I find myself listening to and reading a lot of good stuff recently, and want to share.

After playing Vampire Weekend’s new album to pieces, I’ve become obsessed with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I know: I’m about three years behind the ball with that one. But that’s how it is with almost all music that came out between 2000 and 2006, because I was a grad student and broke. But the good news is that this means there’s a backlog of good alternative music for me to “discover.” I’ve been playing “Maps” obsessively, and love the lead singer’s Siouxsie voice and the band’s 90s guitar sound.

On to the books.

I just recommended Cory Doctorow’s YA Little Brother to my friend at the ACLU because, like all good dystopias, it’s scarily believable. It’s about a seventeen-year-old who, after the bombing of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, is wrongly arrested and brutally interrogated. My friend knows all too well about people the United States has dumped into a legal black hole. Dystopia works because it is a portrait of our society, even if it looks like it’s set in another one.

While sick, I blazed through E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, about a girl with a mind like a steel spiderweb and the heart of a prankster. I loved the book not just because it’s written in a careful, droll way, but also because it made me wish I had read it as a teenager. It’s just really, really hard sometimes to figure out who you are when the people who matter most are telling you who you are, and their descriptions just seem wrong. At least, that’s how I used to feel between, oh, about 13-23. That’s a whole decade of confusion! Too bad I didn’t have Frankie’s spine. That era of self-doubt could have ended a lot sooner.

I’m deep into Richard Price’s Lush Life, an adult crime novel. I’m sort of surprised to find myself reading a crime novel. I’m generally not into the mystery-crime-detective-police sort of thing, which is why it’s really weird that I chose to make my second novel a bit of a murder mystery. But Lush Life just beats the pants off anything I’ve seen lately on the New Fiction shelves in the adult section. I think a typical writer’s reaction (or, at least, mine) to the book is to clutch the heart and cry, “The dialogue! Oh, the dialogue! Why can’t I write that?” Because Price is pitch-perfect. He does some interesting things with punctuation, too, making statements into questions, questions into statements, should-be exclamatory remarks into flat sentences. Well, James Wood has better things to say than I do about Price’s dialogue. Wood doesn’t just write about Price’s dialogue, though. He also notes how Price “contaminates” his third-person narration with the voices of his characters. Like (not one of Wood’s examples):

“A kid with a stitched cheek came barreling into the store so tricked out in Crip blue that no one took him seriously.”

In this sentence, the slangy “kid,” “tricked out,” and “Crip” are the contaminating forces. But that’s not the only thing brilliant about the sentence. It’s also simple, economic, and true. In that one sentence, you get image, reaction, judgment, attitude.

Lastly, I’m reading China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, which is making me wonder why I’ve never read anything by him before.

And now I’m off to do something very important: eat lunch.