Tag: Science Fiction

After a year off, it’s back: The Summer Reading List. Here’s hoping you were able to get through last summer without us. Contributors this time around include veterans like Cynthia Connolly and Gary Baddeley, as well as newcomers like Tim Mitchell and Val Renegar. Many thanks to all who sent me their suggestions. Enjoy!

note: All of the book title links on this page (and there are a lot of them) will take you to the selected title in Powell’s Bookstore.

Hans Fjellestad, Director, Moog:

Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson (Feral House):

A look inside the strange and densely bureaucratic realities of living and working in Antarctica. Some Joseph Heller flavor, but hard to explain. Definitely bleak and funny as hell. Maybe a nice choice for your next afternoon in the sun.

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer (Harper Collins):

From British-Israelism to Serbian anti-Muslim paramilitary units, there are some really unexpected connections here. It’s a fun read and more about cultural attitudes and globalization theory than the actual game. But after all, it’s WORLD CUP time!

Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company:

Roy, as usual I don’t have much time to read any books other than
our own, but that’s fine because we have some cool new books. Just
about to drop is Number Freaking: How To Change The World With Delightfully Surreal Statistics by Gary Rimmer. We plastered every toilet at Bookexpo America with a caution flyer about one of the number freaks inside the book: one about how 45,000 Americans are injured by toilets every year, and it was the talk of the convention!

Val Renegar, Professor of Communication, San Diego State University:

Here is what is going in my suitcase for my six weeks of vacation time:

Theorectial Writings by Alain Badiou (Continuum).
Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson (Riverhead).
Veronica: A Novel by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon).
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (Penguin).
My Life In France by Julia Child (Knopf).
Shibumi: A Novel by Trevanian (Three Rivers Press).

Patrick David Barber, Designer:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Penguin):

This book has begun to inform a nationwide discussion about what we eat and where it comes from. I’ve read parts of this book already in article form in the New York Times magazine and elsewhere; and I’ve skimmed sections sneakily while my partner was reading it. In May we participated in the Eat Local Challenge, whereby we attempted to eat food that was grown within 150 miles of our house whenever possible, and the resonances with this book and the way it is infiltrating our culture were rich and plentiful. What am I saying? You gotta read this.

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv (Algonquin Books):

Got this at the library and had to return it before I could get all the way through it. A well-researched book about what the author calls Nature Deficit Disorder, a malady suffered mostly by today’s young children (for example, one San Diego youth who prefers the indoors to the outdoors because “that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”). A sobering look at some disturbing trends, and one thing I found surprising was just how rich the author’s research and information was, since the premise pretty much fits in the length of a subtitle: Kids don’t go outside enough. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and it’s interesting stuff. I know, sounds like some light beach reading, right? But it’s worth a read, especially among the old-enough-to-have-kids, computer-user set, which is to say, most of you who are reading these words.

And now the books of note which I’ve actually read recently, which, speaking of deficit disorders, are all graphic novels or comics.

The Asterix series by R. Goscinny and A. Uderzo (Orion):

I’ve been checking these out from the library and mostly reading them in the cool confines of said library directly after picking them up. (I also have a formidable collection at home.) I never knew where my childhood dreams of peaceful pre-industrial life came from. Rereading these books makes me realize that they came from here. The world of Asterix is a pretty nice place to be, where no one is suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder, or much else.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin):

This graphic bildungsroman has received rave reviews far and wide, and it lives up to the hype. The whole thing is executed masterfully, from the story’s graceful, flashback-inflected arc, to the beautiful two-color graphic renderings, to the author’s impressively font-i-fied handwriting, to the utterly stunning cover and dust jacket. One two-page sequence, of a conversation between the protagonist and her father, in a car, about their sexualities, is one of the most effective, jaw-droppingly intense pieces of storytelling I’ve ever read, graphical or otherwise. Bechdel’s magnum opus, and a hell of a work to follow up. What’s next? The Dykes To Watch Out For version of Factotum?

Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf):

I suppose we can call these books “Autobiographic Novels of the Artists as Young People,” which has a nicer ring to it than “künstlerroman.” This is another detailed story of one comics artist’s life, from childhood to adulthood. I read this directly after Fun Home, so it’s hard not to compare them (indeed, I found out about this book because of a discussion between Thompson and Bechdel on Powells.com). The artistic styles, and the stories, are quite different, though. Thompson’s story is as dark and cold as his Wisconsin upbringing– even the panels that are set in a sunny afternoon have a dark shadowiness about them. While I can’t say that I enjoyed this book as much as Fun Home — it’s not as solid from a purely literary standpoint — that’s faint damnation if there ever was any. I gulped down the 800 pages in a few hours one night. Highly recommended.

