Music books of the year

1. Princes Amongst Men – Journeys With Gypsy Musicians – Garth Cartwright (Serpent’s Tail)
Long fascinated by the Roma people’s dual reputation as romantic figures and social pariahs, Kiwi journalist Garth Cartwright took a journey across the Balkans in 2003, interviewing prominent gypsy musicians in Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania. He found an impossibly rich culture, one previously known to your average westerner only through the work of jazz ambassadors like Django Reinhardt or Miles Davis collaborator Joe Zawinul, the writings of Lorca, the films of Emir Kusturica and the occasional patronage of maverick celebrities like Johnny Depp. Princes Amongst Men is an absorbing travelogue, social study and vividly written tribute to a true outlaw demi monde. In the words of Chico Iliev: “We have such a heavy life, and if we didn’t have the music, we would kill ourselves. The music is our medicine. Our opium.”

2. Like A Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan At The Crossroads – Greil Marcus (Faber & Faber)
In which Marcus returns to the wellspring of Dylan, this time focusing on what is arguably the Bobfather’s greatest song (and inarguably one of the most torrentially articulate ventings of spleen and invective ever to be released as a 45).

3. With Billie – Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape)
Effectively an oral history of Lady Day, With Billie was assembled by Blackburn from more than 150 taped interview transcriptions conducted over 30 years ago by Linda Kuehl. Before committing suicide in 1979, Kuehl collected a whole slew of material relating to Holiday, including legal documents, hospital records, court transcripts, royalty statements, shopping lists, postcards and private letters, plus the testimonies of former lovers, pimps, musicians and Federal narcotics agents. With Billie amounts to a remarkable portrait of the legendary singer, but also a social history of black American musicians before the civil rights movement.

4. The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened To Brett Smiley – Nina Antonia (SAF Publishing)
In a sort of real life Velvet Goldmine scenario, journalist Nina Antonia sets about investigating what happened to Brett Smiley, a beautiful androgyne and former Andrew Loog Oldham protégé(e) whose debut album Breathlessly Brett saw him being touted as the next Ziggy or Marc Bolan in the early '70s. Antonia – who, as an alienated teenager in thrall to champagne, cocaine and platform-booted glitter gods, was transfixed by Smiley’s appearance on the Russell Harty show – has something of a taste for strays, waifs, decadents and dandies (previous books include biogs of Johnny Thunders and The Only Ones’ Peter Perrett). Here, she interweaves autobiography with her subject’s tale, a risky device, but one that adds greater depth and humanity to a tale of a glam paradise lost.

5. Moonage Daydream – The Life And Times Of Ziggy Stardust – Mick Rock (Cassell Illustrated)
Still one of the most lauded portraiture photographers in rock ‘n’ roll, Mick Rock was the premier visual magician of the glitter era, capturing definitive images of Lou, Iggy, Queen, and of course, Bowie. Moonage Daydream is a stunning collection of some 600 shots from his archives, all dating from the Ziggy era, supplemented with text from Bowie himself. This is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall peek at a man who could combine ‘50s kitsch, Martian flash and kabuki theatrics while in the midst of one of the most inventive purple patches ever enjoyed by any rock ‘n’ roll singer.
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Fiction books of the year

1. No Country For Old Men – Cormac McCarthy (Knopf/Random House)
It was close call between this and Lunar Park, but McCarthy’s is a vicious little sawn-off shotgun of a novel, signalling a significant shift in tone and tempo. Blood Meridian, his masterpiece, took this reader 18 months to get through, but was worth every minute – this one took two days. Predictably, sniffy reviewers dismissed it as ‘just’ a genre book. They were right, but in the words of the Anti-Nowhere League, so what? Reeking of the noir evil of Jim Thompson, plotted at breakneck Tarantino pace, McCarthy’s book produced two of his most memorable characters: Chigurh, a terrifyingly amoral manhunter and the baddest motherfucker to stalk American letters since Hannibal Lecter, and Sheriff Bell, Alvin Straight by way of John Wayne in The Shootist, the last voice of decency among the mad badlands. After his opening testimony alone, you’ll want to take a bath.

2. Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis (Picador)
Controversial choice this. Some saw Ellis’ book as overly sentimental, self referential, bloated with supernatural hokum and just plain daft. This reader thought it his best plotted and most readable yarn.
(see forthcoming issue for interview.)

