A DOZEN FROM 2009

Twelve random 2009 photographs that I like:


Spring in Jamaica Plain - every year, the purples and pinks I see out here (as opposed to the Midwest) never cease to amaze.


Taken at the Brooklyn Botannical Garden in late May.


From a long summer weekend spent in Western Mass., a stunning view in back of the Edith Wharton Estate.


Later that weekend, The Bridge of Flowers (the one on the right) in Shelburne Falls.


At the DeCordova Sculpture Museum in Lincoln, MA, Labor Day weekend.


Another shot of a Toronto street (Queen, I believe) that did not make this post. I love how the CN Tower peeps out in the background.


More pumpkins than you could ever want at Russell Orchards in Ipswich, MA.


Down the road from Russell's, a dramatic sunset at the beach on the Crane Estate.


The harbor in Camden, ME on an October afternoon.


An exceptional year for fall foliage, as seen at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.


Later that day, unexpected beauty in a parking lot in nearby Watertown.


Thanksgiving weekend, a mild Sunday afternoon at Millenium Park in Kriofske Mix home base West Roxbury: Maggie and Steve strolling off into the sunset of another year.

THE BEST FILMS OF 2000

The year 2000, not the 2000’s – that will have to wait until at least January. Not nearly as tremendous a year as 2001, it’s also prone to turn-of-the-decade deliberation: most sources list two or three of these films as copyright 1999, but since they were released in the US the following year, they qualify here.



10. HIGH FIDELITY
Admittedly, I go back and forth on this film’s actual merit. Stephen Frears’ workmanlike adaptation of Nick Hornby’s first (and best) novel attempts to sell an inherently indie story (the hapless love life of a music geek/record store owner) to a wide audience, and the two sensibilities don’t always gel. But then, the music geek in me remembers so much to love about it: Jack Black’s breakthrough performance (playing to all of his very particular persona’s strengths), Todd Louiso’s underrated one (really, the antithesis of Black’s) and of course, John Cusack as a Lloyd Dobler-type who has hit his mid-thirties and naturally still hasn’t figured it all out.



9. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Period costume dramas tend to bore me to tears with their stilted pageantry, but this Edith Wharton adaptation from Terence Davies effortlessly draws me in because it draws so much blood. In his highly personal British film essays, Davies tends to favor a sort of unsentimental nostalgia: here, he revels in the lush detail of early 20th Century upper-crust New York, but he doesn’t lessen any of the real devastation Wharton’s heroine Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson, unconventionally cast but nearly revelatory) faces, and is shrewd enough not to obscure how much of it she brings upon herself—that’s not to say she doesn’t receive any help from a most exquisitely bitchy Laura Linney.



8. WONDER BOYS
Another indie novel (from Michael Chabon) getting the big studio treatment (helmed by director-for-hire Curtis Hanson)—but here, everything aligns beautifully. Michael Douglas gleefully (and rather successfully) plays against type as a schlubby, ratty bathrobe-adorned author forever trying to finish a massive novel while dealing with a garden variety of eccentrics (Robert Downey Jr., Tobey Maguire) and lovers (Frances McDormand, a pre-Cruise Katie Holmes). It’s incredibly shaggy and more than a little quirky, but also immensely likable, and one of the few instances where a tacked-on happy ending actually works better than the book’s unbearably depressing conclusion.



7. DANCER IN THE DARK
Speaking of unbearably depressing conclusions: I would rate this film much higher if I could ever stand to watch it again. Still, at a safe distance I can admire and applaud Lars von Trier’s weird, operatic combination of Dogme feel-bad melodrama and joyous, explosive Technicolor musical spectacle. Only a genius as demented as von Trier could pull this off, a true psychological slasher film—difficult to watch, but so compelling that you don’t dare to look away. But do not undervalue Bjork: her innovative songs (which almost magically fuse the orchestral with the electronic) and her unglamorous, egoless performance both give the film its soul.



6. NOT ONE LESS
Zhang Yimou made a name for himself with sumptuous, epic historical pieces that, at their best, retained the intimacy of a tight character study. Here, he forgoes the large canvas and focuses entirely on a smaller story that can be summed up as such: a young substitute teacher in rural China is instructed not to lose any of her students. When one boy leaves the village to find work in the city, she goes out looking for him. Even as it subtly points out critical differences between an evolving urban and rural China, it’s a simple, straightforward film. Fortunately, in that simplicity, the director finds much beauty—I haven’t seen it in nearly a decade now, but I can still recall how deeply moved I felt at the closing credits.