Tom Georgoulias, Contributing Editor, frontwheeldrive.com:

The Rabbit Factory: A Novel by Larry Brown (Free Press).

JPod: A Novel by Douglas Coupland (Bloomsbury).

ReadyMade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer by Shoshanna Berger and Grace Hawthorne (Clarkson Potter).

I’m jumping the gun on JPod since I’m about three-fourths of the way through it, but assuming he doesn’t throw it away in the last quarter of the book, it’s worth reading.

Tim Mitchell, B.A. in English, Writer and Humorist, Television Panelist, Dilettante and Libertine:

I don’t know if you only want current books, but here are the books/poetry/short stories that I think everyone should read sometime in their lives (Note that I’m excluding obvious and popular works, like Naked Lunch).

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Penguin):

Forget the controversy. This book is miles above The Satanic Verses.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

The John Huston film does this novel justice, and like The Godfather, is about equal to the book.

Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

In my opinion, the only poet to write more than three great poems. Apologies to Dylan, T.S. and W.B.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (Ontario Review Press):

Short story by Joyce Carol Oates. Hey, you can read short stories between naps, eh? This one should not be missed.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage):

Either you get it, or you don’t. The film completely ruined this book by letting too many people get it.

Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carrol (Orb):

Disappointed his fans. Good. Great book from an author who actually has something to say.

Neuromancer by William Gibson (Ace):

Defined the cyberpunk genre, and made the tag “computer geek” a symbol of pride. Without this book, there would have been no Matrix, etc. Trivia: Gibson had never owned a computer when he wrote the book.

Falconer by John Cheever (Vintage):

He also wrote a strong contender for best short story, “The Swimmer.”

The Bible No, seriously. The Bible is the jumping off point for an extraordinary amount of English literature. Just don’t feel obligated to read “Chronicles.” I don’t think the Pope has read that whole damn chapter. I also suggest you ingest your hallucinogen of choice when you read “Revelation.”

The Preacher series of graphic novels by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (Vertigo):

Yes, all of them. I won’t play nor give the game away, but an Englishman and an Irishman teamed up to write one of the best works of fiction about America that I’ve ever read.

roy christopher, Editor, frontwheeldrive.com:

Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts by Mary Orr (Polity):
I’ve been reading this one off and on over the past several months and plan to finish it this summer. Orr explicates the work of four key thinkers in the area (i.e., Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Howard Bloom, and Gerard Genette), as well as the French critics who explored the concept (i.e., Jacques Derrida, Marc Angenot, Paul Ricoeur, and René Girard). Orr certainly set out to make this the definitive introductory text on intertextuality. I’m also referencing Graham Allan’s Intertextuality (Routledge) along the way (Intertextuality is one of my recent a pet research interests).

I just got Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (Verso) and it looks to be a great introduction to this unsung feminist firebrand. Acker has been, in turns, revered as notorious and notoriously overlooked. Many think she embodies the epitome of the literary punk rock ethos, and many others know little about her or her work. I’m one of the latter, but I’m using Lust for Life as the door into her world.

Derrida by Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick (Routledge):
Last year, Routledge put out this book of the script of the Derrida documentary. It includes essays by directors Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick, a lengthy interview with Derrida, a ton of http://frontwheeldrive.com/images from the filming, and an introductory essay by Nicholas Royle, as well as the full text of the film. This over-sized book provides a great companion piece to the movie and will make you look smart if you leave it on your coffee table.

Speaking of companion pieces, if you like the movie Donnie Darko, then The Donnie Darko Book (Faber & Faber) by Richard Kelly is a must-have. It has a long interview with Kelly, the full shooting script and stills from the movie, all of Roberta Sparrow’s book, The Philosophy of Time Travel that exists, and more. If you find the movie the least bit bewildering, The Donnie Darko Book helps clarify what’s going on.

I’ve also been trying to catch up on some missed classics and modern fiction (e.g., Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer, etc.), and I just finished Watership Down by Richard Adams. Not enough can be said about how effortlessly Adams entrenches the reader in his world of rabbits. It’s a perfect summer adventure. Next, I have my eye on Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

The “to be read” stack also contains Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang (Picador), Stargazer: The Life And Times of the Telescope by Fred Watson (Da Capo), and Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin), among others.

Michelle Pond, Da Capo Publicity:

I am an intern at Da Capo Press and Lissa suggested I recommend a book for frontwheeldrive.com‘s 2006 Summer Reading List. Fred Watson’s Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope traces the history of the telescope, from its origins with Tycho Brahe (Denmark’s “lord of the stars”) to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope; offers a glimpse into the future, when telescopes could conceivably save us from asteroids; and captures the intensely competitive life of the modern astronomer. Stargazer acquaints us with the biggest and the best telescopes.

