In the epic battle of The Beatles vs. The Stones, I come down firmly in The Stones camp. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t also love The Beatles. In fact, I’d say The Beatles were the soundtrack to my 19th year. That’s not how I old I was when Beatlemania hit US shores. No, it was 1991 and I had discovered old Beatles’ records at the Chippewa Falls Library. I played The Beatles so often the winter of 1991 that one of my younger sisters still loathes their music to this day.

Even with that small-scale Beatlemania, much of what I knew about the band is the kind of information you get from pop culture osmosis. The kinds of facts you’re not sure how you learned, but know nonetheless. From Liverpool, played in Hamburg, screaming girls on Ed Sullivan, Maharishi, Yoko, Lennon shot in 1980. . . that kind of stuff. Also, who hasn’t heard about the mysterious “fifth Beatle?”

If you read Baby’s in Black the fabulous graphic novel by by Arne Bellstorf, you’ll learn all about one of the candidates for fifth Beatlesdom, Stuart Sutcliffe and the time The Beatles spent in Hamburg.

For real Beatlemaniacs this book might be old hat, but for me it was a revelation. I knew nothing of Stuart Sutcliffe, the brooding artsy Beatle who falls in love with a German art student Astrid Kirchherr.

The book focuses on Astrid and Stu’s relationship and how despite a language barrier, they fall in love. It’s really sweet. Astrid’s pretty rad. She’s a photographer who hangs with all kinds of artists and convinces Stuart to go to art school in Hamburg. She’s the woman who took those early Beatles’ photos where they all have Elvis-y pompadours, before they adopted the mop-top look that was popular with the Hamburg artsy crowd.

As Astrid and Stu’s love grows he has to make a choice between the woman he loves and the band. As you know he didn’t choose The Beatles. If you’re already familiar with this story you know how it ends. I had no idea. After finishing the book I proclaimed, “that’s the saddest fucking thing I ever read.”

It is and it’s good. Baby’s in Black is one of those great books that are engrossing and entertaining while being totally educational at the same time.

The highly gifted, pretty precocious student Julia Severn is studying at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology and lands the coveted gig of recording professor Madame Ackermann’s dream-like psychic episodes in Heidi Julavits’ novel The Vanishers.

Sounds great, except Madame Ackermann is blocked. Nothing is happening when she is in this state. She is especially not finding out the file number of a film canister she’s been asked to locate. So Julia doodles away the day, finds some answers without even trying and pretends Madame Ackermann conjured them herself. Also great — until Madame Ackermann catches on to her little tricks during a routine dinner party game and then all hell breaks loose.

Julia is struck with bloating and skin conditions and all-around discomfort, seemingly the victim of Madame Ackermann’s psychic attack. Julia returns to pedestrians-ville and takes a job as a person who sits in a room pretending to talk on the phone and is hopped up on all sorts of prescriptions that dull her extra sensory perceptions. Then she comes into contact with a handful of people whose interests interlock with her own — including finding her mother, who killed herself when Julia was a month old.

Along the way Julia learns of people who vanish — as opposed to killing themselves — and go on to lead lives away from anyone and anything they know. Many leave behind a last video as a sort of farewell (or, potentially a pornographic eff you). They often spend a bit of time at a spa-like place shared by those recovering from plastic surgery. There is also a hunt for Dominique Vargas, a great filmmaker who disappeared in the mid-1980s, who seems to have ties to Julia’s mother.

This book has that wonderful trait of being something that makes a person sound dizzy and confused when the plot is explained aloud. It’s fun to be reading, but doesn’t stick to the ribs. Every time I set it down I had to backtrack at least six pages when I started again to remember this mess of people and their ticks and motives. Ultimately, this book will be remembered as having a lot of scenes spent in country rehabilitation centers and that at one point things seemed awfully Scooby Doo-ish in a moment of reveal.

The writing is fresh and quirky and descriptive, though sometimes Julavits fishtails into too cute. “Madame Ackermann telescoped her cigarette in an ashtray and stood over me.” That sort of thing.

How much did you like The Hunger Games? The extent to which you’ll enjoy Catching Fire hinges on your answer to that question.

