→ September 30, 2021
→ By

The best books about writing.

I put out a call on Twitter for writers’ suggestions of resources for the students I’m teaching this fall in a Mass Communications class at a local university, and you did not let me down, with over 100 responses to the tweet and a few emails as well. I decided after I saw all of your replies to turn it into a post here, so that everyone could see the list more easily.

Twelve books earned at least two votes apiece. The runaway winner, unsurprisingly, was Stephen King’s On Writing, which garnered 25 mentions. In second place, with eight mentions was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, edging out William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by one vote. Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing, Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times rounded out the top six, all of which earned at least three mentions from you. I have read … none of these. Clearly, I have some work to do. Maybe some day I’ll be a good writer!

Here’s the complete list of books that you mentioned, which I’ve also tried to categorize by subject where possible (going off others’ descriptions, since I haven’t read any of them myself). I have picked up Harold Evans’ Do I Make Myself Clear for my Kindle, since it’s on sale for $3.99 right now, and put in hold requests at my library for several others. I have ranked them within each category by how many of you mentioned each book, with that number in parentheses if it’s greater than one. All links below go to Bookshop.org, from which I receive a commission for any sales through this site. Please don’t feel obligated to buy here – you can and should ask your local independent bookstore, or hit the library instead. If you have other recommendations that didn’t make it into this post, please leave them in the comments below.

General writing

On Writing, by Stephen King (25 mentions)

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott (8)

Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, by Ray Bradbury (2)

The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, various authors

The Lively Art of Writing, by Lucile Payne

Conversations on Writing, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, by Roy Peter Clark

10 Rules of Writing, Elmore Leonard

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

Style

Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg (4)

How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times, by Roy Peter Clark (3)

Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, by Virginia Tufte (2)

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, by Mark Forsyth

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves

Sin & Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose, by Constance Hale

First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life, by Joe Moran

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, by Steven Pinker

Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style, by Arthur Plotnick

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, by Francine Prose

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk & E.B. White

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams

Fiction writing

Save the Cat!, series by Blake Snyder (2)

Writing the Novel, by Lawrence Block

Writing Fiction, by Janet Burroway

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, by Alexander Chee

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, by John Gardner

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, by William Goldman

Danse Macabre, by Stephen King

Method and Madness: The Making of a Story, by Alice LaPlante

Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, by Noah Lukeman

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee

Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different, by Chuck Palahniuk

Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, by John Truby

The Wonderbook, by John Vandermeer

On Writing, by Eudora Welty

The Kick-ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience, by Chuck Wendig

How Fiction Works, by James Wood

Nonfiction

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser (4)

Draft #4: On the Writing Process, by John McPhee (2)

Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, by Beth Kephart

Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction, by James B. Stewart

Persuasive writing

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip & Dan Heath

They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, by Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side, by Trish Hall

Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins

Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion, by Jay Heinrichs

Goal, Motivation and Conflict, by Debra Dixon

Grammar

It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences, by June Casagrande

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, by Karen Gordon

How Language Works, by John McWhorter – out of print

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss

Clarity

Legal Writing in Plain English, by Bryan Garner

Do I Make Myself Clear: Why Writing Well Matters, by Harold Evans

Writing without Bullshit:  Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean, by Josh Bernoff

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves

Creativity

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield

How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure, by Robert Boice (out of print)

Journalism

Associated Press Guide to News Writing, by Rene Cappon

The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide, by William Blundell

The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, by Robert Boynton

Poetry

The Real West Marginal Way, by Richard Hugo

Writing Poems, by Robert Wallace

Everything else

The Pyramid Principle, by Barbara Minto (business writing)

Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer: The Artistry, Joy, and Career of Storytelling, by J. Michael Straczynski (writing as a career)

The Copyeditor’s Handbook, by Amy Einsohn (editing)

My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life, by William Nack (essays)

Modern English Usage, by Bryan Garner (language)

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, by Jane Alison (narrative structure)

Words on Words: A Dictionary for Writers and Others Who Care about Words, by John Bremner (vocabulary)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ November 28, 2016
→ By

Cookbook recommendations, 2016.

This year’s cookbook post is pretty much last year’s cookbook post with a couple of little changes up top – one new rec, one book I want because the author is great, and then the same standbys I always recommend. I’ve grouped my suggestions into categories: The essentials, which any home cook regardless of experience level should own; the advanced books for expert home cooks; a few cookbooks from Top Chef-affiliated folks that I recommend; and bread-baking books, all by one author because I’ve never needed any others. My gift guide for cooks is in a separate post, detailing essential and frivolous toys for the chef in your life.

