There is a scene in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, when an aged and plumped and be-cancer-ed rock and roll star named Bosco is pitching an idea to his publicist: He wants to tour again in support of his album “A to B.” A suicide tour. He doesn’t want to fade away, he tells her, he wants to flame away. A spectacle. An attraction. Everyone knows he is going to kick it, they just don’t know when or where. He wants interviews and videos and every humiliation documented.

“The album’s called ‘A to B,’ right?” Bosco said. “And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let’s not pretend it didn’t happen. . . . Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Time is, in fact, the title goon of this novel full of short stories, a collection of pulse points in the lives of a full squad of players in the rock and roll scene. Each stars a character that is connected to another in a way that ranges from meaningful to fleeting. Then Egan upped the difficulty level: Each story can stand alone as a short story — and in some cases has actually been published elsewhere. And it isn’t told in chronological order.

Andthisismyfavoritebookever.

“Goon Squad” starts with a recurring face — Sasha, an assistant to Bennie Salazar, a biggie big in the music biz. Sasha is a klepto with a shrine to the scarves, wallets, and bath salts she has filched. She is telling her therapist about a moment in the ladies room, while she is on a date. A woman is in a stall making agua, her wallet hanging out of a purse next to the sink. It’s an easy pick for Sasha, who takes the wallet and returns to an otherwise blase night newly invigorated and primed for some eff you en. She throws flirty eyes at the man, and they end up back in her apartment in her bath tub — located very New York City-ly in her kitchen.

Later we will see Sasha as a post high school runaway in Italy, through the eyes of the uncle who is trying to find her. Then as a college student, newly in love, as witnessed by her suicidal best friend, a man who can spoon her but is not allowed to love her. Eventually Sasha’s daughter gets to tell her own story — which she does with Power Point slides. One thing young Allison has learned in school is: Add a graphic, increase your traffic!

Speaking of invigorated and primed — Bennie is looking for a little bit of that. First he adds pinches of real gold flecks to his coffee because he read that it will spark his libido. He tests the validity of this by peering down Sasha’s shirt and hoping for a bonedog. He is recently separated from his wife, and at the suggestion of his therapist is making a list of his life’s embarrassments to tell his young son on the back of a parking ticket, instead of actually telling his son that he, for instance, tried to make out with a Mother Superior.

Each telling glimpse of a player, no matter the test of the line connecting them to Sasha and/or Bennie, enhances these two characters. And they all have compelling stories: Freckle-faced Rhea, the green-haired punk who hangs with a gaggle of teenagers who are all in love with someone who isn’t in love with them. Many of these kids form The Flaming Dildos (including a young Bennie); Jocelyn is part of the Flaming Dildos crowd, and she meets Lou — and older guy who is already established in the music business. While seemingly a bit of a creeper and sexual deviant, he goes on to influence the handful of punks in a positive way. We see him later on a safari with another in a long line of lady friends and two of his children, and also on his death bed sharing some final words; A woman who was once the belle of the PR circuit until she threw a party that was so awesome that she literally scarred the social scene — and some people self-mutilated as proof that they were on the guest list — while she landed in lock up.

This collection packs a lot of wow. Like, exclusively wow. The characters are well-formed, real and unique, and when they show up in the periphery of another tale it’s like running into an old friend. Egan dropped fun crumbs in the story, including that the novel is broken into two parts: A and B, just like Bosco’s return-to-rock-n-roll album. And when she dares to delve into the near future, it’s as recognizable as the near future where Gary Shteyngart set Super Sad True Love Story. It’s a world where text messaging is its own language, and the preferred method of communicating with someone who is sitting across the table.

Not to mention, when it ends there is plenty to think about once the book is shelved: The toll of time, the people who come into your life, take a bath in your kitchen bathtub, and years later can only remember the barest of details from the experience: Something weird with a wallet, eventually a name.

This is the first time in years that I’ve finished a book, closed it, and been compelled to start over again on Page 1.

Romantic chick-lit crossed with Japanese illustrated Manga is a fusion too good to pass up. Like exotic bubble tea that keeps popping up in local tea shops, you just have to try it, whether or not you will like it can be determined after the first sip. Response, written by Penny Jordan with art by Takako Hashimoto, is a comic book made for a woman’s purse.

It is certainly a bold idea and the passion translates well into Hashimoto’s artistry. Flowing purple-hued ink and text keep the visual whimsical, yet adult. The Japanese influence is strong, but the characters are Americanized to a great extent, which makes it more accessible to the romance reader.

It is a short book and a quick read, even with the artwork to slow you down. The act of reading from back to front (or more appropriately from right to left, rather than left to right) is a little odd at first, but after a couple pages the feeling fades. The storyline holds together, but it is sparse. The tantalizing description and character development usually so enticing in a romance novel is limited out of necessity, and though the concept may not catch on completely, it will likely bring new readers to each genre.