The second novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy about the dystopian world of flinty heroine Katniss Everdeen retains much of what was good about the first book and adds one or two new facets, but it also introduces some unwelcome new elements.

Catching Fire sets Katniss on the journey of finding out that the world of Panem, a country that has rebuilt itself from a small-scale apocalypse through violent suppression of dissent, is larger than the 1984-esque Capitol would have its subjects believe.

By now, the horror and grimness of The Hunger Games, the televised fight to the death Katniss won in the first book and must now compete in again, are no longer novel and that’s a blow to Catching Fire. Katniss is still Katniss – uncompromising, resourceful, driven – but this book has her wringing her hands too much over whether she should choose Peeta, the sweet and capable baker’s son with whom she competed in The Hunger Games, or Gale, her brooding childhood friend. Her constant indecision is annoying. When she’s in the throes of her questioning, she seems flimsy, like a damsel in distress who belongs in an inferior work of fiction, but not here.

But on a large scale, Collins knows what she’s doing. Catching Fire moves at the same breakneck speed of The Hunger Games and retains its cold command of violence, which is impassively described and frequent. She’s also added some sexual appeal and friction here, which is good in light of the odd sexlessness of her first book.

I haven’t gotten to Mockingjay, Collins’ third installment, but I’m hoping Catching Fire will prove to be a necessary expository bridge that will take me to a knockout punch of a finale.

If you care at all about Rock & Roll or Pop music you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. If you ever subscribed to Spin or Rolling Stone you should read Out of the Vinyl Deeps. If you ever searched for most of your adult-life for a smart, female perspective on being a Rock & Roll fan and all but gave up on it, you should read this book.

To say Out of the Vinyl Deeps changed my life sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. I don’t listen to music the same way after reading Ellen Willis. And I definitely don’t read music criticism the same way.

For those who have no idea (like me), Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1975. She was a contemporary of Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus. The fact that her name doesn’t roll as easily off the tongues of rock fans everywhere as those other names is a damn crime. On a personal level I feel like it’s a crime that I’ve had to wait thirty-nine years to discover the genius of Ellen Willis. Thirty-nine long years where I actually begged everyone I know, and most of the Internet for rock and roll writing from a female perspective.

It is really hard for me to write about this book and what it was like reading it without breaking into tears. Reading it filled a hole in me that was much more profound than I thought. Ellen Willis’ writing put a social, cultural, and, most importantly, feminist perspective on Rock & Roll that my soul needed. I didn’t realize how much, until I finished.

Take this for instance from a 1971 piece:

When rock was taken over by upper-middle-class bohemians, it inherited a whole new set of contradictions between protest and privilege. The new musicians are elite dropouts and, as such, tend to feel superior not only to women but to just about everyone. Their sexism is smugger and cooler, less a product of misdirected frustration, most a simple assumption of power consistent with the rest of their self-image.

How can you not weep. Have you ever seen a paragraph like that about rock music coming from anyone? Ever? I haven’t. Granted, I gave up on rock writing a long time ago. I’ve had my fill of Chuck Klosterman, Steve Almond, Rick Sheffield, and Pitchfork kinds of rock writing. Basically I’m sick of hearing what privileged white men have to say about, well frankly, most anything.

If there are women writing like Willis about today’s rock music please let me know. I will start up the fanclub immediately.

The essays in Out of the Vinyl Deeps cover the late sixties and early seventies music scene: Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, and The Sex Pistols. And unlike so much writing today it’s not fawning “OMG DYLAN!” it’s an actual, critical, thinking person’s look at what the music means and what it says about the person/people who created it.

What you won’t find is a ton of female musicians which is more a reflection of the time than of Willis’ preferences. She goes in search of women rockers and does a piece on an ill-fated women’s music fest as well as a long-forgotten woman named Miss Clawdy.

One of things I really admired about Willis’ essays is that she was a genuine fan the way so many of us are fans. She talks about ridiculous ticket prices (which granted seem positively dreamy now. At one point she talked about how $3 was reasonable to see The Grateful Dead and Joe Cocker but not “proletarian”), and poor sound, and lyrics. She never talks about being a fan like, say, Steve Almond does as he drives out to hang with Dave Grohl. You know?

