WONDERING. WANDERING. WHATEVERING.
“Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”
— opinion columnist Bret Stephens
It’s positively pouring rain, cats, dogs, giraffes, and it is blustery, leaf-dislodging, noisy on multiple levels — water, wind, things blown over, gutters gushing — and it’s kind of great, though going outside seems like unnecessary peril. Thus: homebound.
The day before Halloween — can you imagine the poor kids and parents braving this mayhem? — yet things look up for the big bloody day. The forecast is sunshine and 60 degrees. Boo-yah! as a ghost might cheer.
Nowadays the most I do for Halloween is steal fun-size Reese’s from the brimming bowl meant for trick-or-treaters and the parents who steal Reese’s from their children. My Halloween dress-up heyday was when I was Paul Stanley from KISS one year and Gene Simmons from KISS the next. This was during the Reagan Administration, so slack must be cut. Like Marley’s Ghost, I wore metal chains as Simmons. Totally rock.
Damn, it’s like a monsoon out there now. The skeletons on the lawn probably have hypothermia.
On my last blog post, I hinted that Cubby the dog would go well with some guac and salsa. Well, he’s since got a bath — no longer is his scent eau de tortilla chips — and a haircut. He now looks like Moe from the Three Stooges. He’s spiffy and perfumey and the groomer tied a natty bandanna round his freshly coiffed neck. It’s too late for a photo of the transformation; he’s growing out, the bandanna is gone, and already he’s starting to smell like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme.
Mexico City beckons. I leave in a week for seven days. As always before a trip, I’m angsty-excited, a nervous muddle of dread and joy. Like, what if I catch Montezuma’s revenge, or get mugged at the ATM? Flip side, what if the food (tacos tacos tacos tacos) spirits me to rapture and the locals’ hospitality restores my faith in humanity? I’ll report later on this uncharted adventure. Bet you can’t wait.
It’s been 20-plus years since I read two ecstatically received literary novels — Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Ian McEwan’s massive seller “Atonement,” considered the prolific British writer’s crown achievement. (I’ve read seven of his novels. He’s spectacular.)
Now. My response to both books, back then, was: meh. What a child I was. I just finished “The Shipping News,” and its deep-grained, lyrical, downright poetic and funny prose carried me along its often exotic world-scapes and among its colorful characters. It’s a trip, and one worth taking. There are a lot of fish.
With “Atonement,” a high-toned, very English story, I have only begun rereading it and already I’m snared by writing that seems crafted with a laser beam, so specific, rich and dazzling, you want to kill yourself, if you care about these things.
Unfortunately, I do.
A clank — the neighbor dispensing with wine bottles in the recycling bin. A thick rain falls and wind blusters the trees, making the dog’s ears perk up and eyes go wide. He bristles at the sound of heavy winds, and often pleads to get on my lap if it’s all too much out there. Rustling leaves — Cubby’s nemesis.
Now a jet plane roars above and the local commuter train blows a curt toot, last call for the suit and briefcase brigade. The rain gutters rattle with liquid bloat. For a couple of days, the water extinguishes the August heat. I couldn’t be happier.
Summer’s almost gone, finished marring, charring the days with high 80s and 90s, sometimes more. Who likes this rot? Most people do, but, as my opinion abides, most people are maniacs. Melanoma. Enjoy.
I detest sweat as well, and shorts are the devil’s attire. But whoosh, the gusts flurry again and now the dog is on my lap, plop, an impossible tableau: dog jostling the laptop computer, making this task either funny or furious. Since it’s the dog, I’ll take the former.
So now, typing one-handed, I’ll wrap this reverie of sight and sound, a mini-experiment in writing live, as the world unfurls, realizing once again that the damn dog always wins.
“I wish I was like you/Easily amused” — Nirvana, “All Apologies”
Someone just pointed out — sooo boringly — how I don’t like anything. It’s an asinine statement that can only come from the congenitally cheery extrovert who unthinkingly likes almost everything, no matter how lame and degrading it is. These are the loud laughers and knee-slappers. Ha! What a hoot! The kind that still thinks “SNL” is funny.