The sacred cow idea plagues modern discourse in the United States. In our polarizing environment, many people on all sides of a debate cling tightly to their beliefs. This causes a mind closure that prohibits new material from entering. I have witnessed this paralyzing closure and the pain it causes many times. The idea that one’s beliefs and ideas are immune from criticism severely prevents growth and change, especially when lives are at stake. To ensure that my worldview is enriched with multiple viewpoints and histories, I seek books and information that challenge and criticize standardized thought.

Adam Fortunate Eagle’s memoir Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School is such a work. Fortunate Eagle was a ten-year student at the Pipestone Indian Boarding school in the Minnesota town of the same name starting in 1935. The book is mainly a collection of Fortunate Eagle’s stories and memories told from his eighty-year-old vantage point. Reading like a diary, Pipestone’s stories also take us away from the school by looking at Fortunate Eagle’s extended family and his travels to both his birth home of Red Lake, Minnesota, and to visit his mother in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Pipestone concludes with an extensive afterword about available boarding school literature.

Pipestone’s contribution to boarding school literature is its greatest strength. As illustrated in the afterword, most historical accounts only show the negative and damaging aspects of Indian boarding schools. What Fortunate Eagle does in Pipestone is offer an alternative view of boarding schools, one that shows Indian children being educated by Indian teachers. Fortunate Eagle’s experience offers a positive version of boarding school life, albeit one that is often violent and gory to read. Many stories are the typical tales of childhood one would expect to read—fist fights, punishments, and adventures with friends—but with much commentary about learning and living as an indigenous child. Fortunate Eagle emphasizes the importance of personal relationships in Pipestone, especially those with his family and those who educated him.

Pipestone is an important book because it offers information that challenges conventional thought regarding not only Indian boarding schools, but Indian history as a whole. Pipestone does what all sound Indian writing should do; it gives Indian people a voice to tell their own history. Unlike most anthropological or historical works that take voices away, Pipestone allows the voices of those that lived through these events to come out and be heard. Rather than having someone else tell the story, Fortunate Eagle takes back history and tells it from his perspective. This book, if one allows it, will open up your mind regarding Indian boarding schools. It’s true that there were many bad boarding schools, and the policy that initially set them up was flawed. However, there is more to the story that needs to be illuminated, and Pipestone does just that.

All of this is somewhat ironic, given Fortunate Eagle’s last sentence in the introduction: “I realize there will be critics of my book; however, I will only listen to those individuals who are over seventy years of age and who were boarding school children themselves” (p. xviii). Fortunate Eagle’s own book is a criticism of boarding school scholarship, and yet he is closing his mind to criticism coming back to him. Fortunate Eagle certainly has that right, but is it an awfully convenient deflection mechanism. I won’t listen to you unless you were there? It seems childish to me.

I’m thinking about joining the ranks of those boring, jackassy literary pundits who warn about the impending death of something: publishing, the novel, the short story, the traditional book, and everything else you love hold dear.

What am I declaring the death of? Story. Or at least good, engaging stories. Off the top of my head I can think of four books I’ve read this year that were well-written but lacked interesting stories or the stories fell apart midway through the book (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Melting Season, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and The Ask). I can’t tell if it’s me or if it’s them. Is there a dearth of story in this year’s must-read books? Or am I just more demanding than usual?

You can add Jenny Hollowell’s Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe to that list of beautifully-written books that lack an actual story. On the surface the story of Birdie Baker, a thirty-year-old struggling actress seems like it would be fraught with tension, but it’s not. Instead we get a sort of dreamy, wishy-washy portrayal of a woman so far removed from her life it feels like she’s floating through it.

Hollowell starts out strong. Instead of presenting Birdie’s backstory as a series of films (with no cameras rolling). It’s a smart and interesting way to get Birdie from her strict, religious Virginia home to Hollywood, but after that the bold storytelling goes away. Instead we’re left with a repetitive (Birdie spends a lot of time driving and sitting on her porch drinking), flat story about a depressed actress who hasn’t fully coped with her past and is on the verge of becoming embittered by all those who have done better than she has.

It’s kind of a drag, and it’s a shame, because the writing here is really wonderful.

Then the past arrived, rubbing against the window screen, and that poison air descended upon her bed. There was nothing new to remember, nothing new to feel there was only that same accumulation of losses, but here with the smell of honeysuckle all around, with the days spend in a green, humid haze, and with the lines she spoke still humming in her mouth, the venom of their judgments, she felt them more clearly. Absence after absence, emptiness after emptiness, nothing after nothing — in the darkness of the motel room her losses crowded around her like ghosts.

And while this passage is beautiful, it hints at what’s wrong with the story — “there’s nothing new to remember, nothing new to feel.” Why is that? Because Birdie has spent the preceding 164 pages moping about her past and feeling sorry for herself.

Well. Now Doug Dorst is just showing off. The relative newbie to the world of book glue’s new collection of short stories The Surf Guru, is so fun, so clever, and so so exciting that it will make people who play with words drool.

Reading his series of twelve tales is like watching a contortionist bend and shape shift, and thinking: “Holy crap. Do you even have a human rib cage?”

