One of my favorite New Year’s traditions is moving the list of books I read in the past year onto the Booknerd page, which has lists for the past eleven or twelve years. I just counted how many years there were over there and already forgot the number, probably because I’m listening to Sam Cooke’s Greatest Hits at a very loud volume.

Usually I also start the year by making a list of my most favorite reads from the past year. I’m not going to do that this year. Not only because I’m pretty full up lists for the forseeable future, and because this year was a bummer reading year. I read a lot of decent to okay books, but only a few launched themselves into my heart like my friend Kurtis‘ The Winter of the Robots, which sounds a little like ass-kissing but I’ve thought of his book every damn day since the weather decided to be negative godhatesyouyoushouldmovealready degrees. That’s the sign of a good book, when images and scenes come back to you randomly.

I blame the bummer year on the fact that I started it off badly. The triple whammy of Pete Townshend’s unendingly boring memoir, coupled with the mean-spirited How Should a Person Be? and The Orphan Master’s Son nearly put me off reading entirely.

At one point a month or so ago, I joked with Christa that my Top 10 list would be The Goldfinch, the Heart book, and then my eight favorite episodes of “Family Ties.”

Though for some reason I keep forgetting that I read and loved Eleanor & Park. I don’t know why that is. Perhaps the story is so similar to my high school experience that I’ve already adapted it as part of my personal history. I can’t explain the forgetting otherwise. Same goes for You Are One of Them by Eliott Holt. Even Sister #2 said she couldn’t decide if she liked the book on its own merits or if she liked it so much because it reminded her so much of me. I know how that goes. I felt the same way about When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams which I raced through so I could give it to my friend Kelly because it was a book destined to belong to and be loved by her. I was right. She loved it, and when she talked about how much she loved it at writing group this summer, I cried.

Besides starting off on a bad page, I made another giant mistake in my 2013 reading. It involved reading four or five books right in a row about writers. Unlike my very intentional reading of female musician memoirs, this series of novels with writers as main characters was totally by accident. Boy did it suck. The books were all okayish. I finished them. But writers are boring as fuck, stuck inside their own heads, and each of the authors used the fact that their characters were writers as a sort of shortcut for why they were closed off holier-than-thou assholes. Barf.

So what’s the one book I’d wish you’d read already damnit so we can talk about it? Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll. I just need one other person in my life to revere this book as much as I do. If you read it and hate it, don’t tell me because it will probably break my heart (or make me question your taste in everything).

What’s one book you read this year that you wish everyone read already?

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My rosy feelings for Belinda Carlisle’s memoir Lips Unsealed come from equal parts twenty-five-year-old nostalgia and love for Christa’s review of the book. Her review is one of my favorite pieces ever published on MN Reads. It’s everything I love in a review: book description, clear opinion, personal connection, and good writing.

Belinda’s book is not everything I love in a music memoir. Probably because it’s more addiction & recovery memoir with a touch of music, which now that I’ve read the book makes sense. Though she loves music, Belinda left all the songwriting to other people. She was divorced from the creative process, leaving that to her bandmates in The Go-Go’s and to record producers. She showed up to give voice to the songs and a beautiful image to the videos.

That’s not to say there is no music at all. She charts the start of The Go-Go’s from punk scene darlings to chart topping groundbreakers. Did you know The Go-Go’s were the first all-female band who played their own instruments and wrote their own songs to land a #1 album on the Billboard charts? I didn’t until I read the book.

She chronicles the excesses of their partying, the bitterness of their many break-ups and reunions (jealousy, drugs, etc.), and of the guilt she felt being the break-out star whose solo career actually goes some place. There’s some sex, a lot of drugs, and a little rock & roll. There are anecdotes about people you’ve probably heard of and tales from her childhood, but mostly there’s just a lot of shame and drug use.

Not all of the shame stems from her constant need to be high, a lot of it stems from her body image. This broke my heart. She was picked on for being a fat kid in school and, well, throughout her career. Reviewers often commented on her weight, which had nothing to do with her actual performance. She talks about constantly comparing herself to Madonna and wanting to look like her.

This was super jarring. There was a time in the 1980s where Belinda Carlisle was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. At least she was in the girl world I grew up in. Just look at her!

And to learn that she wanted to look like Madonna, just felt wrong somehow. While we loved us some Madonna, I don’t think any of us actually wanted to look like her. Belinda though. . . Belinda’s beauty seemed accessible to a gaggle of girls in suburban Minneapolis. Belinda had the kind of beauty aspired to and could maybe actually achieve. Even in our bedroom dance parties we knew Madonna was unattainable.