It’s true, I’m a rough critic with shades of the pessimistic and a tendency toward the comparatively negative. I’m a dark spirit with high standards and a low tolerance for mediocrity and pure crap. I try many things. I am usually gravely disappointed.
Too many people like too many things. It’s as if they like everything. I consider myself discriminating. I don’t need, nor want, to like everything. Most things are middling or overrated, and I feel like a chump for investing time in them. I once interviewed a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he admitted that most shows, films and concerts he sees are worth two out of four stars. I nodded wisely.
And so, I’m labeled a hater.
Just because I find Taylor Swift numbingly average, think team sports are boring and obnoxious, abhor nearly every Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino movie, and am convinced the American version of TV’s “The Office” is grating and unfunny and not a whisker near the greatness of the British original. And Marvel: like daggers in my eyes.
Call me cranky, call me what you will.
But I’m not having it.
There’s so much I do love, such as, in no order:
World travel, books, reading, writing, drumming, snow skiing, romance, vintage BMX, animals, “Breaking Bad,” the Beatles, Philip Roth, stellar art museums, Iranian cinema, Paris, cold weather, big cities, director Michael Mann, “Hacks,” old film noirs and screwball comedies, Beethoven, architect Frank Gehry, ice cream, Radiohead, the Marx Brothers, “Top Chef,” David Bowie, nice people, the singer Mitski, rollercoasters, “The White Lotus,” Toni Morrison, boygenius, Martin Short, “SCTV,” an inspired cocktail, a great meal, Al Pacino, and — surprise — Anderson’s “Rushmore” and Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” … and so on and so forth. I could rattle off superlatives all day.
I should just keep my mouth shut, because too often my opinions suck the oxygen out of the room. People simply can’t believe I don’t think “The Wire” or Springsteen are unvarnished genius (they’re not). But below the negativity gurgles a sparkling river of all that I praise to a degree of adoration, even obsession.
When I was a theater critic, years ago, readers complained about my cynicism to the point that my editors did a scientific breakdown of how many negative reviews I had given as opposed to my positive reviews. The result was 84 percent positive. People, I think, like to cling to the negative response, all that contradicts their self-righteously proclaimed passions that they protect like little bunnies. Free Britney!
Still, it is true I find dissing unworthy cultural totems liberating, a perverse pastime, and I’m not alone in this (see: Larry David). More things that make me recoil: Donna Tartt’s overrated novel “The Goldfinch,” souped-up cars, dinner parties, Harry Potter, bros (frat, finance, tech, gym, etc.), most tattoos, Kanye, that 40-year-old skateboarder …
Bah.
As surprising as it may be, especially for this recovering metalhead, the Beatles are unshakably my favorite musical entity, be it Mozart to Metallica (a pair that shares far more in common than you might think) and beyond.
I adore almost every damn thing the Beatles recorded (OK, I can skip “All Together Now”) and marvel endlessly at their unsurpassed songcraft, sappy lullabies to psychedelic loopings, to the point of becoming overwhelmed and misty-eyed. Their music moves me like a great Vermeer or Turner, an old Woody Allen or Chaplin flick, a sumptuous Bolognese, or a beautiful woman.
It’s nothing new, this affection. As a toddler, I was singing along to “Yellow Submarine” with my dad and having a ball (I have it on tape). But it’s been roused as I read Ian Leslie’s new book, “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” a head-first spelunking into the two main Beatles’ musical/artistic/personal relationship as they composed some of their greatest tracks: “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude.” It examines a plethora of terrific tunes, but places 43 under the microscope. Forty-three!
Animated by fact and folklore, the book, which I admit I haven’t finished, begins in the beginning: how the boys met, formed early bands and honed their chops in German nightclubs. Yeah, yeah (She loves you, yeah, yeah) — that’s old news to Beatlemaniacs. It gets more interesting when John and Paul’s creative minds miraculously meld and songs start to pour forth in gorgeous, gobsmacking cataracts.
