Riddle me this: what can cause a woman to lose twenty years of her life every time she falls asleep? According to S. J. Watson, brain damage from a tragic accident.

I’m no scientist. When I was five I really wanted to be Sally Ride until I discovered knowledge of science was a big part of her job. So to be fair, I really know next to nothing about the intricacies of the human brain. But with a traumatic head injury, can you lose your memories every time you sleep?

That’s the premise behind Watson’s psychological thriller Before I Go to Sleep. Twenty-five years ago Christine was in a tragic accident. Ever since, when she wakes up from sleep she thinks she’s still in her mid-twenties.

On a typical day, Christine wakes up next to her husband whom she does not know. Thinking she had a dirty one-night stand, she slinks into the adjoining bathroom only to look in the mirror and see a much older woman. When her husband wakes he fills her in on her accident, memory loss, and marriage to him. He heads to work while she lingers around the house, not recognizing a thing.

Until one day when Christine gets a phone call. A doctor calls to tell her he’s been working with her for a few weeks and she has been recording lost memories in a journal. The rest of the book is comprised of Christine’s journal full of pieces of memories, confusion, and her husband’s lies.

Before I Go to Sleep is definitely a psychological thriller, but it’s not an edge-of-your-seat kind of thriller. This doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. I turned into this amnesiac woman, confused and scared with what I was reading, wondering why my husband would withhold things from me. But this is definitely a mild thriller, not one where I ignored phone calls and turned off the latest episode of “Eureka” just so I could keep reading.

The part of this book that goes downhill is the ending. I won’t give it away, though you will easily be able to figure it out on your own. Early on I pieced it together, but I was hoping my instincts were wrong. I wanted it to be more complicated. More interesting. More. . . something. But it wasn’t. It is the ending you imagine and it’s such a let down.

And the speech in the end? Come on. It’s like when you watch an episode of “Monk” and you wonder why the killer confesses in the end when the stuff Monk says has no physical evidence. Is it a guilty conscious? Is it Monk’s hypnotizing curly hair? Whatever it may be, the same type of ending happens here and I turned into a big ball of snark. The ending is just so stupid and nowhere near as interesting as the rest of the book. I wanted to be amazed in the end, but what I got was a Lifetime Movie spectacular. Good start, crappy ending.

In the 1980s, Charlotte Silver was the party-dressed princess of her parents’ restaurant Upstairs at Pudding, a sometimes hot spot in Harvard Square. She was served bottomless glasses of Shirley Temples, doctored to her Maraschino cherry and citrus garnish specifications. She sometimes napped beneath the bar. She ate dinners of pheasant and Roquefort flan at table A-1. She developed friendships with the steady stream of employees who breezed through the restaurant.

Charlotte au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood is her story of being raised in this environment. At first both her parents work together at the eatery: Dad as head chef; Mom on pastries. When the former cuts out in favor of a more Bohemian lifestyle than cooking at this epicenter of preppy-hood that regularly features doo-wop singers, Silver’s mother takes over ruling the roast.

Silver’s mom is the star of the story, a hard-working tough cookie with a strict rule about not crying in the dining room. Once a Kim Novak lookalike, over-sized sunglasses always in place, a short busty woman proud of her tiny waist and belief that tiger-striped prints are a neutral. She was referred to by at least one employee as “Patton in Pumps.”

At one point Charlotte asks her mother why she continues in this business that isn’t yielding any income and her mother tells her that if she wanted money, she would have opened a pizza joint or a Chinese take-out restaurant. Why didn’t you? Charlotte asked her. “Because I’m interested in the product. I’m interested in things being beautiful,” she responds.

Young Charlotte, meanwhile, comes to every meal wrapped in one of her fancy party dresses. She practices manners on the wait staff, always addressing them by name and thanking the back of the house after every meal. She comes of age in this space, growing too big to sleep beneath the bar, sometimes sharing a shift with an eccentric Italian-ophile working at the coat check, eventually playing touchie-feely with those temporary summer employees on college break — a crew she refers to as her cabana boys.

In its best moments, this book provides a quick-hit portrait of a kitchen character like an alcoholic chef who refers to her as “Shorty” or the woman from the coat check and the way the spent nights, months, considering possible names for Marlon Brando’s offspring.

Unfortunately, most of the time the story has that artificial prettiness of a dining room with a great dimmer switch. Her memories shimmer and Silver gives only passing mention of the suddenly absent father and mother who is up to her elbows in her signature red pepper soup and whether she, as a child, was resentful, bored. There is a curious amount of focus on what she is wearing — from the party dresses, to the time when she was at school and puberty busted two buttons from her dress leaving her chest bared, to a sudden interest in vintage clothing and how she was one of the rare people who could fit into a classic 1950s dress.