New for 2016

I added just one new cookbook of note to my collection since last year’s post – I’ve acquired others, but there’s only one I can really recommend. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s mammoth The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, named for Kenji’s acclaimed and indispensable column over at Serious Eats, is a must for any advanced or aspiring home cook. Unlike many of the books here, The Food Lab is a better resource for its text than its recipes – I’ve made a bunch of dishes from the book, with a few that just didn’t work out (e.g., the pork shoulder ragout), but every page seems to have something to teach you. The one caution I’ll offer is that it doesn’t include any sous-vide recipes, which is something Kenji does a lot on Serious Eats’ site, although he does have a section on replicating the sous-vide technique using cheaper materials like a portable cooler.

The book I don’t have yet but am hoping to get in the next, say, 27 days, is Alton Brown’s latest, Everyday Cook, which I think is his first cookbook that isn’t somehow branded with the Good Eats title. I’m a longtime fan of that show and of Brown in general – many of his recipes remain staples in my kitchen – but I haven’t used his books much because they’ve often repeated what was on TV. This book looks like a departure for him, and he’s said he was able to do some stuff here he couldn’t do on television (because lawyers). Plus I just enjoy his humor and writing style.

Essentials

There are two cookbooks that I insist any home cook have. One is the venerable Joy of Cooking, revised and altered through many editions (I own the 1997, now out of print), but still the go-to book for almost any common dish you’re likely to want to make. The recipes take a very easy-to-follow format, and the book assumes little to no experience or advanced technique. I still use it all the time, including their basic bread stuffing (dressing) recipe every Thanksgiving, altered just with the addition of a diced red bell pepper.

The other indisputable must-have cookbook is, of course, Ruhlman’s Twenty, by the best food writer going today, Michael Ruhlman. The book comprises twenty chapters, each on a technique or core ingredient, with a hundred recipes, lots of essays to explain key concepts or methods, and photographs to help you understand what you’re cooking. It’s my most-used cookbook, the first cookbook gift I give to anyone looking to start a collection, and an absolute pleasure to read and re-read. Favorite recipes include the seared pork tenderloin with butter and more butter; the cured salmon; the homemade mayonnaise (forget the stuff in the jar, it’s a pale imitation); the pulled pork; all three duck recipes; the scrambled eggs with goat cheese (using a modified double-boiler method, so you get something more like custard than rubber); and the homemade bacon. I’m trying his weekday coq au vin recipe tonight, too. Many of these recipes appear again in his more recent book, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, along with more egg basics and a lot of great dessert recipes; and Twenty itself builds on Ruhlman’s Ratio, which shows you master formulas for things like doughs and sauces so you can understand the fundamentals of each recipe and extend as you see fit.

I’ve long recommended Baking Illustrated as the perfect one-book kitchen reference for all things baked – cookies, cakes, pies, breads, and more. It’s full of standards, tested to ensure that they will work the first time. You’ll need a scale to get maximum use from the book. I use their pie crust recipe, their peach pie recipe, their snickerdoodles recipe (kids love it, but moms seem to love it even more…), and I really want to try their sticky toffee pudding recipe. The prose can be a little cloying, but I skip most of that and go right to the recipes because I know they’ll succeed the first time. That link will get you the original book from the secondary market; it has been rewritten from scratch and titled The Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, but I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t seen the new text.

If I know someone already has Ruhlman’s Twenty, my next gift choice for them is Nigel Slater’s Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, a book about vegetables but not strictly vegetarian. (There’s a lot of bacon here.) Each vegetable gets its own section, with explanations on how to grow it, how to choose it at the market, a half-dozen or more basic ways to cook it, and then a bunch of specific recipes, some of which are just a paragraph and some of which are a full page with glorious pictures accompanying them. The stuffed peppers with ground pork is a near-weekly occurrence in this house, and the warm pumpkin scone is the only good reason to buy and cook an actual pumpkin. I own but have barely cooked from his sequel on fruit, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, because it’s more focused on desserts than savory applications.

Another essential if you want to cook more vegetables is Hugh Acheson’s 2015 book The Broad Fork, which has become the first book I consult when I have a vegetable and am not sure what I want to do with it. Acheson conceived the book in response to a neighbor’s question about what the hell to do with the kohlrabi he got in a CSA box, and the whole book works like that: You have acquired some Vegetable and need to know where to start. Organized by season and then by plant, with plenty of fruits and a few nuts mixed in for good measure, the book gives you recipes and ideas by showing off each subject in various preparations – raw, in salads, in soups, roasted, grilled, pureed, whatever. There are main course ideas in here as well, some with meat or fish, others vegetarian or vegan, and many of the multi-part dishes are easy to deconstruct, like the charred-onion vinaigrette in the cantaloupe/prosciutto recipe that made a fantastic steak sauce. Most of us need to eat more plants anyway; Acheson’s book helps make that a tastier goal. It’s also witty, as you’d expect from the slightly sardonic Canadian if you’ve seen him on TV.

