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a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius~ by dave eggers, 2000

Maybe you've heard too much about this one. Maybe so much it makes you sick. Maybe you've decided to boycott the hype and read something really underground. Besides, he's so ironic, so self-conscious, and it has all those little drawings and all that little writing all over the copyright page, and instructions for reading the book for god's sake.

Get over yourself and read it. I really mean that. Because what you're missing is the exact opposite of irony and do you even know what that means? You are missing moments of grace and tenderness if you are busy being bitter, and that is so boring. You'll read some 30 pages of preface and apologia and a drawing of a stapler and then watch it break into the first page where the light is coming through the bathroom window and you will be redeemed. Not the book. You. See, the true glory of this book is in the relative sum of its many, many (many) parts. It is a whole experience you must read through and laugh through and suffer through and if you are laughing and tearing you are not schizophrenic and you are not experiencing another's schizophrenia or some manipulative joke.

I blazed through this book and came out gasping (and certainly in love, which must make it genius) and gave it to my father who blazed through it and then spent evenings reading it again, aloud, to my mother, and I think we all came out changed in some good way, just for having experienced the possibility of a young life lived.

**One of the excerpts is from the flip-over addition to the first paperback printing (entitled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making) which you will unfortunately not find in subsequent printings, but which is well worth seeking out if you fall in love with AHWOSG and need more.

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{485 pages}  {paperback} {Vintage Books}

air guitar by dave hickey air guitar ~ by dave hickey, 1997

Sure, he won the Genius award, is probably the finest art critic alive, and sure, you really can't fathom being quite this smart, nor quite this hip. But you've just got to love an art historian, an art critic in really the best sense of the word, who lives in Las Vegas by choice. This is one of my favorite books to re-read in bits and pieces, again and again.
I've photocopied parts if Air Guitar for friends, read them aloud to rooms full of people, and you certainly will too, since no one can contain this much genius. The perfect blend of cultural criticism and personal experience lives eloquently in these pages about Las Vegas, Liberace, rock and roll, jazz, art-dealing, basketball… all illuminated in a literary style that is rich, funny, and so utterly enjoyable because of and in spite of the fact that your brain is expanding to understand how very rich this little world is.

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{216 pages} {paperback} {Art Issues Press}

don't let's go to the dog's tonight by alexandra fuller

the white album ~ by joan didion, 1979

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
In this mosaic of late-60's California, Didion's narrative line is really the only one I'm interested in. Writing through the social and psychological fall-apart of narrative, Didion collects details with journalistic observation, connects them with impossible fluidity, and subtly flourishes them with genius disbelief, wry humor, and ultimate style. A montage of the Manson murders, recording sessions with the Doors, her family, the Black Panthers, water in the desert, the women's movement, the Getty museum, and the politics and a-politics in between, Didion bares a history of sense and mood, purpose and abandon, with commanding intelligence and sureness.

This is one of the top 5 ingredients in The Library of Necessary Books. I've read it countless times, in part and in whole, I've copied and read aloud parts for friends, and over these nearly ten years since I first read it, my envy is slowly melting for sheer wonder at the mind that put this pen to paper.

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{223 pages} {paperback} {Noonday Press}


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