3. Black Hole – Charles Burns (Jonathan Cape)
Burns cut his teeth in Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine in the mid '80s before graduating to comics, ad campaigns, album sleeves and high profile magazine covers (Time, The New Yorker). Black Hole is a mouth-wateringly illustrated and skilfully written graphic novel, set among an early ‘70s suburban Seattle clique of teenagers afflicted by a grotesque sexually transmitted virus that manifests itself in the shape of a gaping orifice where no orifice should ever be. A hypnotic tale of stoner peer pressure, body dysmorphia and murder, this is Lord Of The Flies with a dollop of That 70s Show as directed by David Cronenberg. Not for the faint of heart – or stomach.

4. We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver (Serpent’s Tail)
Yes it was overlong. Yes it had an almost irredeemably dislikeable narrator. Yes it was cold and over-analytical. But Shriver’s seventh novel tapped a nerve. In an era when children, particularly American children, are indulged to the point of tyranny, this was a flinty, hard-nosed and brutally honest inquiry into maternal instincts, posing a whole series of taboo questions. Such as, what if you just plain don’t like your kid? And what if that kid turns out to be a demon seed? Who’s to blame?
Chilling stuff.

5. Tooth And Claw – TC Boyle (Bloomsbury)
Boyle once wrote an essay entitled ‘This Monkey My Back’, outlining how he swapped drug addiction for a writing habit. Which goes some way to explaining the guy’s phenomenal prolificacy. I’m of the school that finds his novels overwrought, but as a master of the American short story, the guy is up there with peers like Tobias Wolf and his old Iowa mentors Cheever and Carver. This collection of frequently bizarre tales, loosely threaded by an anthropological bent, is almost the equal of his classic After The Plague from a couple of years ago, which is about the highest praise I can award it.

Non-Fiction
1. I Am Alive And You Are Dead – A Journey Into The Mind Of Philip K Dick – Emmanuel Carrére (Bloomsbury)
Like Orwell, Philip K Dick was an unremarkable prose stylist whose books were driven by utterly remarkable – if not visionary – prophetic ideas. Somewhat similar to Ted Morgan’s Burroughs biog Literary Outlaw, this book elevates what should be a depressing tale of a tragic life to the status of epic psychotropic odyssey. Carrére, a novelist of some repute himself, proves a worthy biographer, capable of making enviable leaps of imagination in order to inhabit his subject’s brilliant but speed-addled and paranoiac mind, plumbing parallel realities, conspiracy theories and sci-fi/Gnostic/Matrix-esque belief systems hatched decades before they became fashionable or profitable.

2. Typhoid Mary – Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury)
Bourdain is of course best known for his restaurant business exposé Kitchen Confidential, but here he turns to a historical study of Mary Mallon, the Irish emigrant cook deemed responsible for the outbreak of typhoid fever that originated in Long Island in 1904. In a speedy and acerbic prose style reminiscent of his hero Nick Tosches, Bourdain gives a surprisingly sympathetic account of a woman who, while culpable as the carrier of the epidemic, was shabbily treated by the authorities, spending most of her remaining days on the run or institutionalised.

3. The Game – Neil Strauss (Canongate)
Covered in detail in the last issue of HP, Rolling Stone/New York Times journalist Strauss’s extended investigation into the world of pick-up artists was an (again) overlong but still mesmerising journey into a gnarly netherworld of geek guys putting themselves through dude boot camp in order that they may metamorphose into Greek gods.

4. Bill Hicks – Agent Of Evolution – Kevin Booth with Michael Bertin (Harper Collins)
Written by Hicks’ lifelong friend Booth with journalist Bertin, this is the second published biography of the legendary comedian after Cynthia True’s 2002 book American Scream. Although the writing style won’t bother any Pulitzer panellists, the book nevertheless exposes us to a different side of Bill, the precociously focused teenage star of Houston’s Comedy Workshop effortlessly competing with stand-up guys twice his age. Even more surprising is Hicks as an athletic, teetotal and resolutely anti-drugs individual. He’ll be the subject of far better (and worse) books, but this is never less than diverting.

5. The Call Of The Weird – Louis Theroux (MacMillan)
Yes, Jon Ronson has already provided definitive outsider studies of American extremists. And yes, Louis Theroux is a far more accomplished interviewer than prose writer. But Call Of The Weird is nevertheless an affecting and surprisingly downbeat study of those dwelling in the margins of American life, from porn stars and prostitutes to UFO-logists and survivalist militiamen.

Special Award – Literary Gross-Out Moment Of The Year

Chuck Palahniuk’s short story ‘Guts’ from his book Haunted (Jonathan Cape), a cautionary (and grisly) tale of swimming pool masturbation and involuntary organ removal that caused audiences at readings to faint en masse, and provoked an uncontrollable bout of knuckle-biting and butt-clenching in your humble reporter. Shame the rest of the book didn’t match up.