She writes about how at 33 Elvis is the “grand old man” of rock & roll, how Carly Simon arouses her class antagonism, and how despite the sexism in punk rock, she loves it.

I often joke about how I keep a copy of Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help under my pillow so I can read “How to Become a Writer” whenever I need it. This Ellen Willis book is going under the pillow too.

(and it’s only a joke in so much as the book doesn’t go under my pillow but rather on the floor next to my bed)

Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life as We Knew It scared the hell out of me. I am woefully unprepared for a natural disaster. Do you have bottled water just sitting around in case our water is compromised? How about canned food, do you have some disgusting canned green beans hidden behind your stashes of cheap Easter candy? And how are you going to heat your house when a simple flick of the switch won’t work anymore? What about tampons, ladies? Do you have enough to last you a year? Or batteries for flashlights? Or aspirin? I swear to god Pfeffer is going to turn me into a hoarder.

What scared me so much was Pfeffer’s description of what Miranda and her family go through when a natural disaster threatens our world. A meteor hits the moon, pushing it closer to Earth. As you know the moon affects the tides, so the Earth is a disaster. Tidal waves, tsunamis, flooding, earthquakes, and mass panic, all while the moon watches over us, closer than ever.

The story is told through Miranda’s journal, and there are such great descriptions of how her mom has them stash food, wood, clothing, medicine, batteries, etc. The trip they take to the grocery store, where panic has already set in, is what started scaring me and it never really went away. I wish I had Miranda’s mother because I would die so quickly in a natural disaster.

Miranda’s journal is a quick, compelling read highlighting the fall of society, the things people do to survive, and the pleasure they take in things we take for granted, like hot food. It all felt real and completely unnerving.

But I wouldn’t call this the best book in the world. The terror I felt with the natural disaster is real and would grab any reader, but Miranda, the journal’s author, is so damn boring. She’s vanilla, monotonous, and weak. Her mother is so much more interesting and I would’ve loved to read this from her perspective, but since it’s a young adult novel I understand why it’s Miranda’s story. But there isn’t much of a story with her. She reports on everything she sees and hears, but she doesn’t really seem to do much of anything. I think the book is interesting, but I can’t highly recommend it because sometimes I was really bored, and the moon causing natural disasters should be anything but boring.

This is the first book in a series called The Last Survivors, and I hear that the next book doesn’t include Miranda at all but shows the survival of another family from a different part of the world. I’m hoping the narrator is more interesting and that we see more of the seedy, disgusting things people do to survive.

The bodice-ripper gets a gay makeover in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and, for the most part, the transformation works.

The bulk of the novel coasts on the slow-to-consummate attraction between Patroclus, an exiled weakling of a prince, and Achilles, the great fighter who is destined to become a hero in the Trojan War. They become sworn companions – nudge nudge, wink wink – and Miller dedicates a great part of her novel to descriptions of Achilles’ flawless beauty, Patroclus’ forbidden hunger for the beguiling half-mortal legend-in-waiting and passages about limbs gliding over limbs, taut chests, and armor falling to the floor of tents (passages that are generally coy and just this side of tasteful). Here, Miller’s writing feels a bit mechanical. At parts, it seems like she’s aware the book has progressed for five or ten pages without a steamy passage and so feels obligated to throw one in.

But the book gets better when Patroclus and Achilles leave their adolescence behind. It’s a development that coincides with their recruitment into the Greek army, a fateful prophecy that Achilles won’t return home from the Trojan War and the growing pressure they feel from general consensus that their relationship could be overlooked when they were boys, but should now be cast aside. To be sure, most of the drama and peril in this part at this stage come straight from Homer’s The Iliad, but Miller deserves some credit for making the familiar tale her own.

She shows adeptness in what she borrows from The Iliad and what she does not and seamless alloys those elements into her story in a way that does not feel like she’s grafting obligatory components of the legend into her own work. The characters of Thetis, Achilles’ sea nymph mother, and of Briseis, a captured princess, particularly feel fresh and reinvented and are to thank for the novel’s eleventh hour knife-twist of poignancy. The Song of Achilles comes to a surprisingly meaningful ending and that’s a credit to Miller, considering that the reader probably knew how things would wind up from the beginning.

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