Dude’s brain is ambidextrous: One minute he is writing about an aged surf hero with a line of products that includes dog food, a handful of pages later he creates a young hard-luck housesitter who keeps flunking her truck driving road test. There is a seemingly normal cake maker who jealously veers into Crazytown while her daughter OCD’s herself into male-pattern baldness, and best buds on the lam from the law who come into possession of a … baby.

There is so much treachery involved. At least twice I started a chapter, fully prepared to be bored by the subject. His story “La Fiesta de San Humberto el Menor,” which is based on the song “Paradise” by Alejandro Escovedo, seems like it is going to be the stuff of dime-a-dozen Western fare starring a suicidal fruit stand owner with a taste for tequila and a wife who ran off with the rich white asshole who owns the town. Read a little closer and it has more in common with the 80s comedy “The Three Amigos.” The formula is there, but the common and age-old language of the genre has been replaced with the absurd. And, yet, Dorst never cracks a smile, oh he of the proverbial poker face.

In “Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet,” the language is so 1889 that to read it without an accent is damn-near impossible. It is the story of a wanna be artist doctor, and the Van Gogh-ish painter he is treating with his special brand of medicine.

Just Dorst’s experimentation with “Splitters” a series of portraits of characters in the world of botany — what the writer might consider his flagship of the book — fails to hold attention, even with its portrait-style photographs, and maybe because of the footnotes.

Dorst’s debut was the novel Alive in Necropolis, a mix of police jargon and other-worldly gangsters set in a town heavily populated with ghosts. What made “Necropolis” such a pleasure is also what works in this collection: A wit so dry that it could be used as kindling. You might not even notice what he is doing, or how much fun he must have had rearranging these sentences on the page. His novel fell flat in the finale. The short story form may be Dorst’s forte. Think Neal Pollack, but a less concentrated, far less overwhelming Neal Pollack. He is the writers’ writer, and he makes the trickiest tricks look so damn easy.

Finding fiction that I like can be a great challenge for me, so I tend to research potential candidates to make the process efficient. I tend to stick with ideas that resonate somehow with my worldview. Thankfully I have a wide interest field to choose from and know what topics to avoid, such as economics, born-again fundamentalist Christianity, and vampires.

However, this method failed me when I choose Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time. This book was full of potential: rainy Scandinavian setting, worn Communist ideals, and an author that shares the same first name as a freestyle skateboarder. Petterson tells the story of Arvid Jansen, a middle age soon-to-be divorcee who is dealing with negotiating the past with his present and a sick mother. I Curse the River of Time was a mixed bag for me. Petterson’s writing is not constrained to a linear timeline, holding me engaged and challenged. Furthermore, Petterson can really set a scene with his descriptive prose.

She could not see the mountains, but she know they were everywhere out there leaving their mark, every single day, on the people who lived in Norway. (p. 6)

Despite these qualities, I Curse the River of Time is simply a tired story of male middle age regret and search for meaning. It’s a typical story and has been told many times in many ways. When one tells a typical story and includes negative stereotypes of indigenous people to buttress wonderful prose, the result is something rather disappointing.

It’s never a good sign when it takes you months and months to read a book. It’s an even worse sign when that book is a graphic novel. But it took me roughly three months to claw my way through Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole.

This book was lauded by most everyone who wrote about it. I learned this only because I had to do some googling to figure out the hell I just read.

The veneration was my first surprise. My second was that the main characters, teenagers Perry and Ruth, are step siblings. That second surprise made me like the book even less than I thought I did.

What we have here is a sort of coming of age of two southern teens, both afflicted with schizophrenia to some degree. I’m not sure if there are varying degrees of schizophrenia, but I’m willing to give Powell a buy on that. I’m not willing to give him a buy on the utter coincidence of the step siblings both having schizophrenia, unless their parents met at some sort of support group. If that’s the case we should know that.

Anyway the book is a sort of jumbled mishmash of coming of age and mental illness and sick family members. It opens with Ruth and Perry’s dying grandmother coming to live with them. She’s not as near her deathbed as we’re led to believe, because it takes her years and years to die. In the meantime, we find out that both Perry and Ruth suffer from hallucinations.

Ruth often sees insects everywhere, and she’s concerned with them, so she has a touch of the OCD with her schizophrenia. Perry’s illness manifests itself in the form of a tiny, pencil-topped wizard who forces Perry to do his bidding.

Even though I found the novel on the whole a confusing mess, the scenes with Perry trying to resist the mandates of the wizard are pretty great. But the rest is just kind of okay, at best and pretty boring its worst.

I can’t quite figure out why this book garnered so much acclaim, the art is kind of muddy and the story is muddled. This is one I should have just given up on, but refused to be beaten by a graphic novel. Lesson learned, it’s okay to give up on graphic novels you aren’t enjoying.

