Our Favorite Undernourished Books of the Year

—Nathan Ihara

RADIANT DAYS | By MICHAEL A. FITZGERALD | Shoemaker & Hoard

Radiant Days received a few notices when it came out early this year, but most of them were bad. The problem, it seems, is its protagonist: a dot-com burnout who, driven by libidinous impulses, goes from San Francisco to Budapest to Croatia at the tail end of the Balkan conflict. FitzGerald, however, doesn’t intend for his American abroad to be a sympathetic character; rather, he’s a portrait of American depravity disguised as righteous entitlement. To paraphrase Chevy pitchman John Mellencamp: He is our country. Limned with passages of outrageous beauty, sublime violence, and a climax you won’t soon forget, Radiant Days might have flown under the radar, but it scores a direct hit.

—Jim Ruland

THEN WE CAME TO THE END | By JOSHUA FERRIS | Little Brown and Co.

I loved this novel about an ad agency going downhill at the end of the 1990s’ advertising boom. Amid layoffs, the employees have romances, play practical jokes on each other, engage in petty rivalries (sound familiar?). They hate each other, but love each other, but hate each other. It’s delicious to witness the subtle turns between those states. The book is also deeply, deeply funny. Ferris tells the story in the first person plural “we,” which should be annoying, but isn’t. Then We Came to the End is a love song for the modern-day workplace.

—Gendy Alimurung

CREEM: America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine | By ROBERT MATHEU and BRIAN J. BOWE COLLINS | HarperCollins

When I was 15, my mother made me throw away my Creem archive because she didn’t want to move it into the new apartment, so I haven’t revisited these articles in a long time. I’m glad I can now. Kids, let me tell you how it used to be: Music journalism was a vital adjunct of pop culture, and fans read this stuff because it was witty, savage, irreverent, and didn’t smell like publicity jive. Great pictures too. Love those fake Dewar’s ads!

—Marc Weingarten

WHAT WE SAY GOES: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World | By NOAM CHOMSKY and DAVID BARSAMIAN | Metropolitan Books

All by himself, Noam Chomsky is the Beatles of all smart guys. And he has been since 1969, when, at the age of 41 — one year older than John Lennon would ever become — he published his first political, non-linguistics book, American Power and the New Mandarins, about the brutal vulgarities of U.S. foreign policy toward the Vietnamese. Ever since then, Chomsky’s books have been circulating through university dorm rooms with the same underground alacrity that R&B 45s used to during the late ’50s and early ’60s, refreshing in their honesty and mind-blowing for the contempt they showed toward the well-mannered bullshit of the mainstream. What We Say Goes is David Barsamian’s eighth book of interviews with Chomsky and is as breezy to read as any Jann Wenner Rolling Stone interview. The only difference is that when you come away from a Wenner interview, you never feel as if you might be capable of emulating the talent of the person he is interviewing. With Barsamian, however, you do, in fact, come away able to play a competent version of Won’t Get Fooled Again. If that isn’t enough, the mere fact that time has done very little to mellow Chomsky’s intellect is enough of a feat to attract anyone who thrills to the profound heroism of longevity.

—Dwayne Booth

STORMING THE GATES OF PARADISE: Landscapes for Politics| By REBECCA SOLNIT | University of California Press

Rebecca Solnit reconstructs the terrain of the essay with the intimate flesh of memoir, and a firm journalistic spine. Scattered with stunning black-and-white photographs, this collection challenges us to take in the natural and material landscapes that inform our cultural identities and interpret them in a language both political and artistic. In these eloquent prose portraits, local landscapes and national narratives intersect in ways that are at once beautiful and destructive.

—Erica Zora Wrightson

LISTEN AGAIN: A Momentary History of Pop Music | An Experience Music Project Book | Edited by ERIC WEISBARD | Duke University Press

This collection of essays on subjects ranging from ORCH5, a Stravinsky phrase turned synthesizer blip that helped forge the sound of early hip-hop, to James McKune, a record collector who single-handedly invented the Delta-blues genre, deftly analyzes marginal and telling moments in pop history. Listen Again is a brilliant reimagining of last century’s most accessible art form.

—Nick Moore

MY LOBOTOMY | By HOWARD DULLY and CHARLES FLEMING | Crown Publishers

Dr. Walter Freeman, a self-proclaimed expert in psychosurgery, once assaulted the brains of 25 women with an icepicklike tool, scrambling their frontal lobes with promises of a “cure” for mental illness — all in one day. Freeman, driving across country in his “lobotomobile,” went on to perform thousands of other surgeries. One patient was 12-year-old Howard Dully, who, with the journalist Charles Fleming, now tells his incredible story, from family rejection (when Freeman failed to “fix” him) to living in mental institutions to dealing with alcoholism, drug abuse and prison. It is in retaking his past that Dully ultimately finds peace, and his place as a kind of laureate for the lobotomized.

—Sophia Kercher