First of all, I read 15,775 pages (at least in the books I finished, I read a lot of pages in books I didn’t finish too) in 70 different books. I’m a little amazed by that number. It seems like a ridiculous amount. I’m not one of those people who just tries to cram in as many books as I can in attempt to show that my brain is bigger than someone else’s brain. I like to retain what I read. I savor the words and the stories. If I’m not savoring the book, I stop reading it (which is why I probably read way more pages than the number show).

Those people who crank through a book or two a day make me roll my eyes. I just find it hard to believe they can retain that much information. Besides, what’s the hurry? It’s not a race. There is no winner.

I can attest that the only reason I made it to 70 books this year is because I eschewed almost all responsibility for an entire week and did nothing but binge on Fables novels — that’s 12 books right there. Then there was the Scott Pilgrim problem, another 6.

Of course, after all that preaching my goal for 2011 is to read 77 books. I only want to read 77 books so that I can claim to have read 500 books in the past ten years. This will, of course, impress nobody and possibly annoy everyone, but you can bet your sweet bippy I’ll be dropping that factoid whenever I have the chance in 2012.

So here’s how my reading year broke down. Now with pie charts thanks to Daytum!

Those 70 books included Graphic Novels, Novels, Short Story Collections, and Novellas (two, oddly).

Getting hooked on Scott Pilgrim and Fables really skewed my numbers for both book form and for gender, as you can see here.

This year I hope to balance that out by reading more graphic novels my women, or not getting hooked on graphic series by men. Either solution works for me.

Incidentally, if you care, my favorite novel of 2011 was probably. . . The House of Tomorrow (though on certain days it flip flops around with Bad Marie and A Visit From the Goon Squad and the worst books I read (and finished) were Bound and Ball Peen Hammer.

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And so I started reading Girl by Blake Nelson because it’s rock and roll June and I was so sick of non-fiction I could barf. Plus, it helped that the book had been sitting my shelf for about six years. And I knew the book was supposed to be about grunge music, alternative nation, and flannel and all that good early to mid-90s hooha. And Nelson has captured the voice of sixteen-year-old girl Andrea Marr so perfectly it’s almost creepy. But then the entire book is just pages and pages of what she wore and whether this eye shadow makes me look slutty and the politics of high school girls and should I have sex with him and now that I’ve had sex with him what does it all mean and Homecoming and driving past his house and starting every other sentence with and. And, really, how much of a sixteen-year-old girl’s diary can you stomach before you want to poke your eyes out? For me it was 130 pages.

I tried, but then this morning when I was reading I found myself saying out loud, “WHO CARES?” It was clear that I didn’t. 130 pages in and I didn’t give a shit if Andrea Marr fucked every character in the book. I didn’t care if she developed anorexia and killed herself.

It’s really hard to make an adult care about a teenager’s story. It’s tough because so many teenage stories are made up of the typical teen angst bullshit we all go through, and survive. I think for a book like this the story has to be unique as does the voice. The voice didn’t work for me, because it sounded like my own sixteen-year-old voice and if I wanted to read boring accounts of going to the mall, I’d go back and ready my journals from 1986.

Damn rock and roll June has been sort of a bust. Now I’m on the prowl from some good Rock and Roll books because so far everything I’ve read has been either boring or disappointing. Boo. Now I’m going to go cleanse my palate with a novel, hopefully it’s a good one.

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This is my plea to all rockstars past, present, and future: If you ever write a book about rockstardom please, please, please, pretty please with cocaine and slutty groupies on top DO NOT spend pages explaining recoupable debt.

After reading Jake Slichter’s So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star and Jen Trynin’s Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be. I feel as though I pretty much know everything there is to know about recoupable debt (which is basically a record company’s evil scheme to make rockstars indentured servants).

One thing I did learn from Slichter’s book about being the drummer for Semisonic is that most music radio stations are total shams run by greedy fucks who are drunk on their power. Slichter gives an exhausting account of what a band has to do, and spend, to get a song on the radio. It’s sickening.

I feel a little bad, having read Slichter’s book right after Trynin’s. The books are so similar that I often found myself growing bored with Slichter’s. I sorta think that all rock & roll memoirs written by performers are going to have the same basic themes, I will lay them out for you:

• Being on the road is lonely and monotonous
• Record companies are run by people who care more about money than music
• Playing on TV is nerve-wracking
• Having fans is a weird, strange experience
• You will make no money with a big-label record deal
• Alanis Morrisette ruins everything (okay, this probably unique to these two books being set in the 90s, but still. . . )

There, I just saved you days of reading. You should thank me.

If I ever become a rockstar, my memoir is going to be about nothing except how much fun I had sleeping with cute groupies, how dueting with Mike Doughty was the highlight of my life, and how I shunned John Cusack’s pleas for me to commit to him. Hell yes.