I am going to write something here that applies to Sloane Crosley and only Sloane Crosley, and God help us all — please don’t let anyone else take this bit of advice and apply it:

Sloane, you need to write more about your personal life. Dates and dudes. Relationships that lean horizontal. Getting dumped and squeezing the living shit out of a bunch of oranges. I know this is problematic: You live in New York, and when a young woman lives in New York and writes essays she gets Carrie Bradshaw’ed into a little pink box. Even if the writer spends 200-plus pages riffing on everything but shoes. But I believe in you, Sloane. I think you can do it in a respectable way, and never have to say the words: “Hm … I guess we should go with the lipstick font for this book. Is there any way to make it look like I’m lounging in a martini glass?”

Crosley’s second book of essays How Did You Get This Number, is at its best in the finale of the nine-chapter follow up to the extraordinarily meh, albeit critically well-received debut, I Was Told There Would Be Cake. The essay “Off the Back of a Truck” is a story of a) meeting and falling for Ben, who is so entrenched in her social circle that it seems impossible they had never met before; b) browsing in an up-scale furniture store, and falling face-first into a connection from the stock room who scores her discounted goods with some back alley wheeling and envelopes filled with cash.

Crosley weaves these two stories in a deliciously teasey way under the umbrella: “If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.” The relationship is void of cliche. She reluctantly reveals his eye color, straying to Crayola Big Box depths for “a dirty peridot color” but admits she has forced her brain to compartmentalize his image. And the rug, dresser, and other luxury pieces she scores for fast-food prices is just so bizarre and shady and stars such a likable criminal.

As for the other eight essays: They’re fine. Just like they were fine in her last book. There is no doubt that she has led an interesting life. On the cusp of her 30th birthday she makes travel plans by sliding her finger aimlessly along a globe, which is how she ends up in Lisbon, playing a version of “Win, Lose, or Draw” to communicate with circus performers.

In another essay she has a super-awkward exchange in a confessional at Notre Dame Cathedral, Crosley being Jewish and all. There is a trip to Alaska where she witnesses the execution of a bear cub, the victim of a hit-n-run.

Unfortunately, these stories are so controlled, so antiseptic, so public relations, and so so not risky. She writes like her mom is reading over her shoulder. Even when Crosley mentions smoking weed out of her apartment window, it seems more of a ploy, a purposefully dropped mention, than a revelation. Her humor is easy, although very pedestrian in a way that leads me to believe that outside the book binding she uses the eff word as every part of speech, and has been known to make a male genitalia joke. But she doesn’t want you to know this.

I imagine people like Sloane Crosley because she is someone they can relate to. The horror of junior high slumber parties, and then reconnecting with the Queen Bee bully years later. The carefully laid bread crumbs that show she is quirky (She imagines keeping a midget in this strange cupboard area of her apartment!) in that way that we all need to believe that our OCD moments and guilty pleasures make us unique. But her relate-ability has such a generic-ness to it that it is without heart. Like a person who is considered a great conversationalist because they listen well and remember the name of your hometown. But what is her favorite song? Shrug.

This is why “Off the Back of the Truck” works so well. She lets her hair down. She squeezes an orange in frustration. Her mind is blown, and you can see her sweeping the pieces into a dustpan, and throwing it all away. I’m not suggesting that Crosley’s next book should be a chronology of her relationships. But I do think if she should put some of that za-za-zu into everything she writes and scrap things like, oh say, the rank nature of cabs in NYC.

Oh. And since I’m here: The cover of this book is really, really ugly.
And: Every once in awhile Crosley has a really good couple of lines, like this — when she is describing apartment living in New York.

Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter.

I am no expert in graphic novels. I typically read graphic novels only at the recommendation of others. Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana came to me thanks in part to my interest in the Catholic Church. I’ll fall asleep reading anything about economics, but start a discussion about Popes, transubstantiation, or sacraments and I’ll fall over my kneeler to contribute.

Pax Romana is a science fiction account of the Vatican’s attempt to create a new future by destroying the past. In the year 2053, the Holy See’s science wing develops time travel. Pope Pius XIII and a select group of Cardinals decide to hire an army of fighters to travel back to Constantine’s era and make some slight historical changes. Predictably, the human tendencies of these time traveling fighters interfere with the mission and significantly alter the future.

There are only a few aspects of Pax Romana that I liked. Hickman’s Gene Pope—a genetically engineered person formed of preserved DNA from 1,000 holy men and women—was one of my favorites. The Gene Pope is created in a petri dish and grown in a synthetic uterus. This creation becomes a repository of all Vatican information contained in the famed secret archives and is updated hourly via a computer upload.

However, the bulk of Pax Romana is negative. The story of sending humans back in time to complete a mission and succumbing to human ideals is predictable. The shadowy faces made distinguishing characters difficult for me. Furthermore, women in this book are a rarity and negatively portrayed when shown at all.

An incorrect portrayal of Catholic doctrine weakens the book’s credibility. Part of the time-traveling fighters’ oath reads as follows:

And finally, do you unhesitatingly accept and profess all the doctrines of the Roman Pontiff? Do you believe in the supreme teachings and infallibility of the Holy See? Do you freely profess and truly hold the Catholic faith, outside of which not one can be truly saved?