You know, a lot of people will tell you go get Julia Child’s classic books on French cuisine, but I find the one I have (Mastering the Art) to be dated and maddeningly unspecific. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom is a slimmer, much more useful book that focuses on the basics – her explanation of vinaigrettes is still the gold standard, and her gift for distilling recipes and techniques into simple little explanations shines here without the fuss of three-day recipes for coq au vin. Oh, that’s in here too, but she does it in two and a half hours.

Experts

The The Flavor Bible isn’t actually a cookbook, but a giant cross-referencing guide where each ingredient comes with a list of complementary ingredients or flavors, as selected by a wide range of chefs the authors interviewed to assemble the book. It’s the book you want to pull out when your neighbor gives you a few handfuls of kale or your local grocery store puts zucchini on sale and you don’t know what to do with them. Or maybe you’re just tired of making salmon the same way and need some fresh ideas. The book doesn’t tell you how to cook anything, just what else to put on the plate. Spoiler: Bacon and butter go with just about everything.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty is an outstanding vegetable-focused cookbook that uses no meat ingredients (but does use dairy and eggs), although Ottolenghi’s restaurant uses meats and he offers a few suggestions on pairing his recipes with meat dishes. The recipes here are longer and require a higher skill level than those in Tender, but they’re restaurant-quality in flavor and presentation, including a mushroom ragout that I love as a main course over pappardelle with a poached egg (or two) on top and my favorite recipe for preparing Belgian endives (a pinch of sugar goes a long way).

Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery cookbook ($10 for Kindle right now) is is easily the best baking book I’ve ever seen, but unlike Baking Illustrated, the recipes are written for people who are more skilled and incredibly serious about baking. Ingredients are measured to the gram, and the recipes assume a full range of techniques. It has the best macaron recipe I’ve ever found – close second is I Love Macarons, suggested to me by Richard Blais’ pastry chef at the Spence, Andrea Litvin – and the Bouchon book also the homemade Oreo recipe I made for Halloween (but you need black cocoa to do it right, and I use buttercream as the filling instead of their unstable white-chocolate ganache).

Bobby Flay has an absurd number of cookbooks out there, but the one I like is from his flagship restaurant Mesa Grill, which includes the signature items (including the blue and yellow cornbread) and a broad cross-section of dishes. There’s no instruction here at all, however, just a lot of recipes, many of which have an absurdly long list of ingredients.

For the really hardcore, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is an essential kitchen reference, full of explanations of the chemistry of cooking that will make you a smarter cook and help you troubleshoot many problems at the stove. I haven’t read it straight through – it’s 700-plus pages – but I’ll go to the index and pull out some wisdom as needed. It also explains why some people (coughmecough) never acquired the taste for strongly-flavored cheeses.

April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig has the duck fat-fried potato recipe that got my daughter hooked on the dish, as well as a good selection of staple sauces, dressings, and starches to go along with the numerous meat dishes, including some offal recipes, one of which (made from minced pig’s heart and liver, with bacon, onion, and breadcrumbs) can’t be named here.

Top Chef Division

Richard Blais’ Try This at Home has become a staple in my kitchen both for about a half-dozen specific recipes in here that we love (sweet potato gnocchi, lemon curd chicken, arroz con pollo, sous-vide chicken breast) and for the creativity it inspires. Blais has lots of asides on techniques and ingredients, and if you actually read the text instead of just blindly following the recipes, you’ll get a sense of the extensibility of the basic formulas within the book, even though he isn’t as explicit about it as Ruhlman is. His second book, So Good, comes out in May 2017.

Hugh Acheson’s first book, A New Turn in the South, and Top Chef season one winner Harold Dieterle’s Harold Dieterle’s Kitchen Notebook are also regulars in my cookbook rotation. Acheson’s book reads the way he speaks, so that it comes off more like you’re hanging out with the guy, talking food, rather than taking instruction. His bacon-wrapped whole fish recipe is unbelievable, more for the powerful aromatics (winner, best use of fennel) than for the bacon itself. Dieterle’s book requires some harder-to-find items, but his side essays on specific ingredients run from the mundane to the esoteric and drop a ton of knowledge on how to choose and how to use. My particular struggle with both books is that they use a lot of seafood, with Dieterle’s including a ton of shellfish; my wife is allergic to shellfish, so I don’t even bring that into the house any more, which requires some substitutions and means there are some recipes I just have to set aside.