Cynthia Connolly, Photographer and Artist:

I have not been doing too much reading, except reading the historical signs on the sides of the roads in Virginia. I advise to read the magazine called Orion and to drive and look up to the trees and sky and contemplate what to do next.

[Above, Angela sits among the many books at Adams Avenue Bookstore in San Diego, California.]

In the midst of putting together a Summer Reading List for 2004, I took a lengthy Summer trip, delaying the release of this list until long after summer was officially over. Here, now, is the list of recommended I accumulated and sat on for far too long. Additions and corrections were made in the meantime. Many apologies for the delay, and many thanks to all those who participated.

note: All of the book title links on this page (and there are a lot of them) will take you to the selected title in Powell’s Bookstore (except where noted otherwise).

Gary Baddeley, Publisher, The Disinformation Company

This is an easy one, Roy, I’m reading proofs of our new books: The Yes Men, which is about those ®TMark guys (remember) who created a fake gatt.org website and ended up being invited all over the world to speak as representatives of the WTO. United Artists released the movie late in the Summer, and we have created the book, which is very funny, but with a serious anti-globalization message.

As for right now, I’m re-reading our book Da Vinci Code Decoded by Martin Lunn because it’s doing so well that we’ve decided to produce a DVD based on it. It’s really deep into stuff like the bloodline of Christ.

I could go on about our own books, but for light beach reading it’s The Rule of Four by Ian Cladwell and Dustin Thomason because I’m interested in the Renaissance text the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili that provides the central theme.

Cynthia Connolly, Photographer and Artist.

Hey, I only have a couple things:

Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escott (Little, Brown)

Where I was From by Joan Didion (Knopf)

Billy Wimsatt, Editor, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, Author, No More Prions and Bomb the Suburbs

You mean other than How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office?

Mark Dery, Author, Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Escape Velocity, Flame Wars

This summer, I did the sociocultural spadework for a book-in-progress — an anti-memoir about my San Diego adolescence, equal parts social history of ’70s SoCal and drive-by cultural critique of border consciousness. I began my excavations of Southern California history, cultural and otherwise, with Southern California: An Island on the Land, by the dean of left-wing California historians, Carey McWilliams (the progenitor of Mike Davis’s archaeological analysis of power, race and real estate in L.A.). Garrulous, generous of spirit, and dryly funny, yet possessed of a backroom dealmaker’s knowledge of how power really works in the Land of the Golden Dream, Williams is the perfect Audio-Animatronic tour guide to Southern California’s Amok Disneyland. His account of the Free Speech Rights in San Diego, in the ’30s, is unforgettable: Emma Goldman came to rouse the rabble and was ushered, by the local constabulary, onto a train to L.A., with a one-way ticket and the friendly admonition never to return. The socialist wobblies (IWW members) who came from all over the U.S. to join the protests suffered a less genteel fate: Cops and hired goons dragged them out to canyon country, forced them to kiss the flag, then beat them, some to death, with truncheons. This is rough justice, in the town where the social order and property values trump civil liberties every time. Mike Davis and his collaborators Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew take up Williams’s song in Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a fastidiously researched collection of essays on San Diego’s powerbrokers and the dissident voices — underground journalists in the ’60s, migrant workers and illegal aliens more recently — raised against them.

Finally, before bed, on the beach, and at poolside, there’s The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction 1909-1959 (ed. Hiney, MacShane), much of which is gleaned from Chandler’s La Jolla years, when he would dictate his correspondence late into the night. Written with a pitch-perfect ear for the American vernacular and the grammatical fastidiousness of a man born, bred, and classically educated in England, Selected Letters is an omnium gatherum of blunt, bleakly funny bon mots. On California: “There is a touch of the desert about everything in California, and about the minds of the people who live here.” “We are so rootless here. I’ve lived half my life in California and made what use of it I could, but I could leave it forever without a pang.” On his fan mail: “…[A]nother letter I had once from a girl in Seattle who said that she was interested in music and sex, and gave me the impression that, if I was pressed for time, I need not even bother to bring my own pyjamas.” On himself: “All my best friends I have never seen. To know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things.” Written in the dead of night with a Dictaphone and a bottle of gin, Chandler’s letters are an inexhaustible fund of insights into the noir aesthetic, the sublime agonies of the writer’s life, the American Language (as Mencken called it), and, forever and always, the sunbelt existentialism that shadows the California Dream.

Tom Georgoulias, Contributing Editor, frontwheeldrive.com

Candy by Mian Mian (Back Bay)

Candy is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Chinese girl who ran away to Shenzhen, a city free of state economic control, to escape from the confines of the government job system. She bounces around the underground club/music culture, which is filled with a lot of other wandering Chinese 20/30 somethings who are into music, fashion, and finding their way out of the world their parents created.

