By all laws of logic and mathematics, I should love Jeffrey Brown’s graphic memoir Little Things: A memoir in slices. We like the same music, we’re about the same age, we’re both writers, and this is the stuff that fills his book. Seriously, I should have a full-blown crush on this book right now.

And yet, somehow, I don’t.

The problem is, I think, that Brown is too much like me, and most of the 30somethings I know. His stories, while amusing at times, lack the kind of emotional significance and depth I look for when I read. And that’s not to say every story you read has to be a life or death moment of drama-filled importance. However, the onus is on the writer to include in his/her story why exactly the story is being told at all. And that’s what each of the slices is missing, the whyness of them.

Each of the slices or stories in this book have the feel of stories you tell your friends at bars, a “so this happened to me once” aura about them. They are the kind of stories that are entertaining for as long as it takes you to drink a beer, and are forgotten by the time you settle the tab.

While I can appreciate the simplicity of the art, and how it adds to the stories, there are very few of them that really stuck with me. Even now, as I write this, I have to keep flipping through the book to try and remember what exactly he wrote about — that one trip to the mountains, a car accident he saw, a girl he liked. . . I did remember (without any help from looking at the book) the panels where Zak Sally appeared at Big Brain and when Brown picked up some Andrew Bird CDs, but still . . . is that enough?

I don’t think so. If this memoir weren’t accompanied by Brown’s artwork, if it were just a traditional memoir, I am convinced it would have never seen the light of day. There’s just not enough there, and that’s totally disappointing.

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Last year, when I started the Rock & Roll June endeavor (whereby I only read Rock & Roll flavored books for an entire month) one of the I Will Dare readers suggested Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Since I was mired in the endless Rock & Roll bios on recoupable debt, I never got around to reading it.

Then the movie came out with Michael Cera in it, and it took all my self-control to not see the movie because I really did eventually want to read that book. I have the kind of old-lady crush on Michael Cera that makes me feel like a cross between Humbert Humbert and coo-coo-cachoo Mrs. Robinson, so you can see what kind of self-control it took to not see that movie.

I’m so glad I waited. After actually reading Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I might not ever see the movie. There’s just no way the movie could do justice to the book’s frenetic, stream-of-conscious narrative that was unbelievably engaging despite the fact that all signs pointed to incredibly annoying.

Told in chapters that alternate from Nick’s and then Norah’s point of view, the book follows the high school seniors through a crazy New York City night fueled by punk rock, heart break, and discovery. The endless night is kicked off at club where Nick’s band, The Fuckoffs (he’s the bassist in the queercore band), has just played. From the stage Nick had spied Tris, his most recent (3 weeks and 3 days ago) ex-girlfriend. Once he’s mingling in the crowd he decides to make her jealous/show her how over her he is, and he asks Norah to be his five-minute girlfriend.

Norah, the daughter of a fat cat, big deal record exec, is a good Jewish girl who goes to the same Catholic school (because her BFF Caroline who may have a drinking problem can’t seem to not get kicked out of the better private schools in the New Jersey area) as Tris, decides that yes she will be Nick’s five-minute girlfriend. She acquiesces in hopes he will give she and an inebriated Caroline a ride back to Jersey.

The two share an electrifying kiss in full view of Tris (who cares only a little bit that her ex and her frenemy are kissing) and then head out with plans of going home. However, Nick’s bandmates slide Norah a fifty and beg her to take him out on the town in the vague hope it will help Nick get over Tris. Before the two can escape, Norah runs into her own evil ex, Tal, an Israeli who she’s had an on again, off again relationship.

Tal’s a jackass who has convinced Norah that she’s not just sexually inept, but frigid. Poor Norah.

So you got two hurting teens hurtling through Manhattan on a crazy night of trying to forget their Exs, trying to deny their attraction to each other, and just generally being stupid teenagers who love music.

The music infiltrates this book, providing a backbeat for all of Nick and Norah’s adventure and the one thing that initially draws them together. Wilco, The Cure, Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Patti Smith, Belle & Sebastian, Green Day, the Clash, Parliament . . . those are just a few of the bands mentioned in the book (the few I can rattle off the top of my head). Anyone who has ever had that spark of attraction and excitement that comes with being musically connected with someone will love this book.

Sure it’s filled with the kid of teenage melodrama that can often cause anyone over the age of 26 to roll their eyes, but the book is so genuine, nailing that desire, the use of the word fuck to express every emotion, the fear of being vulnerable with someone who totally excites you on every level, and the absolute sureness that you will be rejected because this, this is too good to be true.

Is the book perfect? Hell no. The last scene which involves jumping a subway turnstyle is so hackneyed and cliched and, overwrought that I audibly groaned. And there’s Norah’s weird knowledge of mid-90s culture (think My So-Called Life) which seems odd for someone who would have only been like six at the height of grunge culture.

You now what, none of that matters, because the book works. It’s a goobery, teenybopper romance, but it’s charming, well-written (I can’t believe how well the alternating chapters work), and infinitely enjoyable.

I loved reading this book so much I’m a little disturbed. I’m an unabashed, unapologetic Twilight hater. In fact, the legions of thirtysomething woman who rave about these books kind of creep me out. But here I am pondering joining some sort of I *Heart* Nick O’Leary fanclub on Facebook.