Bread

I’ve owned and given away or sold a lot of bread-baking books, because nothing has been able to beat the two masterworks by baker/instructor Peter Reinhart, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads. Reinhart’s books teach you how to make artisan or old-world breads using various starters, from overnight bigas to wild-yeast starters you can grow and culture on your countertop. If that seems like a little much, his Artisan Breads Every Day takes it down a notch for the novice baker, with a lot of the same recipes presented in a simpler manner, without so much emphasis on baker’s formulas, and is a steal at $20.00.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 12, 2009
→ By

Nine new-ish songs.

I’ll be on our Chicago affiliate with Chuck Swirsky tonight, but I’m taping it before the show so I’m not sure exactly when it will air.

Anyway, I have discovered that there is one substantial benefit to XM (Sirius XM, XM Sirius, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week) – an hour or so of their alternative stations usually gives me a half-dozen songs I like enough to purchase. Of course, listening for an hour a week is sufficient, so I’m not about to renew my subscription (which I let lapse in 2006), but I get it via DirecTV at home and occasionally in rental cars, which is how I came across these songs.

Ida Maria – “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” (video)

Arresting title, for starters. Ida Maria is a Norwegian singer who has a smoky voice and exudes a woman-on-the-verge vibe throughout the song (“What the hell do I do that for?) and seems to have some issues to work through (“I like me so much better when you’re naked”). The unbalanced lyrics ride on top of an upbeat, sparse guitar/drum backing. Good luck getting this out of your head.

Tokyo Police Club – “Your English Is Good” (video)

The shoutalong intro is kind of menacing – “Oh give us your vote/give us your vote/If you know/what’s good for you” – and the generally obnoxious lyrics, complete with snotty delivery, are backed by an Arctic Monkeys kind of rapid Britpop/punk guitar riff.

Men Without Pants – “And The Girls Go” (no video, but the whole song is here)

Best band name I’ve heard all year, and it turns out it includes Dan the Automator (of Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Dr. Octagon fame). It’s delightfully trashy rock, deliberately underproduced so it has a garage feel, with a guitar riff that never quite resolves so you’re given the sense that you’re listing to one side as you listen. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Rise Against – “Audience Of One” (video)

I was familiar with Rise Against from their acoustic song “Swing Life Away” but hadn’t heard any of their regular material until I heard this on XM. It’s solid-average, plays up a little with some good tempo changes and unusually sharp lyrics (not just for neo-punk but for rock in general), with the opening stanza, “I can still remember/the words and what they meant/As we etched them with our fingers/in years of wet cement” the first of a handful of strong images which, really, is about all it takes to rise above the lyrical level of the average rock song.

Living Things – “Oxygen” (video)

I had Living Things pegged as a one-hit wonder – and it wasn’t even a big hit or a particularly great song – after their terse and kind of juvenile anti-war song “Bom Bom Bom,” which hit #21 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 2005, but this is definitely a step up for them in the songwriting department. It has a stronger hook and a wave of sound behind a chorus that features some actual singing that wasn’t present on “Bom Bom Bom.”

Editors – “Blood” (video)

This song is actually from 2005, but I didn’t hear it at all until last year and didn’t think it worth buying until the second or third time I caught it. It’s very Joy Division/Interpol, and if you don’t like those bands, I don’t think there’s anything I could tell you about this song that would make it worth your while. Mostly I just wanted to mention that I was sure the first line in the chorus was “Blood runs through your feet,” when in fact, it’s “Blood runs through your veins,” so either the Brummie accent pronounces “vein” with a long “e” or my ears are shot to hell.

Franz Ferdinand – “No You Girls” (video)

They write good songs – I doubt you needed me to point this out. I was thinking the other day about how FF are kind of like Stone Temple Pilots in that, while you weren’t paying that much attention, they’ve racked up a bunch of good singles that would make a pretty strong greatest-hits album if the record company was in the mood for a money-grab. STP was there after four albums; FF might not even need that long.

Cage the Elephant – “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked” (video)

CtE seems like your basic college jam band, which really isn’t my style, but the slide guitar riff and the vocalist’s half-rapped/half-drawled delivery had me singing the song to myself at the SEC tournament despite the fact that I didn’t think I even liked it. The lyrics aren’t especially clever – the singer meets a prostitute and a mugger and sees a crooked priest on TV, territory I’m pretty sure we’ve covered before. Apparently the song went top 40 in the UK last year but just started getting radio play here in the last few months.

Matt & Kim – “Daylight” (video)

Picked this one up a few months ago – I’m a sucker for a good call-and-response song, and this one comes with a shuffling percussion beat for a sort of minimalist punk-pop sucker-punch in just under three minutes.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , ,
→ May 29, 2009
→ By

Top 20 21 Prince songs.

So today mental_floss is running the quiz that I suggested to them back in April, which led to the idea of a whole week of Klaw quizzes: Can you name the six #1 hits authored by Prince?

