Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City is one of the best books of the year. So sayeth me; so sayeth the sage critterpoos at the New York Times, who include Lethem's eighth novel in their holiday gift guide. (Speaking of guides, check out ours!) While a good friend of mine alleges that Chronic City, which is about a group of pot-smoking friends who live in an alternative-universe-like Manhattan, is slow out the gate, she concedes that it paid her back ("with interest," as the bankers say). In honor of the book's goodness, Washington City Paper asked Lethem to create an annotated playlist for his novel's most compelling character (and a nerdy simulacrum for Lethem himself): former rock critic Perkus Tooth.

Ladies and gents, we give you "Perkus's Fugue State: Ten songs for rewiring your limbic system while surfing the Web for chaldrons."

Nico "I'll Keep It With Mine"  (3:20)  Chelsea Girl

Lethem says: "A brief overture to a suite of looooong songs, the most nurturing song Dylan ever wrote echoes in the abandoned gothic cathedral of Nico's voice. What's "it", and who'll keep it where? The answers to these questions have yet to be determined."

Al Green "Beware"         (13:39)  Living For You (long version)

Lethem says: "Paranoia rendered suitably seductive by the Reverend. Note how he begins a call and response with himself as the song progresses. I also like the giggles at the end."

Mahmoud Ahmed "Tezeta"        (12:32)  Ethiopiques, Vol. 10

Lethem says: "Sometimes a language you don't understand is the best way of expressing what you don't know how to say."

Van Morrison "Try For Sleep"  (6:06)  The Philosopher's Stone (Disc 1)

Lethem says: "The keyword here is "try". Good luck with that, once you begin to stumble through Van's hall of gender mirrors."

Animal Collective "What Would I Want? Sky"       (6:46)         Fall Be Kind

Lethem says: "Sure, sky is what I would want, but I'd settle for a persuasive simulation."

Cat Power   "Willie Deadwilder"   (18:18)               Speaking for Trees

Lethem says: "Very much in the tradition of Bob Dylan — not to mention Thomas Pynchon–in this apparently endless song Cat Power spins a meditation about everything and nothing at once."

Kraftwerk  "Kling Klang"        (17:30) Doppelalbum (rare)

Lethem says: "Then again, sometimes better to focus on the bass and drum. Early Krautrock is a sublime alternative musical world, like a whole rock-nation of Brian Enos. Sometimes a language you don't understand, etc."

Red House Painters  "Make Like Paper"   (12:04)         Songs For A Blue Guitar

Lethem says: "The opposite tack from Cat Power; The Red House Painters don't need a million lyrics to carve an epic. The guitar figures do it instead, until the brief written lines resound like a waker's dream."

Gillian Welch "I Dream A Highway"  (14:40)             Time (The Revelator)

Lethem says: "And now Gillian Welch splits the difference between the Cat Power and the Red House Painter approach: the refrain resonates, while the verses are like the proverbial river you can't step in twice."

Fripp/Eno  "Evening Star"       (7:50)          Essential Collection

Lethem says: "Night is falling at last for you — the night of the mind, I mean, since it's been dark outside for hours already. Fripp and Eno bring the healing, at least until tomorrow."

Publishers publish fake books because, if you have an “author” who has some larger cause to promote, the publisher gets free promotion. What the publisher has traded for such an abundance of promotion is its own brand. HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book—or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book.

So true! There's all this other stuff, though–"[Books are] fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue."–that I can't get behind, not since I finished Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City on Saturday and cried myself to sleep. That book was definitely not a lie.

When I suggested "Higher" to my guitar instructor, he scoffed. Our arrangement was that I could pick a song to learn (as opposed to having one assigned), only if it supplemented the sight-reading, theory, or scalar focus of our lessons. Radio rock, with the exception of Metallica (pre-Black) and the Foo Fighters (anything from The Colour and the Shape), was verboten.

But when my instructor saw the pull-off in the opening hook for "Higher," he changed his mind. At first, he didn't believe that guitarist Mark Tremonti was playing it as transcribed: It required the guitarist to simultaneously make a bar chord at the 7th fret using the first finger (drop-D tuning) while completing a pull-off (on the notoriously fickle G string) that stretched all the way to the 12th fret and required the pinkie and ring fingers. If this makes no sense to you, just imagine having to stretch your fingers much farther apart than feels natural, and doing something elegant with them like that.

In essence, this one musical line changed my instructor's opinion about Creed, a tough sell considering that very few technically proficient guitarists have anything nice to say about contemporary radio rock. But for many, many people, no convincing was or is necessary. I played "Higher" at parties through college, and the response was always one of warm recognition.

Human Clay is a platinum album, which explains why most people recognize–like, even–the riff from "Higher." Millions of people bought the album, from which we can extrapolate that many, many people like the album. Is an encomium for a widely purchased album that defined an era of radio rock necessary?

No. Based on sales, longevity, and concert attendance, Creed is actually an overrated band, it's just not rated by the select tribe of paid music critics whose job is to play taste police.

In Chronic City, the new novel by Jonathan Lethem, the character Perkus Tooth observes that "[r]ock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they'd never call it that. They believe they're experts."

One music writer telling his colleagues that Creed is better than we realize, or, as Ron Rosenbaum argued in January, that Billy Joel is not as good as the millions of people who buy his albums think he is, appears at first glance to be a deviation from the consoling we do so frequently: Talking up indie acts, poorly selling albums, and obscure deep cuts, and bemoaning the bad taste of the masses while railing against the labels that keep them fed and stupid. Yet defending Creed isn't a break from that; it's condescension disguised as counter-intuition, and in its own way, a mirror that reflects the impotence of the average music critic: Creed didn't need Slate in its corner 10 years ago, and it doesn't need Slate now.

Ironically, Weiner's piece has been widely reviled by his target audience: people who consider themselves experts. In fact, it's spawned its own twitter meme. Bloggers with "great taste" have dismissed Weiner's argument wholesale, and have sworn to hate Creed even more now that one of their own has dared to save the band from their very tiny, very dull pitchforks.

And that, people, is destined to be the exercise's only value: It reveals the massive divide between what the idiots want and what the smarties want, and the utter futility of suggesting to the latter group that the former is ever correct.

1. The Wild Things (Fur-Covered Edition), by Dave Eggers.

Another in adventure in meta by postmodernist Dave Eggers, this novelization of high modernist Maurice Sendak's ubiquitous children's book is also based on a screenplay for the recent film that Eggers wrote with postmodernist Spike Jonze. I'd read this because I like things that are meta, and because I like things that are covered in fur.

2. The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver.
I often buy, but rarely read, books in the "The Best" series published every year. ("The Best American Short Stories," "The Best American Science and Nature Writing," "The Best American Sports Writing," etc.) I'm never sure what's in them, but they look good on the bookshelf, and make me feel intelligent which, really, is what books are for.

3. Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem.
Jonathan Lethem's written a bunch of books I've never read, but I always see in people's apartments in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Green Point. Though I'm not interested in the Brooklyn Renaissance (can we call the decade-long Brooklyn cultural explosion a Renaissance yet?), I am interested in alliteration, and boy, is this book's title alliterated (alliterative? alliteral?).

4. War Dances, by Sherman Alexie.
Sherman Alexie is responsible for one bad movie, but publishes good, emo stories in the New Yorker and is Native American and, though it's not politically correct to say or think so, Native Americans are cool.

5. American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, by Craig Ferguson.
Aren't you at least a little curious to read about this talk show host/former Drew Carey Show star's alcoholism and suicide attempt? He's one of those guys who seems like a douchebag, but, if he really is a douchebag, is probably a cool douchebag.