1. They Live, by Jonathan Lethem, edited by Sean Howe.
In sum: Because I love books by well-regarded novelists about John Carpenter movies starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, I'ma run to the bookstore to buy this sh*t. If the bookstore's not open, I'ma break the glass doors down. If the glass is unbreakable, I'ma find a rocket launcher like A. Schwarzenegger in Commando and blast the door into a million pieces as Rae Dawn Chong looks on in horror. If I can't find a rocket launcher, I'ma borrow a Humvee and plow right on through. If the Humvee's outta gas, I'ma find a hybrid SUV that isn't out of gas. If I can't find a hybrid SUV that isn't out of gas, I'ma locate an expert bookstore-glass-door lockpicker like one of those dudes in the original Oceans Eleven, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven remake, Ocean's Twelve, or Ocean's Thirteen to get me into the bookstore under cover of night. If I can't find an expert lockpicker, I'ma enroll in lockpicking school and achieve a sufficient level of lockpicking mastery to do the job my damn self. If I can't find a lockpicking school, I'ma wait until the bookstore opens in the morning. It can't stay closed forever.

2. Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film, edited by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly.
Return of the Living Dead is a horror flick featuring a bunch of punks that get devoured by/turned into zombies, a fate only slightly worse than being stranded at a Slapshot show. I saw Return of the Living Dead when I was 10 or 11. It was supposed to be campy, but was terrifying instead. I had nightmares for two weeks. Then my parents found out I'd rented it and put a parental block on my Blockbuster account. In other words, 1988 sucked.

3. Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, edited by Peter Orner and Annie Holmes.
Insert clever quip about Zimbabwean humanitarian crisis here.

4. After Claude, by Iris Owens.
This is a fancy new illustrated edition of an old novel that's either French or Gallic in it's general obscurity and coolness, like Sofia Coppola's husband.

5. Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro.
This book combines prayers from different religious traditions into a posi-blanket knitted entirely from organic good vibes that warms you up when you are feeling blue and are worried that god is dead but can't quite bring yourself to attend the Unitarian church down the street because the whole Unitarian thing seems so damn wishy-washy since the congregants are unwilling to commit to any one faith for fear of being totally wrong about Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, etc. and instead float upon a sea of fuzzy ambiguity. In the immortal words of Gary Gilmore, Dominus vobiscum.

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.

Readers of a less writerly bent will likely experience a similar "jacking up": Carpenter's terse, overtly masculine prose, precise vernacular, and above all the unsentimental yearners who populate his book constitute a plausible, troubling world—one from which it's hard to emerge without a bit of a head rush. The novel follows Jack Levitt, an orphan who bounces around the Pacific Northwest—between an orphanage, pool halls, reform school, dank hotels, and prisons—before marrying and siring an heir in San Francisco. It's a volume fairly dripping with testosterone—the women get a fair shake, sure, but exclusively through the eyes of the men who sympathize, or try to; not for nothing is the book's most intense relationship between Jack and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black pool prodigy from Seattle who rematerializes next to Jack in San Quentin.

Without relying on the "postwar" handle, it's fair to say the book is structured as a noir cogitation on escaping the system—and it's also a more sophisticated man vs. authority narrative than Cuckoo's Nest. Carpenter's stronger in the pool-hall/prison grit milieu than in the stumbling-towards-family passages, though in each case the narrative boils down to Jack's earnest struggle and chronic inability to buy into an inherited schema—whether he's down and out or marrying up. The author reserves his deftest portraiture for dissolute vagrants and the idle rich, both sets wrestling with the same period listlessness, the same incompatibility whereby their raw desire outstrips all potential targets: Money, sex, adventure, family—none of these are commensurate with the gaping, wordless need of each individual.

I spoke with Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB classics series, to discuss his decision to reissue the novel.

How'd you settle on reissuing Hard Rain among this year's selections?

EF: I'd been hearing about it for some years, and at a certain point it reached a kind of critical mass. I knew Jonathan Lethem was a big fan, and then Richard Price got in touch [about a year ago] saying he just thought it was a great book. Turns out he had heard about it from Pelecanos. It's a remarkable book, and it seemed to make sense.

What sold you on it?

EF: It's just remarkable on a sentence-by-scene level—you take the first sentence of the book about the motorcycles, you're already pulled in. And there are so many stories going on in the book. The scenes are vivid, the prison reformatory scenes especially—extraordinarily vivid scenes. And there's a kind of reach and ambition of trying to cover every base. One of the appealing things is it's a book about the trials and tribulations of manhood. People don't write about that any more. In its day it wasn't an unusual subject—think Mailer—but I think another issue there...there's a certain kind of macho writing that became unpopular. And this book is interesting partly because it deals with homosexuality, something that was ruled out in the old manhood stuff.

The Times' obit described Carpenter as "a novelist and sometime screenwriter whose unflinching examinations of disheveled lives won more critical acclaim than popular favor." Which is, obviously, true. Why do people tend to gloss over Carpenter when discussing, say, writers like Nelson Algren?

EF: I don't really know enough about his career to say. The fact is that a lot of good writers don't—he was writing, living around San Francisco, which was not—you know, there's a certain tyranny to New York.

How long had it been out of print?

EF: I think since the early '80s. I think it was available from Playboy Press in a kind of mass-market paperback edition. I'm pretty sure that was the last time it was available.

How did Pelecanos get involved?

EF: Richard Price told us that Pelecanos had told him about the book—I think I knew already, Pelecanos had written about it as a book that he thought was unjustly neglected and he thought was great.

When making selections for the NYRB Classics series, how much emphasis do you put on profit and how much on posterity? 'Cuz this is a book that ought to be read...but it's not going to sell a million units.

EF: Right. We have the basic mission—which is not, I hope, incompatible with financial viability—to get books that are good books. They should be good books that also are news now. There are a lot of good books that people want back in print, and I know it's a worthy book, one that posterity should know about, but there's not any obvious way that, apart from the people who already value the book, it'll get a new audience. So I tend to think that these books not only have proven themselves, but can also get a new audience.

"News now"—that's interesting. What makes Hard Rain news now?

EF: Well, it speaks very interestingly of the pathologies of being a man, and an American man in particular. It's a subject of interest to at least half of the population. And I think it does it in an unusual way. There's also another thing going on, complementary to the first: I think people are interested in thinking about the different kinds of things novels can do. So there's a little bit of looking back and just seeing the lay of the land and all these interesting exceptional things put out in the past as opposed to the latest greatest books.

Photograph of Don Carpenter courtesy of Wikimedia Commons