Catholic doctrine does not say this regarding salvation outside of the church. Instead, it says the following in the Catechism:

“Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery.” Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. (1260)

Then there is the matter of Pax Romana’s an anti-Islamic bent.

In the old future, due do economics and ethnic population shifts, what was called Europe had been overrun by the religion called Islam; and in the East and West, monotheism was on a perpetual wane. Because of this, the religion called Catholicism was facing a certain end.

It is typical of many western writers to negatively portray Islam as gobbling up continents and becoming a problem that needs to be dealt with by extraordinary methods. It’s a paranoid crutch that unfortunately contributes to the Islamophobia that is running rampant in the United States.

These issues weigh down the book’s positives and turn it into something rather below average.

I was so excited to read Scott Pilgirm’s Finest Hour, the sixth and final volume in the series, that even though I had ordered it for ridiculously cheap, the moment I got near Big Brain Comics last Tuesday I caved and bought another copy. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to wait another day to find out what happend to Scott, Ramona, and their gang of wry sidekicks.

Volume 6 takes place roughly four months after Volume 5. Ramona’s MIA, Scott’s vegging in an apartment paid for by his parents, and Sex Bob-Omb has broken up. Things are not going well for our favorite Canadian hipster doofus.

Eventually that gang of wry sidekicks rouses Scott from his funk and forces him to face his pathetic life and the seventh evil-ex Gideon Graves. It is the battle we’ve all been waiting for and it’s well worth the wait. If it seems I’m being intentionally vague, it’s because I am. I don’t want to be a spoiler. Bryan Lee O’Malley reveals a lot about where the characters are going, some of it is shocking, some of it’s not. However, I don’t want to ruin any of the delicious surprises Volume 6 has.

Endings are hard, so it was with a little bit of trepidation that I jumped into Volume 6. Since I was one of the first of my friends to read it, many have asked what I thought.

“He ends it well,” I told each of them. It sounds like damning with faint praise, but that’s not it at all. There were many routes O’Malley could have taken. He could have gone down the schmaltzy sentimental route which would have felt like being manipulated. He could have come at us from out of nowhere with a bunch of left field surprises which would have felt like selling out the characters for the sake of shock. Instead he stays true to his characters and delivers an ending that is full of optimism and epic video-gamesque battles.

What O’Malley has created here is a funny, touching coming of age tale for twentysomethings. It’s about letting go of childish things, dumping that bullshit emotional baggage (literally and figuratively) that we all like to cling to in our 20s (that whole “I’m so broken and flawed and my pain make me unique and mysterious” bullshit) and opening yourself up to possibility. It sounds hokey, but in his hands it’s not at all.

No, in O’Malley’s hands it’s funny and fun and surprisingly touching. Oh, just go buy the books already. Read them now before the movie ruins everything (not that I expect the movie to be bad, but because it will spoil all the surprising things in the books).

Gary Shteyngart’s fuckability levels must be off the chart right now. If he were to walk past a credit pole, numbers that rival elite college standard SAT scores would blink in his wake. He might even be considered a candidate for eternal life, according to the Post Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation — if he drinks his green tea and veers clear of trans fats.

Gary Shteyngart is so hot right now. He’s a newly-minted member of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ club; Every bit of media in the world that writes about writers is writing about him; There is a kicky trailer for his third novel Super Sad True Love Story, with a cast so ripe with hot author-types that it is damn-near a literary equivalent of the movie “The Outsiders.” (I’ll see your C.Thomas Howell, and raise you a Jay McInerney).

If you set aside the very farkle narkle media blitz that is required to have an “it” book, Super Sad True Love Story stands on its own. Although saturating the internet with Gary Shteyngart is very much in line with the theme of his dystopic love story set in a recognizable future where iPhone-like devices are called apparats, and everyone communicates on a social networking site called GlobalTeens, a hybrid of Facebook, YouTube, online banking, Google reader, and “Am I Hot or Not.” The texting dictionary has expanded to include things like JBF (just butt fucking), and TIMATOV (think I’m about to openly vomit).

Lennie Abramov is, by pop standards, an old man. The son of Russian immigrants, a slight Jewish man with a sunken face and gleaming white forehead and a sickle of a nose. On his last night of a yearlong work trip in Rome, he meets Eunice — a young Korean hottie matottie in her early 20s — and they have an awkward sexual exchange. While Lennie romanticizes the event, starts mentally planning a life with the 80-pound minx, Eunice is GlobalTeening her BFF about the gross guy she hooked up with, his awful bunions, how she had to teach him to brush his teeth.

Lennie returns to his unfashionable digs in the Lower East Side (all the cool kids — those involved with Media, Credit, or Retail — live on Staten Island). The single-party United States is at war with Venezuela. The dollar has been replaced by Chinese yaun. Girls wear onion-skin jeans, see-through attire that reveals waxing habits. Book-books are considered archaic and stinky. Reading one on an airplane draws the same sneers as, say, lighting a cigarette. Credit poles line the streets of New York, rankings projected when you walk past. A person’s fuckability number is always recalibrating. Go to a bar, and with a few taps on an apparat, you can learn that you are considered by other patrons to be the least attractive man in the room.