The author launches with the somewhat green “Come Go with Me” in the late 1950s, strikes upon “Please Please Me,” with plenty of songs in between, and finally hits the stratosphere with “Ticket to Ride” and “We Can Work It Out.” It’s all joyride from there as the Beatles — George and Ringo included, of course, though they’re mere cameos — orbit Earth for seemingly ever. (But hardly. The Beatles lasted roughly 10 years, 1960-1970.)
Expectedly, Paul is painted as the pretty, peppy one, John the caustic, callous one. Yet both are endowed with bristling intelligence and an ample sense of play and worldly curiosity. They are autodidacts of the most ravenous kind, and they devour anything that has to do with art, literature and music.
Their love of the American songbook, R&B and rock n’ roll is insatiable. And what they learn from them — doo-wop flourishes, country-western twang — dazzles. Their debt to Elvis and Dylan is bottomless.
The book is overstuffed with factoids, from the deep influence of Timothy Leary and LSD on the mid-career John song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to Paul asking George Martin for the kind of biting strings from the film “Psycho” for “Eleanor Rigby” — a masterpiece that Paul wrote at age 23.
It also doesn’t shunt on the group’s tour escapades, drug dabblings, interpersonal jealousies, and other gossipy gum drops. The book gleams with facets. Even at this early stage, Lennon and McCartney feel like brothers. My brothers.
“John & Paul” is marvelous musicology, mind-blowing and wads of fun. It is my book of the summer, and I still have yet to reach “I Am the Walrus,” “Get Back,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and, with terrible longing, yes, Paul’s heart-yanking “The End.”
Last month or so, I was reading a terrific book about the making of the classic movie “Chinatown” titled “The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown’ and the Last Years of Hollywood,” by Sam Wasson, and I had to grin at this quote from legendary screenwriter Robert Towne: “So much of writing is trying to avoid facing it.”
That’s hardly the most original thing uttered about the writer’s penchant for procrastination and craven dread of the blank page — Hemingway summed it up: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — but it was a reassuring reminder that cooking up stuff for a readership, a nervously performative act, isn’t always a joyride, or particularly easy. It can be a grind. It can be depressing. It can sap the soul.
But it can also be exhilarating and, when things are flowing, a blast. Well, let’s not get carried away. How about … satisfying? Said great journalist Russell Baker: “I’ve always found that when writing is fun, it’s not very good. If you haven’t sweated over it, it’s probably not worth it.”
I don’t know how you reconcile that dichotomy, the yin and yang of good and rotten, delight and drudgery, but they seem to jibe. There’s a fruitful friction. Good days, bad days, middling days. (That last line? Lazy writing. Bad writing. I left it there as a specimen of what can go wrong.)
I always want to write, but once I sit down and face the empty page that sneers, “Go ahead, try and fill me,” I tend to constrict, choke, unless I’m especially inspired and know how I’ll begin and where I’m (generally) going. Those days are the exception. Right now, I’m winging it. I had that Robert Towne quote in my head and started riffing. (Help!)
There’s no map. There’s only this: Get it down. The prose may be raw and bloody — embarrassing, eye-sizzling — but the ideas matter and the words, those painstakingly chosen few, will be chiseled out of the viscous blob of verbiage. Editors are helpful at this stage, and I’ve worked with many who have saved my prolix ass. But here on this free-floating blog I’m on my own. I am judge, jury, executioner. And I probably should have executed that sentence.
Point is, writing, like any creative endeavor, is a messy enterprise, hard to do but at times truly rewarding (I have ten journalism awards that bear that out, he crowed). You have to dive in head first, and toil to make a splash. Taking pride in your work is mandatory — read tons, write multiple drafts, and use spell check for chrissakes — the only way you’ll do anything worth a damn.
First you must conquer that blank page, which requires actually facing the music, not dodging it, as Towne noted. I’m working on a writing project that I approach tentatively, with baby steps, not because I’m indolent but because I am, frankly, a little scared.