To celebrate this, here’s a countdown of my twenty favorite Prince songs, which I recommend you skip until you’ve tried the quiz. Prince completists out there will probably notice that all but one of these songs were released as singles; in part this is because I am generally a singles guy instead of a deep tracks guy, in part because I think deep tracks guys are usually pretentious boobs, and in part because my first introduction to early Prince came from The Hits which, if you ignore the third disc that is clearly for pretentious boobs, is rather awesome.

(EDIT: Why 21? Because somehow I deleted “Raspberry Beret” when reordering songs, didn’t notice it, and added a 20th song before posting. Of course, I wrote the whole thing two weeks ago, so I’m just guessing that that’s what I did.)

21. “Partyman.” Prince had a very long peak, but it wasn’t a steady one; the late ’80s were relatively fallow for him and he didn’t bounce back all the way until Diamonds and Pearls in 1991. The video for “Partyman” starred a relatively unknown Dutch sax player named Candy Dulfer, who then had a crossover pop hit called “Lily Was Here” a year later.

20. “Little Red Corvette.” I wonder what Prince song has actually received the most airplay over the years – it seems like “Corvette” is a staple of eighties stations the way that Visage’s “Fade to Grey” is de rigueur for ’80s new wave compilations. It’s a good enough song, with lyrics that walk the line between clever and all-right-we-get-it-everything-is-about-sex, which kind of sums up 64% of the songs Prince recorded, with the other 36% just about sex without any of the metaphors.

19. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” Prince was pretty big on the synth early in his career, before the New Wave crowd took it and played it directly into the ground. This was one of Prince’s catchier synth hooks; “When You Were Mine” has better lyrics (“You didn’t have the decency to change the sheets”), but he sounds like he recorded his vocals with a towel stuffed in his mouth.

18. “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” His first US top 40 pop hit, with 28 more to follow. I wonder how many programmers and listeners realized what exactly Prince was saying in the chorus.

17. “Black Sweat.” I think this is the only post-name-change song on the list; it sounds a lot like early Prince with better production values and a very catchy drum machine riff behind it. It’s less-is-more music.

16. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” Ten thirty-five on a lonely Friday night.

15. “Sign O’ the Times.” Hated this song when it came out, because it was so strange. Now I like it, because it’s so strange. Prince was never big on social commentary, at least not in songs he released as singles, but “Sign” is entirely about it, and one of the first mainstream songs to talk about AIDS.

14. “Thieves in the Temple.” Honestly, if it wasn’t for this song, I’m sure Prince could propose that we all forget that Graffiti Bridge ever happened and get a unanimous “amen” from the congregation.

13. “1999.” Might not have made my list at all on January 1, 2000, because I was so damn sick of it.

12. “Let’s Go Crazy.” Dearly beloved … Purple Rain was Prince’s breakthrough, and I’d like to think the main reason is that he veered so much farther into rock territory than he ever had before. He was already working his own wide-ranging style of fusion, and by assimilating a big chunk of not just rock but distorted guitar-driven rock, he created something pretty amazing that no one has been able to match since then. Oh, and this wasn’t even the best song on the album.

11. “Delirious.” Great song that sounds kind of dated now. It’s begging for a remake that replaces the little Casiotone synthesizer he used on the original track with some guitar.

10. “U Got the Look.” Prince invents text messaging, with the help of the hey-she-got-kinda-hot Sheena Easton.

9. “Alphabet St.” Perhaps better in the version released as a single, without the embarrassing rap from “Kat,” although for embarrassing it’s tough to top “Dead on It” from The Black Album. Also, getting “Alphabet St.” as a single meant that you didn’t have to buy Lovesexy and end up with one of the more ill-advised album covers in music history. (This was the most ill-advised cover in music history. I warned you, but you’re going to click anyway.)

8. “Pope.” I think this is the only B-side on the list – it was unreleased before The Hits came out. Very catchy, with humorous lyrics and that same less-is-more feel that a lot of Prince’s best songs have. It’s poppy by Prince standards.

7. “Raspberry Beret.” My wife was floored when I told her this wasn’t one of Prince’s #1 songs. I’ve often wondered if this song gave Ian Broudie the idea to call his side project the Lightning Seeds (a mondegreen from the line “thunder drowns out what the lightning sees”). And no, I don’t think the urban legend about “in through the out door” is true.

6. “Sexy MF.” Not one you’re going to hear on the radio any time soon. Sort of a funky NPG jam session with plenty of sexual innuendo and a syncopated beat that feels like an odd time signature or a record that keeps jumping ahead. I could argue for any song from here on for #1.

5. “When Doves Cry.” Hell of a guitar intro, brilliant lyrics, and no bass line whatsoever.