Eventually Eunice accepts Lennie’s invitation to return to the U.S., and live with him. Her father, a violent drunk, is tormenting her mother, an enabler, and her sister, a blossoming activist, over things like spoiled tofu. Euny wants to be nearby to monitor the situation, and in the process falls a little bit in love with Lennie, but never stops quantifying those feelings with admissions that he’s old and unattractive and a nerd-face with a nose like an elephant.

They take long walks through Central Park, where Low Net Worth Individuals have set up a sort of resistance camp. They travel to Staten Island to hang with Lennie’s college friends: Noah and his girlfriend, who are always mid-live stream, and the comparatively domesticated couple Vishnu and Grace. Lennie tries to reclaim favor with Joshie, the 70-something owner of a company that helps High Net Worth Individuals live forever. Joshie is also a customer, his face melded into something that looks less war torn than Lennie’s, and his vocabulary an embarrassing text-lish where he incorporates the acronyms, but also falls into, say, Groucho Marx-isms.

And then everything combusts in a sort of 9/11 way. Apparats go dark, water is scarce, and survival depends on who you know, where you work, and education level.

There is a lot, a lot going on in this super delicious novel. It’s like one of those movies you would have to see six times to notice every nuance to fully appreciate. It is funny, and sweet, and also a little scary for its proximity to now, a world where everyday we put our lives in danger by text messaging while crossing the street. Where a thought isn’t just a thought, it’s a status update, and books with pages are being phased out in popularity for their e-counterparts. It’s a real thinker on a lot of levels: Political, social, communication and even the role of those stinky novels we like so much. Consider what Shteyngart said to the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview:

“The novel is a disaster at this point. It’s not a disaster that there are no good novels being written. There are wonderful novels written. It’s that our brains are being disassembled right now and being put back together in a whole different shape, and that is not going to be conducive to reading a 300-page thing that doesn’t have any links.”

It’s impossible to review Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 2010. I’ve been trying to come up with the words for weeks now.

Women have gotten PhDs dissecting this book, what it meant to women in 1963, and the repercussions of its publication. I cannot measure its goodness or badness in a few pithy sentences. In fact, I even have a hard time being critical about the book’s many flaws — mainly that it’s written for and about white, upper-middle class, straight, college-educated women. Plus, it seems, Friedan seems to think education is only for those white, upper-middle class, straight women.

Despite its flaws, I want to press this book into the hands of every woman I know (and a lot of the men). Ladies, we’re still perpetuating and falling victim to the Feminine Mystique. You should read it. Everyone should read it, not just to see how far we’ve come but how far we have yet to go.

This book has changed the way I think about things, the way I see things. It’s like a sixth sense, I see sexism everywhere. I find myself making sexist, anti-woman judgements all the time, and I’m abhorred by it. But at least now, I recognize it. It’s a small step, but still a step.

This book was an education for me, and I think it will be for you too. We never study women’s history in school, or the role women played in history. We learn about Betsey Ross (she made the flag), and then spend a paragraph on Suffrage, and that’s it.

I didn’t take any women’s history classes in college, and the one feminist class I took was not a good experience. I took a Women’s Lit course and was labelled “so male” by my classmates because I’m not a petite, “feminine” woman and because I disagreed with their interpretation of the short story “Sur” by Usula K. LeGuin. Eighteen years, and I’m still bitter about it.

So, since I’m having a hard time finding the words I’m going to take the easy way out, and share just a few of the surprising things I learned from and while reading The Feminine Mystique

• Some of my friends are suffering from The Feminine Mystique right now in 2010. They’re smart women who quit their jobs to become stay at home moms, and until I read this book, I thought they’d kind of lost their minds. But that’s not it. They’re lonely, empty, and depressed. They’ve given up everything they are to be mothers and are finding that living your life for someone else, even someone else you gave birth to, blows. It’s not fulfilling so they turn to drinking and sexual fantasies in hopes to find fulfillment. So far, it’s not working.
• Women were forced back into the homes by men returning from WWII who longed for these idealized mother figures they missed so much while in battle.
• The fiction (which was quite popular then) in women’s magazines went from being about career-women looking for love (barf, I know), to women looking to be the perfect housewife. The male editors of the magazines only published stories (both fiction and non-fiction) about women as mothers and homemakers, which in turn forced the female writers to write about such things — even going so far as to write about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s cleaning (or it might have been cooking or party-hosting) tips rather than her poetry. If you don’t see Mommy Blogger written all over this portion of the book, there’s something wrong with you. Mommy-blogging might just be the second horseman of the second feminine mystique apocalypse. We have 1000s of women’s voices on the Internet and a majority are spending their time talking about the cute thing their kid did rather than, oh, anything else.
• Prohibition? Yeah, it wasn’t a movement by a bunch of no-fun-having teetotalers who wanted to kill everyone’s buzz. No. It was a movement by women for women, because drunken men weren’t earning living and were beating their wives. It was a movement to help stop domestic violence, not to ruin everyone’s fun.
• Mothers were (are?) blamed for everything — loving too much, loving not enough, and just generally fucking up everyone around them.