There’s a cure for that. It’s simple yet courageous: Sit down, stare at the page, and bleed.
It is the impoverished soul who has yet to encounter the unbridled bliss that is Eve Babitz’s prose. I’ve written about her several times, but I seem to be on a Babitz kick this summer (when am I not?), and my proselytizing propensities are in full whack.
There. I said it. I am enamored with Babitz’s writing, and this lust just won’t go away. Last month I reread her infamous 1972 semi-fictionalized memoir “Eve’s Hollywood” and that kick-started my crush on her hip, shaggy, archly observant wordsmithery.
Babitz was Joan Didion with a jolt of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and, crucially, a sense of humor. She’s the cool Didion, the one who laid Jim Morrison, among a murderers’ row of L.A. badasses — “she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles” — and swanked her way through the megalopolis’ mega-scenes with abundant beauty and ample talent (she was also an accomplished artist).
Her memoirs and novels depict “a glamorous and unapologetically wild world.” And a privileged one, too. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. She was romantically entwined with Steve Martin and Harrison Ford. Reader, you are forgiven for getting a wee jealous about her oversaturated life. Me, I wilt.
And it’s this bounty that keeps you reading, carried as it is with earthy writing whose low-slung easiness pops at every turn with a hilarious throwaway detail. “She was a phenomenal writer,” declared LitHub, “the kind people hate the most, the kind that doesn’t have to toil or sweat to turn out something that’s not only decent but often extraordinary. Eve was not a great writer in spite of her unseriousness but because of it.”
Some summers ago, I compiled a blog entry entirely of quotes from Babitz’s fizzy, funny novel “Sex and Rage.” A few brief samples, a sliver of what the book, as slim as it is, contains:
“In the hurricane, the waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes.”
“He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes. Anyone would have liked being hugged by him.”
“She felt as though she’d been in front of a firing squad that had changed its mind.”
Her work is so much more than this. I’d have to transcribe whole pages to do it justice. It’s wily, droll, dry but juicy, real and loaded. And you will laugh.
Four years ago, I wrote about this book: “Babitz’s raffish auto-fiction, whose subtitle, ‘Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time,’ is a brazen come-on. It’s so saucy, such unfiltered fun, and the writing so ablaze, resisting it would be dumb self-denial.”
In 2018, I read the Babitz novel “L.A. Woman,” and wrote, “Soaked in sunsets and squalor, glamor and grit, ‘LA. Woman’ traces the squiggly trajectory of a young Jim Morrison groupie through the titular city with a constant stream of poetics and epiphany. It’s funny and mean. It’s about Los Angeles. And life. I gobbled it up in a gulp, like a gumdrop.”
So, yeah, I dig Eve. Without being her proxy pitchman — Babitz died in 2021, age 78 — I recommend these books: “Eve’s Hollywood,” “Sex and Rage” and “I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz.” Take a bite.
Or don’t. Remain unenlightened. I don’t care. And Eve, that snarky libertine, certainly wouldn’t either. She’d shrug, chuckle a plume of smoke, then carry on waxing rhapsodic about her capacious life in her crazy city, not a care in the world.
In these mid-summer doldrums, a few rambling thoughts that amount to nothing in particular …
Best sentence all summer: “Her lipstick is a philosophically incomprehensible shade of chalky orange.” (From “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz.)
I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t bore me silly or raise an eyebrow or two. Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” is a possible exception, and “Eve’s Hollywood” definitely is. I’m skeptical of minutiae only the writer cares about, like how their father flew planes in World War II and their sister married an alcoholic son of a bitch. I can hardly believe a word of what the authors say, especially when they do things like insert direct quotes they muttered as toddlers, forty years after the fact. (See: Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club.”) It’s all magnificent hooey.