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I have to admit The Rock Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge was probably not meant to be read from cover to cover like most books. Really, who sits down and reads the dictionary?

I did, and it was a little exasperating. Mostly because the definitions started to get a little samey. How many times can you use the word hirsute in one book? Apparently 48 kabillion. Ditto lodestar. In fact, those two words were used so often that I started to count each instance. But then I decided that was insane and stopped.

Reader insanity aside, The Rock Snob’s Dictionary was awesome. I’m one of those music people who wishes to attain musicgeekdom, like High Fidelity, track one side one kind of geekdom. While I have the desire, I lack the knowledge. This dictionary’s got your knowledge right here.

I learned that Don Arden who was the manager of The Small Faces is also Sharon Osbourne’s dad. Also, while I always knew Tim and Jeff Buckley were related in some way, I didn’t realize they were father and son.

While I enjoyed the definitions about a bunch of people I vaguely remember hearing about, my favorite parts of the dictionary were the explanations of rock crit vocabulary cliches. Plangent, roots, psych, sun-drenched — I always wondered just what the hell those really meant when talking about music.

Plangent: Standby rock-crit adjective used to lend a magical aura to any nonaggressive guitar-based music (even though the word’s primary meaning is “loud and resounding”). Stipe’s muffled vocals and Buck’s chiming, plangent guitar made REM’s Murmur one of the most auspicious debuts of the eighties.

Their genre definitions were pretty awesome too:

Alt. country. Self-righteous rock-country hybrid genre whose practitioners favor warbly, studiedly imperfect vocals, nubby flannel shirts, and a conviction that their take on country is more “real” than the stuff coming out of Nashville. Heavily influenced by Gram Parsons. Also known as the No Depression movement, after the title of an album by the seminal alt.country band Uncle Tupelo (which itself purloined the title from the Carter Family song “No Depression in Heaven”). Though such alt. country standard-bearers as the Jayhawks and Neko Case continue to embrace the genre’s conventions, the former Uncle Tupelo mainmen Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar have emphatically de-twangified, the former as the leader of the crit-beloved pop eclecticists Wilco, the latter as a solo artist after disbanding his post-Tupelo alt.country band, Son Volt.

Reading the book was pretty fun and educational. However, I have to admit, I loved it the most when they wrote about things I already had pretty good knowledge about (The Replacements, Big Star) because it gave me the smug sense of self-satisfaction that maybe a part of me was already the musicgeek I so longed to be.

The post Rock & Roll June Book 2: Closer to rock snobdom appeared first on I Will Dare.

Since I’m knee deep in a few other Rock & Roll books, and since I wanted to start the month off right, I decided to squeeze in this delectable graphic novel in quick. It was a solid choice.

If Preludes & Noctures was the Goth Family Robinson, The Umbrella Academy is the Emo Family Robinson, which is not a complaint.

The Umbrella Academy is made up of a pack of siblings destined to save the world. Each member of the Academy was born at the same time, to mostly single women who had shown no signs of pregnancy. There were 40something kids born, and Reginald Hargreeves hunted down and adopted seven of these babies. That was all he could find. He adopted them so he could save the world.

We don’t see the kids in the Umbrella Academy again until they’re ten and they’re saving Paris from an Eiffel Tower run amok. The kids go by two names a name they’re given and their number. We see five of the kids taking care of business, and one, number seven, in a blimp-type thing with Hargreeves being told that she can’t help because she’s not special.

Once the Eiffel Tower nonsense is taken care of we fast forward another twenty years when the gang gets back to together to bury their patriarch. Along the way learn that things haven’t been so happy in Academy one of them, unspecial number seven has written a tell-all book about growing up an Umbrella, one of them left the academy and had a baby, one traveled to the future and got stuck trying to get back, only to return to the present day in the body of a ten-year-old boy, another has become a moon-dwelling half ape-half human Spaceboy.

Oh yes, and then there’s another plot to destroy the world — that centers around Vanya, unspecial number seven, who is turned into some sort of doomsday weapon called The White Violin. It’s awesome.

Do I sound stoned? I feel a little bit like I am while trying to explain this captivating and beautifully-drawn (by Gabriel Ba) comic book collection.

The six books that make up The Apocalypse Suite are dramatic (in story and art), intriguing (what the hell is going on), and satisfying (oh, that’s going on). The Umbrella Academy are a bunch of damaged, moody, superheroes who don’t quite get along and have a lot of parental issues they seem to be working through.

I enjoyed reading this collection so much, that I can’t wait to read the next one. I’m hoping it will pick up some of the many threads dropped in The Apocalypse Suite, because there’s a lot of good material here.

The post Rock & Roll June Book 1: The Emo Family Robinson appeared first on I Will Dare.

So this year, i have tentatively filled my schedule with:

• Roses & Thorns by Bret Michaels
• It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music by Amanda Petrusich
• What Would Keith Richards Do? Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor by Jessica Pallington West

As you can see it’s heavy on the non-fiction. I’m taking requests for fictional Rock & Roller books (with the exception of Arthur Phillips’ The Song is You because I am reading that one now. Clearly, my exuberance to read that book got in the way of my planning).

I’d also like to dig into some sort of Rock & Roll graphic novel (obviously not Local because I already loved it).

So what say ye, Darling Ones? Give me some suggestions.

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