5. THE WIND WILL CARRY US
For much of the past decade, Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami has focused entirely on documentaries and minimalist digital video features that visually bear little resemblance to his best known work. So, call this entry a pinnacle of what came before. Abandoning the meta-narratives of past triumphs like CLOSE-UP, he presents a bare-bones premise—a journalist travels to an isolated Kurdish village to report on a rare burial ceremony for a dying elderly woman—and then repeatedly skirts it, focusing more on cultural differences and missed connections (never has any film wrung so much poetry from bad cell phone reception). Throughout, the mammoth, surrounding landscape plays such an essential role to the film’s almost beatific pondering of life and death that Kiarostami’s typically unresolved final scene makes for a most apt summation.



4. BEST IN SHOW
With each year, this looks more like Christopher Guest’s best show. His precise dismantling of dog shows and their trainers may not contain the unanticipated emotional heft of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN or the deadpanned brilliance of THIS IS SPINAL TAP, but it may be his funniest, sharpest effort, and certainly his darkest and most savage. Kudos to an especially inspired ensemble, from expertly drawn stock characters like Parker Posey’s yuppie from hell and Jennifer Coolidge’s golddigging poodle princess to only-in-Guest-land creations like Fred Willard’s sublimely clueless, tasteless commentator and Guest’s own drawlin’ fishin’ store proprietor/aspiring ventriloquist. As little as they may care to admit it, subsequent real competition-focused docs from SPELLBOUND to THE KING OF KONG owe a lot to this fake one.



3. JUDY BERLIN
Whatever happened to director Eric Mendelsohn? His debut feature seemed to come from out of nowhere. The type of indie film that now seems lost to a long-ago era, it’s a low budget, black-and-white fable about a day in the life of a sleepy Long Island suburb. The word fable seems most suitable due to the film’s dreamy pacing, sparse, poetic use of music and sound and gorgeous, otherworldly cinematography (the day centers on a solar eclipse); there’s also a trio of superb performances from Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and, in her last role, the incomparable Madeline Kahn. According to IMBd.com, Mendelsohn finally has a new film in post-production; let’s hope it’s as unique, charming and sincere as his first.



2. YI YI
Most Westerners (including this author) only know Taiwanese director Edward Yang via this three-hour familial tapestry and meditation on mortality, urban alienation and human kindness. While I would love to easily view Yang’s still-not-available-on-region-1-DVD back catalogue, YI YI seems so elaborately vast and complete that it almost compensates. Beginning with a birth and ending with a death, it marries the scope of Dickens with the pinpoint exactness of Carver. Nothing really earth-shattering occurs, but everything shifts and rearranges itself ever so slightly, creating the most profound cumulative effect as it considers something so ordinary as the passage of time and lives lived—possibly even more profound since Yang’s untimely death in 2007.




1. BEAU TRAVAIL
Although inspired by Herman Melville’s novel BILLY BUDD, this is the sort of subject matter you can imagine only working as a film, or perhaps director Claire Denis and her cinematographer Agnes Godard just managed to fully transform a literary work into cinematic art at a level without precedent. A stunningly shot and framed Rubik’s Cube of a movie, BEAU TRAVAIL (whose title translates as “Good Work”) is a peek into how a young recruit upsets the balance of power in a French Foreign Legion post in North Africa, but it’s just as much a rigorous paean to the kinesis of the male form. It constructs a purely visual language that would make it just as exciting to watch with the sound turned off—that is, if it weren’t for wiry, wound-up Denis Levant at the film’s center. Both his acute physical actions and monotone (but not apathetic) voiceover barely conceal a mounting intensity that is kept almost impossibly bottled-up until the film’s astonishing final scene, where it explodes in a most unexpected, ingenious and euphoric way.

My original top ten for this year:

1. BEAU TRAVAIL
2. THE WIND WILL CARRY US
3. JUDY BERLIN
4. YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
5. CHUCK AND BUCK
6. DANCER IN THE DARK
7. NOT ONE LESS
8. ALMOST FAMOUS
9. CHICKEN RUN
10. HIGH FIDELITY

Funny how # 1 and # 10 are still the same, eh? I must have seen YI YI days after making this list. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH would not play Boston until February 2001. Can't imagine how CHUCK AND BUCK and CHICKEN RUN made the cut over BEST IN SHOW and WONDER BOYS. I have fond memories of ALMOST FAMOUS as a fun, if somewhat flawed film. However, my memories of YOU CAN COUNT ON ME are vague at best—I seriously need to revisit it, because I remember feeling a little anger over Laura Linney losing the Oscar to Julia Roberts that year.