I’m sleeping like crap. Nothing new, but I’m locked in a stretch of relentless insomnia. I called my doctor and he gave me a low dose of Lunesta. It’s done nothing, even when I take more than the prescribed amount (whoopsie). I pop Benadryl and a dorky over the counter sleep aid as well. I’m all drugged up and I still don’t nod off till 4 or 5 or 6. Then I sleep till 9 and awake vaguely refreshed with murder on the mind. I feel like a Stephen King character.
Kamala’s got me revved. For now. The initial blast of flowers and fireworks — her spontaneous honeymoon — is about over, and now she must face the music … er, the monster. Trump, a hopeless buffoon, bigot and playground bully, will meet his match in the debates. Kamala will be the buzzsaw that Trump’s ignorant, lying face encounters and it will be beautiful. That ear boo-boo Trump’s so proud of will be shown for the nothing it is, except symbolic and specious martyrdom. He keeps blathering about the American “bloodbath.” Yes, indeed.
As always, I’ve been watching lots of classic movies from early and midcentury Hollywood — the Golden Age of pictures when men were either gruff or suave (and glistening with pomade) and women were silky and soft-focus, radiating unreachable glamor. Black and white was king and the best pics were positively charged with swoony cinematography and dazzling chiaroscuro. Those were the days. (And I’m someone who name-checks “Alien” and “Jaws” among his favorite films, alongside “All About Eve” and “The Big Sleep.”) Recent viewings: “The Big Heat,” a crackerjack 1953 crime thriller by Fritz Lang, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, who gets a pot of scalding coffee tossed in her face by Lee Marvin and has to wear a giant bandage for half the movie; the unbearably charming Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the 1937 screwball marriage/divorce romp “The Awful Truth,” which features the brilliant dog Skippy, who also plays Asta in the great “Thin Man” films; and 1955’s “The Big Knife,” where a fist-tight Jack Palance is a movie star sucked into the manipulative corruptions of fame. A rabid Rod Steiger noshes the scenery like it’s beef jerky. And that’s just three oldies I’ve recently watched (I’ve seen them all before). They beat the living crud out of big, dopey summer blockbusters any day.
I bought a hair dryer. I swear to god. It cost $15. It screams like Janis Joplin.
Axl Rose is about as douchey a rock star as they get. This is comically, semi-tragically revealed in a long article written by John Jeremiah Sullivan for GQ and included in “Pulphead,” a collection of his essays from 2011. Last week, the book was named # 81 on the best 100 books of the past 25 years list in The New York Times.
As I was reading the Rose profile, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose,” Guns N’ Roses’ familiar songs thwumped through my head, be it “It’s So Easy” to “Paradise City.” The music — hard, transgressive and nasty-catchy — has few metal peers.
GNR owns many great songs, almost all of them on their debut “Appetite for Destruction.” On a later album is the ballad “November Rain,” one of the band’s worst songs (next to their godawful cover of Dylan), yet beloved by millions. Pandering and juvenile, it’s a big sloppy dog kiss about a laughably clichéd love affair. (Google the lyrics. They’re shocking.)
“November Rain” is as cotton-candy as a fawning celebrity profile by Maureen Dowd in the Times, or a Nancy Meyers rom-com, but in soft-focus with buckets of moody rain. Gummy, cloying. You want to gag.
Still, GNR fans regard it a masterpiece. They are distressingly mistaken.
Metal power ballads are always troublesome. Most are dreadful. Take Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” and all the synth-soaked dreck in between. (They’re not all bad: “Dream On” by Aerosmith, “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica, “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi.)
“November Rain” is worse than all that. It’s flat-out embarrassing, a soapy tearjerker that only jerks something unprintable here. Slash is metal guitar royalty, but even his virilely earnest solo belongs on a Yacht Rock cruise to Night Ranger Island.
Though he notes it in passing, Sullivan doesn’t express an opinion of “November Rain,” which is too bad because he’d probably decimate it with atomic wit. (Unless he likes it, then we’d have a serious discussion.)
Amazingly, “Rain” isn’t even GNR’s worst song. That would go to the above mentioned Dylan cover, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” in which Axl Rose torments then strangles the classic tune to screeching death. It has to be the most mangled and irresponsible cover song in rock history. (The band also managed to muck-up Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” in an overblown, histrionic rendition for which they clearly thought they were ideally heavy, but missed the point entirely.)