Yeah, I know, this has little to do with the book. I have little to think about the book. It was oddly disappointing. Addiction memoirs are not my thing. They have the “if you read one, you read them all” feel to them. They all read sort of like this: here are the myriad shitty things I did to get drugs and the other shitty things I did to hide my need for them. Here’s how I finally saw the light and what I do now to stay clean.

Boring. While I don’t begrudge her the need to share her story (or anyone who suffers from addiction), it doesn’t really make it that interesting. While I’m glad I read Carlisle’s memoir, it’s more because I’m on a rock & roll reading kick. Really, Christa’s review is better than the book.

And, if you’re interested here’s how the Women in Rock Memoir/Biography Ranking sits:

1. Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll by Ann & Nancy Wilson
2. Rat Girl by Kristen Hersh
3. Between a Rock & a Heart Place by Pat Benatar
4. Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways by Evelyn McDonnell
5. Just Kids by Patti Smith (it ranks this low because it’s less about music and more about her friendship with Mapplethorpe)
6. Lips Unsealed by Belinda Carlisle
7. Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt

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If Rob Lowe’s memoir is the biggest, best issue of Tiger Beat ever, then Gavin Edward’s Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind is the saddest.

River Phoenix was a beautiful, doomed neo-hippie with a heart full of music, hopes of saving the world, and a hardcore drug habit he was intent on hiding. It’s hard to believe it’s been twenty years since the twenty-three-year old actor died outside of the Johnny Depp-owned Hollywood club, The Viper Room, but there you have it.

Edward’s biography is illuminating, to say the least. As someone who would have labelled herself as a big River Phoenix fan (I brag about seeing “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” in the theater. Twice.), I learned a lot about him reading this book. All of it depressing as hell.

Perhaps more than the super-secret addiction, and even the loss of virginity as a child (an actual, four-year-old child), the most depressing thing to learn was how handicapped River was by his lack of education. Ostensibly he was home-schooled by his parents, but throughout the book people who worked with Phoenix talked about how very little he knew — even the most basic of geography, history, literature. They said he was a smart kid but had no knowledge. On one movie someone had to explain to him who General George Patton was.

The great thing about this biography, aside from revealing details long-forgotten or never-known about Phoenix, his family, and his career, is that Edwards consistently provides context for what’s going on in Hollywood at the time River is working on “Stand By Me” or “My Own Private Idaho.” He tells us what Johnny Depp was doing at the time, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, and a whole slew of Phoenix’s contemporaries, including the musicians Phoenix would befriend at some point — members of the Butthole Surfers and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. Phoenix’s romantic relationships are also covered — and after reading this I want to hug Martha Plimpton — hard. I knew going into this that she’s pretty much made of awesome, but after reading Last Night at the Viper Room, it seems she was the only person in River Phoenix’s life who wouldn’t put up with his bullshit.

And that’s the real heartbreaker here — that so many people bought his BS. He was a troubled young man whose drug use was increasingly getting in the way of his work and his life, and so many looked the other way. Or believed him when he said it wasn’t so bad. People helped him hide his problem from reporters and the public in an attempt to protect his image, which led, ultimately to his death.

As the clock winds down to River’s ultimate death Edwards gives us a minute-by-minute playback of what happened that night at the Viper Room. It is infuriating and sad and leaves you with a heaping helping of woulda, shoulda, couldas.

This is a book that weighs heavy on your heart after you read it, but still makes you kind of glad you did.

Also, one last nerdy aside, Phoenix died of a drug overdose and the coroner who performed the autopsy said something about how the cocaine that night went right to his heart and stopped it. Which is, if you are a nerdy goodie goodie like me, the exact thing that killed Regina Morrow in Sweet Valley High #40 On the Edge and when I read that my first reaction was, too bad, he never read about Regina Morrow.

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The thing I love about reading books by Kurtis Scaletta (who you should know is a friend of mine), is that they zap me back in time to when it seemed my only responsibility and the only thing I wanted to do was read the book in my hand. His books make me read while eating, read while “watching” TV, and read way late into the night so I can find out what happens.

Today his latest The Winter of the Robots is to blame for my advanced tiredness. I even knew what was going to happen and there I was at midnight vowing just one more page, one more page, one more page until I was done. It was worth it.