EAGLEMAN FOR TURKEY DAY

Chances are you've already seen this classic, not-a-parody Chicago commercial - I've viewed it many times myself, and it never fails to crack me up - the shoddy production values, the even shakier acting, the sound effects! Happy Thanksgiving.

YEAR OF THE DOG

Get ready for an overdose of cute. It was one year ago today that Steve brought a ten-week-old Maggie home.



Here she is the first night, lap-sized.



A week later: still a little disoriented by her new surroundings.



December: more comfortably at home



Early January: still small enough to fit in a bookcase.



Late January: getting a little scruffy, although the rest of her head has yet to catch up with her ears.



February: ears no longer so bunny-like.



March: post-spayed and temporarily funnel-headed.



May: still small enough to get a bath in the kitchen sink.



Summer: full grown and ready for action!



November 2009: the lady of the house, and a good girl.

THE BEST FILMS OF 2001

Yes, the year is correct. As I begin compiling my end-of-the-decade lists (you’ve been warned), you may notice that on the sidebar, my yearly lists for film and music only go back to 2002, for that’s when I began blogging. Completist that I am, I feel the need to post my top ten films of this decade’s first two years (I haven’t decided whether to do music yet). First up, 2001.

More than a few critics deem 1939 the greatest year ever for movies (THE WIZARD OF OZ, GONE WITH THE WIND, etc;), while at least one has stumped for 1999, the year of AMERICAN BEAUTY, MAGNOLIA, BOYS DON’T CRY and many other notable efforts (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH was my # 1 at the time, although now I would say ELECTION without hesitation).

For me, 2001 is almost implausibly stellar. I feel as strongly about every title in my current top ten of that year (as opposed to my original list, which I’ll reveal at the end) as I do about most of my number one films of any other year this decade. I’m not sure how to account for this. Before I argue how these films were born out of a creatively stimulating environment that no longer exists, may I remind you that 2001 produced a lot of dreck as well, from Tim Burton’s pointless remake of PLANET OF THE APES to stiflingly disastrous indies such as NOVOCAINE. So, call it serendipitous that a single year produced such a bounty of cinematic riches—keep your fingers crossed that it will happen again soon. (As always, I go by U.S. release dates in determining what year a film belongs to).



10. AMELIE
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s iconic baguette of a romantic comedy nearly defies logic. The cynic in me sees it as an overly precious slice of calculated whimsy and wishes it had an actress with more depth and presence than title star Audrey Tautou. And yet, every time I watch the film, I melt like our heroine literally does in one scene. The narration, the set design and especially the score are inventive and divine. In the end, I suppose the whole thing radiates enough pure, unfiltered joy to obliterate all of my cynicism.



9. OUR SONG
Easily the most obscure film on this list, this quiet gem from writer/director Jim McKay follows three teenage girls (one of them a young, robust Kerry Washington) over the course of one summer in Brooklyn. What impresses me most about this coming of age tale is its genuineness: rarely does a work of fiction so effortlessly simulate the day to day rhythms of real life to the point where viewers feel as if they are eavesdropping in on the characters rather than watching performances.



8. HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of his own theatrical piece about a sort-of transgender glam rocker boasts a unique searching-for-an-identity concept that transcends its Rocky Horror influence, terrific songs that, for once in a musical, genuinely rock, and an instantly winning, handmade, off-the-cuff feel. However, it’s Mitchell himself that gives the film its spark—his Hedwig is such an arresting and sincere persona that the character’s underdog status takes on an intense poignancy amidst all the fabulousness.



7. DONNIE DARKO
Perhaps the decade’s premier cult flick, and the one that seems to exist most defiantly in its own world—just try to describe it to someone who hasn’t seen it in twenty words or less. “Disturbed teenager discovers means of time travel while a giant rabbit forces him to do bad things” is the best I can come up with, and even that doesn’t begin to explain this perverse John Hughes tribute. Overly ambitious and a little obtuse, it’s nonetheless a true original, casting an eerie, unshakable spell like no film before or arguably since.