4. “Soft & Wet.” This was actually Prince’s first single, according to Wikipedia, but I’ve never heard it on the radio. The title gives you a fairly clear indication of what the song is about, and what almost every song Prince recorded in the first four or five years of his career was about. It’s dated with the heavy synth use – almost funk meets new wave – but the hook is sharp. Great first line, too, although that might be the reason I’ve never heard it on the radio.

3. “7.” No one seems to know to what seven people the song refers, but the mystical lyrics and catchy chorus made it kind of a surprise hit. Of course, in the U.S., it peaked at #7.

2. “Gett Off.” One of the best opening stanzas to any song, ever: “How can I put this in a way so as not to offend or unnerve/But there’s a rumor going around that you ain’t been gettin’ served/They say that you ain’t you know what in baby who knows how long/It’s hard for me to say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong.” The song was sort of a return to Prince’s glory days of sex-driven funk, but despite serving as the first single off the Diamonds and Pearls album, it didn’t make a dent in the singles charts until the album’s second single, “Cream,” went to #1.

1. “Kiss.” Iconic? Anthemic? Timeless. There may be no better exemplar of less is more in music.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 5, 2009
→ By

The TIME 100 Q&A.

Quick admin notes: NYC 1050 AM hit moved back to 9:25 pm tonight. Podcast of my chat with Jeff Erickson is available here. Tentatively scheduled to appear on 101 ESPN in St. Louis Wednesday at 1:20 pm CDT.

I’m working my way through a half-dozen greatest books lists, from the Novel 100 to the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners, but I think the most successful one for introducing me to books I liked or loved has been the TIME magazine list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. (Details on all the lists I use are on the FAQ.) On a whim, I contacted Lev Grossman, one of the two critics behind the TIME 100, and he and co-conspirator Richard Lacayo agreed to answer some questions I had about their list. Lacayo wrote about the process behind the list’s construction when it first appeared, and that essay may be useful background for those of you unfamiliar with the list itself.

Lev, you mentioned in your first response to me that you didn’t care for Tropic of Cancer, yet it’s on the list. How much did literary influence or academic value weigh against readability or trivial things like plot?

LG: I wasn’t that interested in academic value. I’ve spent some time in academia, and I feel like I have a good sense of what that’s good for it, and what it isn’t. As for readability, I’m a major backer of it. It was the fashion in the earlier part of the 20th to write very challengingly and elliptically and occasionally boringly. Which was a mode that was appropriate to its time. But not all those works are still worth the tremendous trouble they put the reader through.

I am however very interested in literary influence — works that changed the literary landscape through their sheer force and power and visionary newness. I’ll forgive a book a lot I would say I weighed those heavily.

RL: That was my pick, and one that I re-read for the list to make sure I still liked it. As I mentioned in that essay I wrote to introduce the list and explain how we made it, we didn’t agree on every title, and we decided not to, because we thought it would be more interesting for the list to include non-consensus choices. As for Tropic, I love the shaggy dog quality of that book. I don’t care whether it goes anyplace in particular. That willingness to blow off the “responsibility” to provide much of a plot is part of Miller’s personal ethic. The book is a demonstration of its own philosophy.

I was aware of the book’s history as the object of a landmark obscenity trial in the U.S., but it didn’t play any part in my judgment. And as for academic value – is Miller much read in “the academy”?

Unlike most lists of this ilk, yours was unranked. Why? If you had to choose a top 5 from your 100, what would it include?

LG: Oh, you know how it is. Lists are arbitrary enough as it is, without bringing ranking into it. You start splitting hairs, comparing apples and oranges … it started to seem absurd.

Top 5, off the top of my head?

Brideshead Revisited
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby

RL: I just don’t think that’s possible. There’s no rational unit of measurement. You can do that with a poll of numerous critics by counting up which titles got the most votes, the way Sight and Sound magazine does every ten years with the greatest films. But I couldn’t claim with a straight face that Pale Fire is 22.5% better than Appointment in Samarra.

But if I had to pick a top five, it would probably be To the Lighthouse, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, 1984, Midnight’s Children but ask me a year from now and I might choose five others.

Your list was limited to novels first published in English. Why exclude works from other languages as long as they were eventually published in English? Did you consider, at the time or afterwards, creating a parallel list so that Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be similarly recognized?

LG: We did consider creating a parallel list. But the body of work was just too vast — how could we pretend to have read all of world literature, even in translation? We needed ways to narrow the field. That was one.

RL: We weren’t belittling “foreign” literature by not including it. We were paying it our respects. We felt we could not plausibly tell readers we had sifted the fiction of every nation. There’s simply too much of it – French, Japanese, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Latin American. Halldor Laxness may have won the Nobel Prize, but never made it on to my bookshelf. Lev and I both have English lit. degrees and have been reading for decades and were comfortable claiming to know enough of the range of English language work to make what we hoped were useful evaluations of it.