What I’m getting at in a wildly circuitous way is that you should read “Pulphead,” for its offhand humor, literary punch, throwbacks to New Journalism, and overall entertainment value.
Sullivan’s prose and approach favorably remind me of fellow culture essayist Chuck Klosterman. Pages are paved in irreverence. Laser insights tango with lacerating opinions. Laughs are plentiful. And you’re all the smarter for reading them.
Like so many witty essays that graze the indulgent — be it Sullivan, Klosternan, Eve Babitz or the late Michael Corcoran — they’re delightfully devastating. And there’s the kick.
P.S.: After some 35 years, a cornrow-headed Axl Rose is still trying to keep together an iteration of GNR for recording and touring. I have no idea how that’s going. But I do know that in 2018, Rose appeared in an episode of “New Looney Tunes” as himself, singing an original song “Rock the Rock.” In 2021, Rose again appeared as himself in a cartoon, this time “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?”
Perfect. One of rock’s natural cartoon characters has actually become one.
Think of the hundreds — no, the thousands upon thousands — of books published in the United States from Jan. 1, 2000 to today (elbow nudge: that’s 25 years). Mounds, mountains, miles of bound pulp, if you consider only traditional paper books that you flip the pages of and place on neatly arranged shelves, while ignoring their electronic ilk.
Now, pick the best books from that teetering heap, or actually the 100 best books, both fiction and non-fiction. That’s the gargantuan task The New York Times has undertaken this week in its selection of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far.”
We’re talking the smartest, zestiest, funniest, fiercest, most important and most influential tomes over the past 25 years. A gallery of luminaries — writers, actors, critics, editors and more — voted, and you can find them and the whole Times project here, including the final list of the 100 “best” books.
It’s pure gimmickry. It’s subjective folly. It’s a game. Let’s play.
I’ll give you a taste. Here are the Times’ top 10 picks (spoiler alert): 1. “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante. 2. “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. 3. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel. 4. “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones. 5. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. 6. “2666” by Roberto Bolaño. 7. “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead. 8. “Austerlitz” by W.G. Sebald. 9. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. 10. “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson.
It’s a robust mix, though heavy on the historical, I think. The top 11-20 is a bit lighter, with titles like Junot Díaz’s funny “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and Michael Chabon’s delightful “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (yet it also includes Joan Didion’s grief journal “The Year of Magical Thinking”).
Conveniently, the project provides an online tool that makes it easy to tally how many books you’ve read from its mega-compilation. Me, I’ve read 39 of the 100 chosen titles — not great, not bad. But it’s not a contest. I won’t list all of them here. Instead, I’ve picked five of my favorite books from my personal tally, a peek into my pea brain and what I look for between covers.
2. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon — Gleefully spanning lands and history, this teeming picaresque is about a magician and an escape artist who figure out life by creating globe-trotting comic books. But that’s just a sliver of their “amazing adventures.” Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for his 600-page romp, uses every trick in the book to entertain and edify, and handily succeeds.
3. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo — An unvarnished plunge into the slums — and humanity — of Mumbai, India. An award-winning journalist, Boo’s unflinching but empathetic reporting is both devastating and bracing. It sticks with you like a troubling dream.
4. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy — Biblical, apocalyptic, rife with death, despair and cannibalism, McCarthy’s unrelenting opus takes us through hell with ash, blood and savagery, and stingy glints of light. A Pulitzer winner, this riveting knockout is all about being human in the abyss.
5. “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson — This deeply spiritual Pulitzer-winning novel almost defies description. An epistolary story told in the forms of journals and memoirs, it showcases Robinson’s otherworldly command of language and astute thinking about the divine. Not the easiest read, it still blew me away.
Rounding up to 10: “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante; “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith; “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen; “Outline” by Rachel Cusk; “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson.
GNASHING. 