Silver is in college when she learns that her mother has lost the lease on the restaurant and that it will close in the summer. In real life she struggles to find the right way to say goodbye to the space she once used as a permanent address during a period of frequent moves to different apartments. In the book, she struggles to write about what it has all meant without getting the page sticky with word frosting.

This story is a quick read, pleasant enough, but probably won’t stick to the ribs. It seems like a good fit for people who frequented the restaurant or worked at the restaurant, but in terms of a memoir with mass appeal, it’s a little too light on real life, heavy on pretty portraiture. There are some thoughts on the changes in the food industry — how things went from smoking line cooks to celebrity chefs to fashionable food — and changes in the Harvard Square neighborhood, including the end of a great sandwich shop and the beginning of an Abercrombie & Fitch.

I usually have a strict 100-page rule for books. If after 100 pages I don’t care, am dissatisfied, or bored by the book I chuck it aside and move on. I didn’t do that with Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama and I kind of wish I had.

I stuck with it for two reasons. First, my love for Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic can not be adequately expressed using mere words. Not only is the book amazing, but it also holds a sentimental place in my heart. It was the first non-superhero graphic thing I’d ever read. Okay, it was the second. But I hate Ghost World with a kind of fire that erases it from my memory. Anyway, Fun Home was a sort of “Owen Meany” experience for me. If not for Fun Home, I’d have never discovered Maus or Persepolis or, heaven forbid, Scott Pilgrim. It opened the door to the world of graphic novels for me, and for that I just couldn’t abandon Bechdel.

Also, I picked this for Rock & Roll Bookclub and how crappy would it be to abandon the book you’re foisting on the rest of the group?

Before reading Are You My Mother? I would have never guessed that you could get too personal, too close in a memoir. I would have thought the more personal, the better. I was wrong. The problem with this graphic memoir is that it’s too close. The reader is, literally, plopped inside of Bechdel’s sessions with her psycho-analysts and phone conversations with her mom, and as if that’s not enough there’s also the dreams that start every chapter.

Oh, it’s bad. Which is a damn shame because you’d think the territory she’s covering. . . the writing of her first book and how her mom handles it and then the writing of this second book is so damn interesting. Somehow the life gets sucked out of it. I don’t know if that’s because she spends a lot of time going into all kinds of psychobable from the books she’s reading or not. I know that as a reader I did a lot of eye-rolling because it just feels almost too navel-gazey. This is the kind of stuff that would only interest the person involved.

When Bechdel backs off the psychiatry and the Virgina Wolff and the highlighting passages from those books like a college freshman who is amazed they can write in their books, she’s good. I wanted more of a straight narrative and less of a “let’s examine my psyche and how everything that ever happened damaged me.”

I kind of wish she’d just told this story straight. . . I wrote a book about my dad, a closeted homosexual, who probably killed himself but we’re not exactly sure and this is how my mom and I dealt with the fact that I was telling the whole world our painful family story.

That, would have been gold. Instead we got a too-close look at a lot of things that while probably had a great deal of significance in Bechdel’s life come off as a little petty and pity-partyish.

Really, this one was just one big disappointing dud.

Have you read Shaun Tan’s The Arrival yet?

No? Well, stop right now and go read it. It won’t take that long because there are actually no words. The Arrival is Tan’s brilliant graphic novel comprised solely of gorgeous artwork.

The artwork reminds me of Brian Selznick, the man behind Hugo and Wonderstruck, although Tan has done what I want Selznick to do – don’t give me any text when your artwork is that strong.

The Arrival is about a man who leaves his family and the terrible conditions in which they live to try to build a better life for them in a world where things are so unfamiliar to him.

To really make you feel what an immigrant feels, Tan has this man go to a world that is unbelievable. The animals are like creatures from a fantasy novel. The written language looks like the images seen inside the great pyramids. The architecture is odd and different throughout the whole city.

At first it seems like this man is dreaming because this place can’t be real, but this is exactly what an immigrant must feel going to a new country. Everything would be different, confusing, and, on some level, magical.

Trying to find his way through this new place, this man meets many other people who help him and we learn about their stories and how they came to be in this new place.

I can’t even tell you how beautiful this book is. The artwork is one thing, but the message here is really eye opening. This is the immigrant experience. Wonderful.

I found a gem tucked into a bookshelf at a huge novelty shop that sells things like candy cigarettes and anime-wear. It had a steampunk taxidermy art show going on in a small attached gallery.

I was scanning the comic book section looking for work by women, pulled a maroon book off the shelf and read its introduction. Within the first paragraph artist Carol Lay mentioned Ubangi women featured in Hustler magazine, a DC collection of romantic comics, and a bummer state-of-the-relationship conversation with a boyfriend in 1979. On the next page: A foreword by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo.

Sold.

One of the highlights of my recent vacation was the discovery of longtime, much-published Lay’s Goodnight, Irene, a collection of Irene Van de Kamp stories from the 1980s with some yet-unseen stuff. It is so ridiculously fun that snorting and cackling become involuntary.

