to cover the entire spectrum of genius and idiot while writing about the same thing over and over. He wants you to know that he drinks, fucks, gambles and doesn't care about any of it. In his poems, there lies a confident drunk, asleep at the wheel of life, seamlessly floating on by, content with distraction and apathy.

6. "Shit My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern
I was afraid that Halpern, beyond his Twitter account, would end up being something along the lines of Tucker Max (who sucks, by the way), writing things like, "And then this crazy thing happened to my balls, and here's how my crazy dad reacted." I thought it was going to be the memoir of a 29-year-old party guy laughing at us for getting a book deal. But it wasn't. The book was earnest. And Justin Halpern is stupendously likable. You root for him, his father, his mother, everyone. It's actually a relatively simple narrative about a father and son, except, of course, the father is like a verbal confetti gun of swear words. Halpern's humorous memoir turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books about a family I've ever read.

7. "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers
When his parents die within just weeks of each other, Eggers moves out to California with his older sister and his much younger brother. And what seemed to start off as a memoir detailing the fallout that followed his parents' death becomes something of a frantic (and somewhat fictionalized) diary of his twenties instead, as Eggers raises his brother like a parent and runs a local magazine with his new friends in San Francisco. The narrative is so wild and charismatic that it almost seems unedited, but, given the score of literary devices used, it's obvious that it's very planned and an attempt at nervous realism. If Eggers seems smug or arrogant or mad at the world or losing his shit, you let it go because nobody knows it better than him. It'd be really easy to hate a book like this, but it's told in such a brutally honest way without making scores of attempts at caring what others think that you let it go and just pat the dude on the back.

8. "Morning Poems" by Robert Bly
Bly writes very observationally with compassion and humor. Maybe not in his words, but in his tone. Even in his misery, he's aware that he's writing a poem and trying to get a point across. He doesn't just write his feelings down so it comes off manic and overly charged. It's very calm. He sees the great world around him, with nature, with people, with everything, and he can narrate between the lines. It's hard to balance the depth of good poetry as well as the bluntness of accessible poetry, but Robert Bly can do it pretty seamlessly.

9. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan
Taking a long look at "industrial, pastoral and personal meals," Pollan provides an academic narrative on the food industry in its impressive breadth and scope. He investigates meat farms, organic growers and even details his own adventure hunting animals and scourging mushrooms. It's a fascinating read for sure, despite Pollan making it seem like vegetarians would never bother to read his book, as if all us are too busy reading David Sedaris while getting high and Tivoing documentaries about socialism and dolphins. Well, guess what, Pollan? I read your book and found much of it thoroughly engrossing! Take that!

10. "The Last Magician" by Stephen Corey
The only way I can describe this book is “quintessentially American," as it seems like Corey grew up in the America we were all supposed to call our own, with picnics, fireworks, bedtime stories and Sunday papers. And, given its sincere reflection and thoughtful musings, it reads like the collection was penned by a father grateful for his new life after spending his youth traveling. He’s somewhere stationary now and wildly appreciative of having a wife, kids and a home in the suburbs. There's a lot of quiet smirks lurking behind the words, painting the portrait of the American Dream without the delirious ecstasy, but with the calm, secluded possibility that it can exist. But he never sets out to do that, so the poems don’t come off as big hope or endless love. It just comes off real, as one man tries to interpret the world from his place in it.

Happy reading in 2012, folks!