I’ve decided I am done with non-fiction for a bit. I’ve just banged through three of them and I’m longing for the delicate and beautiful world of fiction. I miss fiction. So instead of reading Girls Like Us as I planned, I’m going to be reading Girl by Blake Nelson. This book, which is tangentially about rock and roll, has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, since I got it as a birthday gift back in like 2001. It’s time has come.

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Here’s the thing with rock and roll memoirs (at least this is the thing I’m getting after reading, well, two) stories about playing crowded, smoky clubs all the sound the same after you hear about three of them. Doesn’t matter where the club is, who the band is, or what year it is. Sometimes something quirky happens, but even then it’s not enough to break up the monotony.

That would be my main complaint about Jen Trynin’s Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be, which weighs in at a wrist-straining 350+ pages, a lot of her stories all sound alike. In fact, much of Trynin’s rockstar career can be broken down into three stories:
1. All the big labels wanted me and the big wigs would all fly out to my shows to tell me how much I rocked.
2. After signing I went on the road where I drank and smoked too much and was lonely and felt bad about getting what I wanted.
3. My first record didn’t do well, I freaked out and quit.

I’m oversimplifying a bit, but not much. Even with the frequent bouts of monotony, Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be is a pretty engaging and entertaining read. Trynin does a good job of breaking down what it means to “get signed” and how it’s a miracle any musician makes money on a major label. Between this book and Dan Kennedy’s Rock On I completely understand why record companies are in such dire straits.

Trynin’s got a great conversational writing style which helps the book move along at a pretty good clip, and she’s pretty funny. I even laughed out loud a few times. Once when she had a panic attack in her hotel room and had to call the front desk to find out the date and time. Another time when she found out that Spin had given her record “Cockamamie” a five.

I also liked the way Trynin foreshadows the coming of Alanis Morrisette and what effect that phenomenon had on her career. In fact the whole book is just soaked in that mid-90s vibe. It’s awesome and she should get some mad props for that.

What I liked the most though, was that Trynin’s memoir felt really honest. She was smart from the get go, giving a lot of influential people nicknames, so she never had to reveal who they really were and it worked. In fact, I think I preferred it. Sometimes with so many people flitting in and out of a story it’s hard to keep track of who exactly Derek or Randy or Peg is. But I always knew who she was talking about when she referred to HeadHoncho, had she called him Phil or something it’d have taken me a minute to figure out.

Trynin doesn’t portray herself as a victim or a martyr, just a girl with bad timing which is really quite refreshing.

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At one point in her book The Importance of Music to Girls Lavinia Greenlaw makes this observation: “I don’t know how to think or how to talk about what I think. I haven’t learned anything for years. I don’t listen. I can’t speak. I am watching myself happening or not happening . . .”

For some reason when I read that passage I immediately thought “AHA! That’s it, that’s the problem.” Because I really, really wanted to love this book and it somehow left me a little cold. Despite some stunning and beautiful writing this memoir feels as though Greenlaw never stopped watching herself happen. It’s almost as though Greenlaw’s poetic prose puts up a wall between her and the reader.

Writing about music is probably the most difficult kind of writing to do. Trying to put concrete words and images to something as abstract as music can drive you crazy, and I think it’s why so much music writing reads like incomprehensible gobbledygook. The very best music writers are able to convey the emotion the music evokes in them to the reader. Either music did not evoke any kind of emotion in her, or Greenlaw’s just not that good at writing about music. It’s probably the latter, because Greenlaw’s a pretty damn good writer. When she writes about dancing, it’s magic. She should have written her entire memoir about dancing.

Despite the title, I never believed that music was really important to Greenlaw. It seemed to be something she did to preoccupy her angst-filled teen years but not some sort of vital lifeblood that she would die without. The music was merely a means by which to define herself, the boys she wanted to date, and the fashions she wore. In fact for someone who claimed to be punk in the 70s in England, she spent more time talking about her hair cut and bondage jeans than she did about any of the music coming out at that time.

The format of the book didn’t do Greenlaw any favors either. It’s told in these whimsical, floaty 2-6 page vignettes that seem to follow each other chronologically, but really don’t have much to do with each other as far as content goes. There is not a strong narrative thread running through each chapter. Really, the only thing that compelled me to continue turning pages was my own hope that the book would start making sense. It’s a little confusing.

The whole thing is so disappointing. It’s not the female answer to Love is a Mix Tape that I was looking for. It’s not even a really great, engaging memoir about growing up in the English countryside. It’s sad, but I enjoyed Greenlaw’s Book Notes essay more than I did the book. Probably because the writing that essay is more concrete and accessible and not all floaty like it is in the book.

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