In this one we have Jim, who is tired, sore, and newly crushing on Rocky, the girl next door. He’s tired of doing the arts & crafts portions of the yearly science fair projects he teams up with his best friend, robot-obsessed Oliver, to build. He’s sore because it’s winter in Minnesota and the snow, it never ends — same with the shoveling. And Rocky? Rocky has suggested he team up with her for this year’s science fair. She’s got her eye on some otters near the old junkyard not far from where they live and thinks studying them would be fun.

Jim agrees and ditches Oliver for Rocky, which pisses off his old friend. However, the otter project is cut short and we find Jim ditching the girl for Oliver and the robots. Rocky teams up with Dimitri, a mysterious Russian immigrant with a family filled with intriguing characters. They’re going to build their own robot to take down whatever Jim and Oliver create.

There’s a lot of middle-grade drama, both romantic and robot related, and I haven’t even gotten to Jim’s blackmailing, super-smart kid sister Penny, or his always angry Dad or shady Sergei or kind of shady Peter or the robot battle at the Mall of America or, or, or the mystery living in the junkyard.

Oh. . . the mystery living in the junkyard is the best part! See the junkyard is on the grounds of Nomicon, a mysterious robotics business that went kablooey some years back, taking lives. But it seems maybe something survived the horrific accident. This is what made me stay up way too late last night. If you want to find out what’s going on there, you’ll have to read the book. And you should read the book. It’s so fun and funny. Jim’s a pretty witty kid and a few of his one-liners had me cackling with glee — especially a joke about Edina.

The Winter of the Robots, go for the robots (because: ROBOTS!) and stay for kids figuring out how to maneuver relationships (romantic, parental, and otherwise), discovering their passions, and unearthing the mysteries of what’s going on in that creepy junkyard (and there are otters! Otters & robots, what more do you want in a book?).

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Warning: I’m going to state a personal preference in a minute. Please try not to bunch yer undies. I know we live in a time where having a personal preference has morphed into some sort of damning of all that you don’t prefer. For instance it seems, at least on the Internet, that saying ‘hey I like to read old-fashioned paper books’ is often interpreted as ‘you who read ebooks are ruining everything with your electronics and stupid fart faces.’ The Internet is weird like that.

There used to be a time where you could have a personal preference and it was okay. It was okay to like Diet Coke more than Coke or Diet Pepsi and stating that you did, indeed, prefer Diet Coke was in no way a condemnation of anyone who chose to drink other kinds of sodas. It was a glorious time.

So with that in mind, here goes: I don’t care for the work of Neil Gaiman. It’s okay if you do, we can still be friends. I can see his appeal. I can see how his magical stories might enthrall people. However, his writing does nothing for me and, frankly, kind of bores me.

My latest attempts to enjoy the books of Neil Gaiman comes in the form of The Ocean at the End of the Lane the hotly anticipated adult novel from the young-adult/middle grade/graphic novel maestro. I listened to this one, read by Gaiman (who is a great reader) for my bookclub and it was fine. Did it make my pulse race? No. Did it make me yearn for what was going to happen at the end? No. Did it make me want to turn it off and not go back? No.

I am damning this one with faint praise. It was just okay in my estimation. A little repetitive. . . what color were the kitten’s eyes again? Oh yes, blue-green thanks for telling me eighty-two times. Also, was the wormhole like a strangely transparent living thing? Really? Maybe you should tell me again. Did the narrator like to read books? I don’t know because you only mentioned it every other page.

The repetition stands out because this is a shortie five hours when it’s read to you, 192 pages when you read it yourself.

This book finds an fortysomething man returning to his childhood home for a funeral. While walking his old stomping grounds a fragment of a memory scratches at him. He wanders down the lane to the old Hempstock farm where he finds Old Mrs. Hempstock, who invites him in and settles him at a bench in front of the old duck pond, a pond her daughter Lettie called an ocean.

Properly benched, his memory goes back forty years to the summer he was seven and an opal miner came to live with his family and met a tragic end. The death of the tenant sets off a chain of events that brings ettie Hempstock, an eleven-year-old girl into his life and an evil babysitter in the form of beautiful Ursula Monkton into his house.

Strange and magical and dark things happen and culminate (of course) in an ultimate battle. Lives are lost, lives are saved, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, it’s a little boring. The over-arching theme about memory and fear and self-worth is all well and good, and like I said it’s nice. It’s a nice, okay book that I couldn’t get too hopped up about either way.

If you’d like a more positive, sunny take on the book go read Leann’s review or Christa’s review, they really liked the book and have much more insightful things to say about it.

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