6. GOSFORD PARK
Robert Altman doing an upstairs/downstairs British period mystery? It seems as absurd as a 1970s update of Phillip Marlowe, or a live-action version of an outrageously silly comic strip/cartoon. Altman tried everything and left his discernible stamp on it (to varying degrees of success), but this was his best effort since NASHVILLE, with which it shared a massive, mostly great ensemble delineated by class, and a murder. But he just about glosses over the latter and focuses almost entirely on the subtleties inherent in the former, and it’s a rich, witty, revealing take on an awfully particular culture.



5. GHOST WORLD
Speaking of comic book adaptations: this starts off like the ultimate ‘90s Tarantino-inspired remnant of indie irony: two teenagers (a never-better Thora Birch and a young, astute Scarlett Johansson) live to mock and defile the mass-market suburban humdrum around them by celebrating that which “is so bad it’s gone past good back to bad again.” Fortunately, director Terry Zwigoff doesn’t let his heroines (or the audience) get off so easily. By adding an inspired third character (Steve Buscemi at his very best) to the story, he allows them to consider a depth of emotion outside the film’s ticky-tacky surface, and the end result absolutely nails the uncertainty and fear of becoming a grown up.



4. WAKING LIFE
Another director who is game for just about anything, Richard Linklater is at his best when he’s at his most personal; this seemingly free-form, literally floating (via rotoscope animation) dip into blather about dreams and ideas seems exceptionally personal, but feels like an inspired dialogue, as many contribute to its ideas and design (it employs over twenty animators on a scene-by-scene basis). In addition to looking like nothing else that preceded it, WAKING LIFE also had its own unique, peculiar rhythm—it was one of the few films released in the weeks after 9/11 that wholeheartedly encouraged its viewers to sit down and think about the world around and beyond them.



3. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
Some filmmakers arrive with a fully-formed vision (see # 7) that they can neither top nor sustain; others cultivate one gradually until it eventually blossoms at its fullest extent. Wong Kar Wai is the best director in the latter category I can think of. This film beautifully amalgamates all of his obsessions (American pop music, tactile sensuousness, romantic longing, the opportunity and folly of coincidence) into a stunning whole. A deceptively simple tale of a romance that’s never acted upon, it sounds like the stuff of a prime Douglas Sirk melodrama. Instead, it plays out with such nuance and restraint that it achieves an almost unbearable intimacy, leaving the viewer insatiably swooned and utterly devastated.



2. MULHOLLAND DR.
I wasn’t much of a Lynch-head before seeing this exquisite and weirdly emotional mindfuck of a feature, which was constructed from scraps of a rejected television series pilot. I still find it hard to explain why I get goose bumps just hearing the opening swing-band theme music as the image blurs and skitters across the screen. I can’t even fully decipher the narrative’s warped logic, although over several viewings I’ve come up with a few ambitious, probably insufficient theories. But oh, how easily Lynch seduces me—with Los Angeles as his medium, he fearlessly explores connections between dreams, reality and the movies, not to mention all of the wicked, sublime and terrifying possibilities that surface when they overlap.



1. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
To explain my enduring love for Wes Anderson’s familial saga, I go back to the notion that with each viewing, I take away more from it. Visually, that’s not much of a challenge for anyone, for the director jam packs each intricate frame and dizzying montage with an insane attention-to-detail that bespeaks a lot of excitement and real affection for this universe he’s created. For some, it’s harder to locate that growing emotional charge on subsequent viewings or even one to begin with. While not denying that Anderson’s whimsy is an acquired taste, I will strongly champion the carefulness with which he develops his characters (okay, maybe 'cept for Dudley)—always in stock uniform, they may appear like comic strip denizens, but they’re also as unexpectedly complicated and enchantingly flawed as most people you know.

Just for fun, here was my original top ten:

1. WAKING LIFE
2. MEMENTO
3. HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
4. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
5. GOSFORD PARK
6. GHOST WORLD
7. IN THE BEDROOM
8. MULHOLLAND DR.
9. OUR SONG
10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

I had seen DONNIE DARKO but was still processing it. As for AMELIE, I was grappling with the issues I mentioned above. I was easily impressed by the performances in IN THE BEDROOM at the time, though now I suspect that's all there is to the film. Repeated viewings of the Lynch and Anderson films, of course, escalated my opinions of them over the years. And what about MEMENTO, this year's (and possibly this decade's) greatest casualty? I've had little desire to return to it since 2002, and I fear it wouldn't stack up to these other films today. Perhaps before the decade is over, I'll view it again to make sure.

I've changed the name back--it says much more about me (well, obviously) than Ambitious Slacker ever did. Expect more actual new posts soon.