Also, I can never find the umlaut on my keyboard.

The Modern Library’s list, which covered the entire 20th century, was criticized for its lack of female and minority authors. Did you consider the authors’ genders or ethnicities at all in assembling the list? Should those be factors?

LG: I think it’s worth considering those things, along with everything else. There is a subjective dimension to the idea of ‘literary value,’ a big one, and Richard and I were conscious that the people making this list were two white men. We did our best to ensure that a broad range of points of view was represented.

RL: Lev speaks for both of us when he says we were aware that we were both white men drawing up this list, but I didn’t find it necessary to worry about that too much. For starters there were always going to be plenty of women on the list. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. Likewise Muriel Spark. Beloved? Death Comes for the Archbishop? These are no-brainers. In the end I think there are 19 titles by women.

Similarly with black authors, You don’t put Invisible Man on the list to be “correct”. You put it there because it’s so obviously brilliant. James Baldwin? Zadie Smith? We didn’t have to go searching for them. The only book by an African-American writer that I picked up because I hadn’t been introduced to it before and felt I needed to know it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved. Along with Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates that book was the fun discovery of this whole process for me. (Re-reading Portnoy’s Complaint was also a nice surprise. I had forgotten how good it was. Not just funny. Good in many ways.)

As I mention in that introductory text, there were writers who almost made the cut but didn’t quite — Dawn Powell is in that category for me. And as I also there, there are a number of women writers whose greatest work is in stories, not novels. Flannery O’Connor is a genius, but her novel, Wise Blood, doesn’t do it for me. Likewise Annie Proulx, The Shipping News notwithstanding, who once said to me herself that she considered stories her real forte. Close Range is my idea of a masterpiece, but it’s a story collection. Karen Blixen, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty – same thing.

What I didn’t do was include a book simply because it represented any kind of social or political breakthrough. I love Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, about a gay man living in California after the death of his lover. It was published in 1964 and really is a breakthrough book in terms of introducing a gay character who’s not troubled by his own sexuality, just carrying on with his life. But good as it is, as a book it doesn’t measure up for me to The Berlin Stories.

If I had an agenda of any kind it may have been British novels of the 20s, 30s and 40s. I like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, the novels of Aldous Huxley beyond just Brave New World. Waugh. Graham Greene. It’s not the Masterpiece Theatre aspect, it’s just something about the ease with which they practice the conventions of novel.

Richard wrote at the time that you agreed on roughly 80 titles more or less off the bat. What book that made the list sparked the biggest disagreement? How about one that missed?

LG: It’s been a while since we formulated the list, and I’m trying to remember. Richard is a staunch Pynchonian, which I definitely am not — I’m sure I rolled my eyes at putting two Pynchon novels on the list. But I did it quietly. Likewise I expected resistance to some of the science fiction entries on the list — Dick, Gibson, Stephenson — but got none. Likewise the YA novel (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and the graphic novel (Watchmen). I wish I had stories for you about shouting matches and fisticuffs, but it was a pretty civilized process. I think Richard’s essay has all the dirt there is in it.

RL: Not to sugar coat the thing, but there weren’t that many, partly because we had this agreement that there would be titles we just wouldn’t agree on. Lev likes graphic novels. It would never occur to me to put Watchmen on the list but he loves it. Meanwhile, I really enjoy a lot of what you might call classic modernist writers, the ones who play around with the conventions of the novel, from Woolf to Pynchon. That stuff bores some people, including sometimes Lev. It’s ice cream to me. As he mentioned to you, I would have put a third Pynchon title on (V.), but there wasn’t room. (And I’m not somebody who pats Pynchon on the head for everything he does. I pretty much panned his last book in the magazine.

Have you reconsidered – or regretted – any of the entries since the list was published?

LG: I haven’t.

RL: Only the books there weren’t room for, but that’s list making for you. As mentioned, Dawn Powell. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights. Maybe The Wapshot Chronicle by (John) Cheever. E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. (Saul) Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.

Are there any works published since 2005 that you would place on a revised list?

LG: Yes, one. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

RL: Oscar Wao, definitely.

KL: It’s on my to-be-read shelf and just moved up in the queue after that response.

Did you consider other lists or awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, as criteria for inclusion or even as “bonus points” for specific books?

LG: We really didn’t. I’ve sat on enough awards committees to know how arbitrary they are. I don’t give them much weight.

RL: Did we care whether a book had won prizes? Not at all. The Nobel didn’t get Patrick White on the list. And The Pulitzer has gone to many dreary books.