The premise: Young Irene is orphaned when baboons attack her parents during a safari. She is taken in by native hunters, the Bongodians, and raised by the tribe. When she comes of age, she eagerly goes through the traditional ceremony in which her lower lip is extended with the help of an ivory plate and her upper lip is looped up over her nose.

Though she has undergone a rite that assures her beauty matches that of the other women in the tribe, her white skin is deemed unlucky and none of the men will risk marrying her. She decides to leave the tribe and joins up with white traders and returns to the United States where a birthmark reveals that she is an heiress and now the richest woman in the world. Unfortunately. . . her face.

She begins dating a blind man, a lawyer, who is unaware of her money situation or her appearance. She keeps things chaste until finally he can’t take it anymore and asks to feel her face. When he encounters the jutting lip he freaks and dumps her and, meanwhile, Irene attends a cosmetics party where things get uncomfortable. (In one of the images from the book, she stares at a tube of lipstick with wide eyes and a question mark bubble).

Her now ex-boyfriend takes his woes to a bar and explains the situation to a bartender, who determines that Irene is the heiress who has been all over the tabloids. Kurt suddenly expresses renewed interested. Unfortunately, his plans to get the band back together are thwarted when Irene is kidnapped right in front of him and an unscrupulous cab driver takes advantage of his blindness to steal all of his money and send him away on an airplane to nowhere-near-Irene.

All sorts of unconventional characters crop up including a two-headed collector of unusual women who has an entire island at his disposal, a woman with an extended neck, and an evil three-breasted seductress who is out to get revenge on Irene.

These stories are hokey as heck and play on the uber-seriousness of romantic comics of yesteryear. They are self-conscious enough to in-joke about beauty and the nature of comic books. The predictable is taken and twisted into something very funny and not predictable, like the three-breasted woman who gets Kurt drunk and tries to convince him to have his face surgically changed to look more like Irene’s to win her love again.

As a nice add, Lay introduces us to Irene’s daughter — who as a teen really resents her conventional face and begins computer doodles of how she can make her own look more interesting.

Lay also explains in the introduction that Irene was born of her work inking Donald Duck and Scrooge comics mixed with the cutesy girl hairstyles from “Heart Throb” comics. Anyway, all of this happened a long time ago, but since it’s new to me I’ll say this — especially after being bored to brain itch by Alison Bechdel’s latest — comic books just got fun again.

The worst part about waiting for the artist behind your favorite graphic memoir to make her magic again is, unfortunately, reading the new release when it finally happens.

So. I didn’t like Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel. This comes after loving, seriously loving Fun Home so much that I can’t stand that idea that I would never again read it for the first time. For me it was, and still is, the gold standard and the perfect 10. It stands alone as a novel; It stands alone as illustrations. It is as good as it gets.

Bechdel aired the family’s multi-layered laundry in the coming-of-age debut. Her father had secrets — including, possibly, flings with teenaged boys and a death that might have been on purpose; her mother was emotionally distant. In the follow up, Bechdel grabs her microscope and considers her relationship with her mother. The lack of hugs, the there-but-distant, the seeming lack of curiosity her mother seems to have for Bechdel’s life.

The result is a circular and clinical evaluation of Bechdel’s life and relationships with not so much the navel gazing that goes with memoirs, but a navel poking, prodding, and dissecting. She takes the words of her two favorite therapists, as well as Virginia Woolf and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott as a sort of decoder ring for solving the mysterious case of Alison and her mother. And, in turn, the universal experience of having a mother.

It’s super boring. Like restless reading, big sighs, annoyance. Itchy brain reading. If this book had anyone else’s name on the cover, I wouldn’t have even finished reading it.

Bechdel’s mother is a chilly character, short on hugs and long on conversations filled with the nitty gritty of her days. She’s smart. She reads a lot. Any affectionate inkling is locked in a vault. She seemingly forgives Bechdel for Fun Home. She’s also cute the way moms are cute. She’s just a person in the way we are all just people with blisters and bumps and bruises and failings and quirks. While their relationship isn’t what Bechdel specifically wants, this barely seems like something that needs to be dissected as much as it just needs to be understood: We’re all just people.

Bechdel chooses scientific evaluation over cohesive narrative. And while her study is thorough and she finds some sort of resolution, she buries the narrative. I really wanted the narrative. She’s good at narrative. Her last narrative was super great. There are glimpses of story here that she doles out occasionally, then rips out the rug when things start to get interesting.

This is worse than having someone tell you about a dream (which Bechdel actually does on a handful of occasions). This is having someone tell you about a dream and then analyzing the dream for you. Oddly, this book feels like the most personal of memoirs, but it also feels like it dances around any sort of intimacy. It’s like sitting down to meet someone and instead of starting with small talk and burrowing deeper, Bechdel just unzipped her chest and splayed her organs on the table.

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)