RETURN TO TORONTO

My reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival are up at Chlotrudis Mewsings. Below are some places I visited when I wasn't sitting in a dark theatre (or waiting in line to get into one).

RETURN TO MILWAUKEE

Last month, Steve and I spent a long weekend in Milwaukee; fortunately, we had better weather than we did the last time.



Thursday night, we met up with my folks and an old friend for dinner at Eddie Martini's, a steak house oozing Mad Men chic years before the show ever aired. More reverent than kitschy, the place nonetheless has its tongue slightly in cheek, as seen by its name-eschewing sign above...



...and this rock garden/cocktail fountain out front. Incidentally, my mother impulsively ordered a special appetizer for the table: a giant martini glass (probably larger than this one) overflowing with a mountain of chilled seafood.



Friday afternoon, we drove down to The Third Ward for lunch at the Milwaukee Public Market. (Why doesn't Boston have one like this? Quincy Marketplace is just a supersized food court, after all...)



An overhead view of the Market, taken from the second-floor balcony. In the foreground, Kehr's Candies, a neighborhood childhood favorite of my father's.



Gentrification of The Third Ward began well over a decade ago, although when I was a student at Marquette, it was still full of boarded-up warehouses and ancient establishments like Marlene's Touch of Class, a giant musty thrift store. They've since been replaced by condos, trendy restaurants and boutiques, but nifty, hidden architectural details remain, like this inexplicable face.



That evening, Steve and I celebrated our anniversary with dinner on Brady Street and a movie at the Oriental. I left my camera at the hotel, but I brought it with me the next day when we met up with my parents in Cedarburg, a small town about 15 miles north of the city limits. Its so-quaint-you-could-scream charm is exemplified by this clock along the main drag...



...and this recently restored art deco movie house. Very cool, but only in a small Midwestern town would you see a lineup like this on the marquee: do they seriously think anyone is going to see a Nia Vardalos flop two months after it quickly left the multiplexes?



Cedarburg is home to one of the few remaining former Wadham's Gas Stations, an early 20th century local chain distinguished by its attention-grabbing pagoda roofs.



In addition to its lovely main street, other attractions in Cedarburg include the Cedar Creek Settlement (a 19th century mill full of shops, restaurants and a winery) and the Cedar Creek itself, which flows East of the business district. The dramatic bridge above runs across it.

That evening, following dinner at Saz's and frozen custard at Kopp's (two local institutions), Steve and I met up with another friend in Bay View and had drinks at the Palm Tavern, which I can best describe as a really cool hole-in-the-wall with a refreshingly lax atmosphere. It also has a plentiful selection of obscure beers and liquors (I drank a Hangar One Spiced Pear Vodka and tonic).



On Sunday, after a good brunch at Irish pub Brocach (just don't order the obscenely greasy Irish doughnuts), my parents left town. With heavy rain in the forecast, Steve and I hurried over to one of my favorite places, the Boerner Botannical Gardens. The wind kept picking up and I could just see ourselves making a break for it back to the car and getting absolutely soaked. Fortunately, the storms bypassed us entirely, only leaving us with some exceptionally muggy air.



The overcast skies didn't do much for my wide-angle shots, but I did manage to get some neat close-ups like this one above.



By evening, the sun reappeared. We took a walk along the McKinley Marina Pier, which juts out what seems like miles into Lake Michigan.



On the Pier, looking West towards the Milwaukee Water Tower.



The Pier is not far from Alterra By the Lake, a former water pump station turned coffeehouse. We sat there until dusk, sipping iced tea and Italian sodas and trying to keep our Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from flying away (it was still pretty windy out).



Before heading out of town Monday afternoon, we stopped by Boswell Book Company and then a particularly foggy lakefront. The odd weather for August enabled us to take pictures of the Milwaukee Art Museum that were quite different from our last trip.



I honestly don't remember ever seeing this much fog on the Lakefront.



The fog began to lift just as we were leaving. Here's good ol' Abraham Lincoln (part of the Milwaukee County War Memorial) next to the city's tallest building. Even though four nights was just the right amount of time to spend in my hometown, I kept thinking that another day or two would have been nice.

SAD TROMBONE

Yes, it has come to this: a sad trombone button on the net (you have to love the proto-Cooper Black font on it). I admit I make this noise out loud at least ten times a day, only I lean towards the two-note Debbie Downer rendition. Does anyone know this sound cue's origin? Does it go back further than this?