*KL: Concur.

One inclusion that confused me at the time that I read it was Watchmen, which is really a short story stretched to novel length by illustrations. To me, it offers none of the complexity of even a short novel like Red Harvest. Tell me about the decision to include a graphic novel in a list of prose works.

LG: There are plenty of things to complain about in Watchmen, but a lack of complexity? I couldn’t disagree more! I’m a great believer in the power and importance of graphic novels — or comic books, as I prefer to call them — and I think they’re one of the most exciting things to happen to the novel in the 20th Century. To me the list would have had a hole in it without them.

I’ll throw some titles at you that I thought should have made the list or at least been considered. Tell me whether they came up at all, and if so, why they didn’t make the cut.

Cry the Beloved Country
Tender is the Night
A Confederacy of Dunces
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Empire Falls
The Dud Avocado

LG: Now we’re really going to expose the ugly underbelly of subjectivity in this list. A Confederacy of Dunces – I’ve always felt this book was rather heavy-handed and unfunny and hence over-rated. I know it’s beloved by many, and I’m buying myself some serious ire by saying that, but if there’s one rule I have as a critic, it’s never lie. And I couldn’t in all honesty put that book on the list, because I just don’t feel it’s great.

Tender is the Night was a tougher decision, it’s a beautiful novel with reams of great writing in it, but I think ultimately it’s slightly overstuffed and ungainly and melodramatic, especially when you put it next to the jewel-like perfection that is The Great Gatsby, which I think is better suited to represent Fitzgerald on the list.

I could go on slagging the classic works you’ve listed, but you get the general idea. I’ll just add that, to my shame, I had never read or heard of The Dud Avocado. There’s that ugly underbelly I was talking about.

RL: I read Cry the Beloved Country long ago, but wasn’t moved to re-visit it. I like Confederacy, but wasn’t in love with it. Tender is the Night was on my short list – an adolescent favorite, adolescents love doom. But Fitzgerald’s problem is that he wrote one book so perfect it makes everything else he wrote look a bit dim, even the good things.

The Dud Avocado – I’ll have to go looking for that one.

Awesome stuff. I’ll even forgive you for trashing Tender is the Night, which is my favorite novel by an American author. My readers will enjoy you taking me to task over Watchmen, although I stand my ground – it was thinner than a sheet of phyllo dough.

Thank you both for your answers and for the great list.

Filed Under: Literature, Media, TIME 100, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 24, 2008
→ By

On lit lists.

So reader ajd posted this in the comments on my Vanity Fair review, a follow-up to his question of whether I ever read lesser-known works by great authors:

My original question was, in part, based on criticism in works like Myers’ _Reader’s Manifesto_, i.e. that certain “great” literature is only considered great because it is deemed so by the keepers of the kingdom. I’ve always wondered how useful certain lists of great books are for this very reason — do the authors pick the best books, or do they pick the books that make them look the most intelligent and the most in tune with what other literati value?

Obviously this is moot to some extent, as one simply has to start somewhere. And some of your less-favorable reviews seem to indicate that you agree with this general premise above; I’d just wondered if, once you’ve read other works by authors on these lists, you’d found you preferred them over the best-known books.

I’m with Myers and ajd to a point; there is no question that some books are considered great because they’ve always been considered great, and I think there are a few books that are considered great because they’re incredibly hard to read. There’s also the whole stream-of-consciousness movement started by Joyce – like a viral infection through the world of fiction – that gets praise from academics but that leaves most readers cold or on the outside altogether. I admit I haven’t read Pamela or Clarissa, but their greatness has to be almost wholly derived from their influence on contemporary or near-contemporary authors, since they’re scarcely read today.

However, there’s a limit to this absolute-contrarian view. Some books are considered great because they’re actually great. One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the top 20 of the Novel 100) is one. Most of you who’ve read The Master and Margarita (which is in the honorable mentions for the Novel 100) agree that it’s phenomenal. I don’t hear anyone saying that Don Quixote (#1 on the Novel 100) isn’t anything special.

I also run into a fair amount of disagreement on the rankings of novels by prolific authors. What is Charles Dickens’ greatest novel? In high school, we read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. The Novel 100 includes the former, but adds Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers (the latter being my favorite). Some cite Hard Times for its blend of comedy and biting social commentary. And when the Guardian did its list, the only Dickens novel on it was David Copperfield.

Part of why Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is typically considered his best book is that it’s his most serious, and there is absolutely an academic/critical bias against comic novels. (That said, Modern Library put A Handful of Dust over Brideshead Revisited, while the Bloomsbury 100 includes the former but omits the latter.) It is almost as if a comedy has to be very old (Fielding, Austen) or the author’s only great work (Heller’s Catch-22) to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,