There was much more. Much, much, much more. The Feminine Mystique is the kind of book you read and then it takes about the rest of your life to process what it really means to you and the world around you.

I fell in love with Belinda Carlisle in the back of a clunky brown passenger van in the summer of 1987, my walkman spinning the cassette of her debut solo album, “Belinda.” On the cover, the most beautiful woman in the world was dressed in all black against a Hubba Bubba pink backdrop, her bob flung whimsically in a way that said “I’m the kind of girl who tosses her hair. I’m always having fun.”

To see her on MTV supported this personae. In her videos, Belinda Carlisle spun and rolled in the sand, dance-flirted on sun porches, made love to a convertible’s head rest with her voice — a voice that sounded equal parts cigarettes and Tab. Her clothes always dangled off bare shoulders, like she had dressed hastily in the morning before sneaking out a bedroom window. Never trashy, though. What people mean when they say: “Why, she’s a natural beauty.”

In her memoir Lips Unsealed the former Go-Go reveals that this was all a front. Beneath the tousled red hair and pearly whites, she was a coke head in an internal state of controlled chaos. She was on and off the wagon so many times she should have splinter scars on the backs of her thighs. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Go-Gos reputation for partying hardy was well-documented, and frequently Carlisle’s own binges ruined live performances — both televised and at sold-out concerts — and pissed off her band mates.

In 2005 she snorted her last snort after envisioning herself OD’d in a hotel room — death by hotel room being popular in the crowd she ran with. (Consider her old friend-with-benefits Michael Hutchence of INXS). Not to mention that her longtime husband Morgan Mason — he of the kissy face moments in the video for “Mad About You” — was pretty much done with her secret stashes and wonky-eyed returns from touring.

Carlisle was a chubby club girl — nicknamed “Belimpa” by her high school classmates — in the late 1970s, hanging in the Hollywood punk scene with her gal pals. One night, sitting on a curb, they decided to start the band that would eventually become the internationally beloved Go-Gos. Amount of musicality between them: Nada. (Carlisle told those shrieking sociopaths on “The View” recently that in those days it was pretty uncool to actually know how to play an instrument).

Soon after they were touring in Europe, and went on to become the first all-girl band to write and play their own instruments and land a number one record. By then they had shed their punk roots and were producing something a little more poppy than they were first comfortable with.

Of course, the Go-Gos were pretty short-lived. They were divided between the party girls and the not-so party girls, and later there was some resentment about their front woman’s bigger hotel rooms, and role as spokeswoman. Rightfully so: While the other women learned their instruments and earned songwriting credits, Belinda Carlisle was completely divorced from the creative process.

Carlisle went on to get married, develop a solo career that started up here, and progressively spiraled into the discount bin at used record shops. There were reunion tours with the Go-Gos, and drug binges across the globe that included a particularly harrowing experience involving pallets of coke guarded by machine guns. There were weepy promises made to her husband, and a brief reprieve from addiction while she was pregnant with her son. Add to this a Madonna-inspired eating disorder, fueled by seeing how svelte the Queen Material Girl had gotten and comparing herself unfavorably. Then there is the time she gets coked up in the bathroom at her son’s school . . .

Speaking of purging: This book is a big one. Carlisle puts it all out there, seemingly leaving no part of her life for the sequel. This memoir doesn’t necessarily paint the newly-minted AARP member as a real sweetheart. And since she’s being so goll darn honest, she fact checks a few of the rumors that have been spun about her over the years no matter how inane and forgettable they are to the general public. Things like:

1. No, she didn’t screw David Lee Roth.
2. She did not do coke while she was pregnant with her son.
3. She wasn’t dropped from her label after “Live Your Life Be Free” because of a public altercation with the then label president.

These dolled out digs are a little trite, but hey, if she’s going to splay her story without romanticizing an ounce (or gram, as the case may be), she’s allowed a bit of self indulgence. She is exactly what you would expect from a 1980s rock star, right down to the part where she cleans up her act and includes the Dalai Lama on her reading list.

These days Belinda is living in the south of France. She’s a spokesperson for a weight loss system. Her son is en route for college, and she’s still married to the romantic lead from her music videos. She was on one of those reality dance competitions, and was ix-nayed early. She has been sober five years. The Go-Gos had planned a summer last-ditch reunion tour, but Jane took a digger when hiking and an ACL surgery took precedent over teams of 40-something white women and sex-starved middle-aged men in jean shorts singing “Vacation” in unison.

Many years ago I wrote a bloggy love letter to Belinda Carlisle, and said that I didn’t really want to know about her real life. I wanted her to be that woman skipping through an apartment, singing and tossing her hair. Beaming and shiny skinned. The character, not the Wikipedia entry. I didn’t want to see her strung out at 8 a.m., Rod Stewart screaming at her for keeping him up all night.