FIFTEEN BOOKS

A few weeks ago on Facebook, I responded to a meme called "15 Books I've Read That Will Always Stick With Me", a list one was supposed to create in 15 minutes or less. Now that I've had a little more time, some thoughts on what I picked (roughly in the order I first read them).

1. Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I cited this particular book over all of the Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume I read as a kid simply because Dahl wrote adult books for kids (or kids books for adults, if you prefer). I never even saw the Gene Wilder film until I was a teenager. By then, it was a real letdown— perhaps Dahl’s sly, outlandish prose is best left to one’s own illusion, (although I still anticipate Wes Anderson’s version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox).

2. Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
The perennial classroom favorite, and deservedly so—this is the great 20th Century American novel, alternately droll and wrenching and always uncommonly humane without seeming preachy or self-important.

3. Jean Shepherd – In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
In this collection of near-autobiographical short stories (which would provide the gist of the film A Christmas Story), brilliant, underrated monologist Shepherd presents a far more bent evocation of a 1930s childhood than Lee, and god bless him for it.

4. Leslie Marmon Silko – Almanac of the Dead
I’ve seen many a lengthy film where the journey, the duration of watching it and losing yourself in a particular world has a greater impact than the destination itself; Silko’s 800+ page tapestry of 20th century Native American/European American relations is a compelling literary equivalent.

5. David Sedaris – Naked
With his second book, Sedaris comes off like the Shepherd’s somewhat cranky gay son, relaying uproarious warts-and-all tales from his childhood with ingenuity and an ease that most humorists would kill to possess.

6. Dale Peck – Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye
Peck gleefully played around with genre and structure in his early books, and reached a dizzying peak in his third novel, a Kansas Gothic about a racially divided town with multiple narrators—nearly all of them worthy of their own books. Better known for his savage, snarky literary reviews, Peck hasn’t come up with anything so interesting since.

7. Tom Robbins – Skinny Legs and All
Like many of my generation, I went through a Robbins phase and I’ll be blunt—you either love or loathe his shtick. This is his most expansive tall tale, and it involves a giant van in the shape of a grocery store turkey, a restaurant co-owned by an Arab and a Jew (situated across the street from the United Nations, no less) and the most soulful can o’beans you’ll ever meet. And if that sounds overly precious, beneath it all is a beautiful, eloquent narrative about the necessity of art.

8. Michael Cunningham – The Hours
Since the author does not waste one single word in weaving together the stories of three women in different eras, I’ll only add that I’ve never read prose that captures the stark simplicity of haiku like this book does.

9. Lester Bangs – Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
If blogging had been around when Bangs was alive, he would’ve probably posted more often than Perez Hilton. People now moan about all of the bad, self-indulgent writing inspired by Bangs’ confessional, conversational approach to rock criticism; this compilation confirms his influence and phenomenal talent.

10. John Irving – A Prayer For Owen Meany
I also went through an Irving phase, consuming many of his hilarious, overstuffed novels as if they were neverending comfort food buffets. This is his most unlikeliest, audacious effort, due mostly to the title character: a remarkably unsentimental midget of a child with (conceivably) a nails-on-chalkboard voice.

11. Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping
Like Owen Meany, this is an unconventional tale of a 1950s childhood, but Robinson’s style is worlds away from Irving’s: simultaneously dense and plainspoken, her language meticulously guides the reader through unthinkable situations (like a flood) and intricately drawn characters like her spinster/proto-feminist heroine Sylvie.

12. Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I read a considerable amount of McCullers before finally tackling this, her first and greatest work. It’s almost unbearably melancholic, but the compassion she lends her deaf-mute protagonist (and the young woman fascinated by him) is striking in how complete and engaging it feels.

13. David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
It’s hard not to be impressed by the set-up: six stories, each in a different genre, structured like a Russian doll that folds back into itself, only together they make up one novel. In addition to Mitchell’s firm grasp of each genre, you have the reoccurring thrill of discovering each echo and revelation as the book gradually returns to where it began.

14. Tom Spanbauer – In the City of Shy Hunters
Spanbauer has only published four novels, but each one could be a candidate for this list, and his third is certainly his most ambitious. An epic about how AIDS ravaged Manhattan in the 1980s, it recalls a time and place so vividly and personally that in no time at all, you feel you know it by heart—and the character Rose may be the most imaginative drag queen ever devised.

15. Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
As lengthy as Almanac of The Dead but far more concise: Clarke’s fictional history of two dueling magicians in early 19th century England is compulsively readable, with a contemporary perspective that never jars with the parameters of the fantastic world she has conjured up.