But now that is untrue. This book was delicious. I’ve been having mini-Belinda video fests for the past few days, and falling in love with her all over again. Let’s just say: I feel the magic like I’ve never felt before.

Colin Sokolowski author of The Accidental Adult should teach a course in how to deal with surly book bloggers. Seriously. The email he sent to me about his book should be forwarded from author to author and publicist to publicist as the textbook way to get your book noticed. It was short (nice), funny (super nice), and it showed that he has actually visited our site and read it (he called MN Reads witty and smart-assed, perfect, huh?).

So what would you like to know about Colin? How about this, on his bio page he writes that his proudest literary accomplishment was when a major market newspaper chose his letter to the editor defending Van Halen’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction as its “Letter of the Day.” Nice, it’s the perfect lead in to his six answers.

What book(s) are you currently reading?
I’m loving Steve Almond’s essay collection Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He’s got a very conversational voice, and he’s super funny in describing the delusional power of songs. Next up will be Rob Sheffield’s Talking to Girls about Duran Duran. Do you sense a theme here?

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Who?
I have a big-time crush on The Day I Shot Cupid’s Jennifer Love Hewitt. She’s fictional, right?

If your favorite author came to Minnesota, who would it be and what bar would you take him/her to?
I’m a big fan of Tom Perrotta. Before my book came out, I contacted him to see if he would blurb it for the back cover. He actually responded to my e-mail, and was quite kind and classy in essentially telling me no. His books Election and Little Children are probably his best known, but my favorite is Joe College. His protagonist is a working class college junior at Yale who doesn’t realize he’s an accidental adult in training. It’s loaded with 1980s pop culture references and great descriptions of college life. Ah, the good old days. So I suppose I’d like to sink a few pints with Tom on the sidewalk patio at The Local. And try him again on that blurb request.

What was your first favorite book?
Either Lord of the Flies or Of Mice and Men. I seem to recall they were among the first books I actually didn’t fake book reports on for my ninth-grade English class (unlike Wuthering Heights).

Let’s say Fahrenheit 451 comes to life, which book would you become in order to save it from annihilation?
I know I should say The Bible, but I also think our souls really crave – and deserve – laughter. Very few books make me laugh out loud, but at least a dozen essays in The Phat Phree’s Look at My Striped Shirt! had me laughing hard enough that my eyes produced tears. That kind of humor is worth preserving.

What is one book you haven’t read but want to read before you die?
I tried to read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not once, but twice. Each time I just couldn’t get past the first 50 pages or so. Maybe the third time will be the charm. If not, I’ll wait for the movie.

Right before her ninth birthday, Rose has a bite of a lemon cake her mom baked. It was a practice cake to make sure the recipe was right for the big occasion, Rose’s birthday. In that bite, Rose is overcome with her mom’s feelings of loneliness and emptiness.

Rose’s magical power — tasting the emotions and background of the people who prepare the food she eats — takes center stage for about half of Aimee Bender’s second novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. It’s a fabulous, interesting premise that seems to get lost halfway through the book.

Rose is kind of a lonely, odd-duck herself in a family filled with lonely, odd-ducks. On the surface the Edelstein’s look like American apple pie goodness and all that. Dad’s a lawyer, Mom’s an artist who works at a carpentry co-op, and brother Joe’s a budding scientific genius. But then there’s the cake filled with sadness and regret. It’s our first hint that things aren’t as they seem.

This novel is at its best when it’s focussed on Rose, her gift, and the relationship she has with those around her. Bender’s a phenomenal writer. I can’t imagine any other writer who can write a scene involving a turkey sandwich that can bring tears to your eyes. Each chapter ending is a little kick to the chest as if to remind you how engaged you are in this story.

So why did this book leave me feeling so empty, kind of like how I imagined the lemon cake tasting?

Because Bender seems to lose her way. Instead of sticking with Rose, her strange abilities, and how that effects her relationships with the people around her, she veers off into a story about Joseph.

He’s Rose’s older brother who may or may not be autistic. He’s obsessed with science, physics specifically, and how a penchant for disappearing — like into thin air, it seems. Joe’s also obsessed with being alone, and when he gets his very own apartment (paid for by his doting mother) things get really bad. Joe goes missing for days at a time, throwing his family into distress.

After awhile we jump back from Joe’s story to Rose’s story which has leaped forward many years. The sibling’s stories don’t seem to blend well, because while Rose tells us about Joe and what’s going on with him, we hear less and less about the food and what she’s tasting.

Bender never seems to get her footing back. The book feels sort of loosey-goosey with a few flashbacks thrown in to explain what really happened to Joe. It doesn’t sit well. As a reader I had a hard time reconciling Joe’s story with Rose’s and how together they told a bigger story, and what role Rose’s ability to taste emotions had to do with everything.

This is one of those books I enjoyed reading, the journey is fun and engaging because Bender’s such a great writer, but once it was done I kind of wondered what the point was.