Small Town Punk by John L. Sheppard (Writers Club Press)

Lost punk teenagers stuck in a nothing small town, drinking between shifts at dead end fast food jobs, and struggling through their teen years. If you grew up like this, you’ll recognize the authenticity almost immediately. The characters and dialogue are just that good.

All Hands On: THE2NDHAND reader Edited by Todd Dills (TNI/Elephant Rock)

Best of collection from the free literary broadsheet THE2NDHAND.

Vinyl Junkies by Brett Milano (St. Matrin’s)

Profiles of record collectors and their favorite haunts, hidden and famous. A fairly insightful and tender look at record colleting and obsessive hobbyists in general.

Working Stiffs Manifesto by Iain Levison (Random House)

The funniest book I’ve read in a long time. Read it all in one sitting. A documentary of Levison’s string of dead end jobs, one right after another, and all the hilarious and worthless crap he’s seen during and in between. Perfect.

Shepard Fairey, Artist, Obey Giant

I have not read a good book in a while. The last book I read was this big compilation of interviews from people who shaped the first 2 years of punk called Punk. My schedule has not been leaving time for more than magazine and newspaper articles.

Steven Shaviro, Author, Connected, Doom Patrols, The Cinematic Body, etc.

Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead (Free Press)

Whitehead, a hidden influence on such recent thinkers as Deleuze and Bruno Latour, is the most underrated philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century. Surprisingly timely.

Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (Knopf)

The latest popularization of contemporary physics, going beyond the bounds of science into full-fledged metaphysical speculation.

The Filth by Grant Morrison and Chris Weston (DC Comics)

This mind-bending comic is now available as a single-volume trade paperback novel. Everything you wanted to know (and a lot you didn’t) about the ultimate nature of reality; together with a hero who is forced to battle everything from viral nanobots that take over human bodies, to pornographers who generate bioengineered predatory megasperm, to memetic cloning programs that turn human crowds into orgiastic Stepford Wives who provide the building blocks for an “emergent superorganism” — when all he really wants to do is stay home and care for his cat.

The Iron Council by China Mieville (Del Rey)

The third volume of Mieville’s Bas-Lag trilogy (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar). Mieville writes brilliant, dense meta-fantasy, utterly gripping yet at the same time deconstructing the tropes of the Tolkien tradition. Sort of Lovecraft-meets-Dickens-meets- Marxist theory. To be published in July.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (Penguin Press)

The much-awaited sequel to Empire.

Marc Pesce, Author, The Playful World

The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr (Random House)

The amazing account of the probable discovery of the unlikely mechanism of smell, by renegade scientist Luca Turin. In a classic case of an outsider solving a previously intractable problem, Turin sweeps away a hundred years of accepted-if-hodgepodge theories about the “shape” theory of scent, and discovers something far more interesting: there’s a spectrograph in your nose — or rather, thousands of them. An incredible must-read for anyone who has ever gotten a whiff of the stench of scientific politics, or the scent of victory.

Phil Agre, Associate Professor of Information Studies, UCLA

Here are four very different history books that I recommend.

Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Thomas Ertman (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

This is an excellent example of a particular kind of history that compares and contrasts different nations in a systematic way based on a simple theoretical model. The topic is state-building: why did some European countries construct efficient, professionally rationalized bureaucracies where others spent centuries stuck in absolutism or corruption? Ertman argues that the difference has to do with two factors. One was the “starting conditions” left over from the dark ages. In some areas, such as England, the legacy of Roman administration left behind a tradition of strong local governments whose workings were homogeneous. This made it easy to start a parliament and hard not to, and parliaments are a counterbalance to bureaucracies. In other areas, such as Germany, local government was heterogeneous. The other factor was timing. State-building was driven largely by military competition, and countries for which such competition arrived early were less bureaucratic. It’s a theory, and Ertman uses it to analyze aspects of the various countries’ histories that might otherwise have gone unanalyzed. Does the theory explain Afghanistan? Even if it doesn’t, at least it makes clear just how contingent European institutions really are.

The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto by Mary Elizabeth Berry (University of California Press, 1994)

The major difficulty with the humanities is interpretations of things that go beyond the evidence. Despite all the yammer about postmodernism, this really begins with I. A. Richards, whose arbitrary interpretations of literature have been oppressing students for generations. Mary Elizabeth Berry’s book about everyday life in Japan during the century-long civil war that began around 1450 is an impressive lesson in how to interpret history when the evidence is slight. Because Japan lacks a tradition of bureaucrat-monks, and because its cities keep getting burned to the ground in wars, Japanese history is not as well documented as European history. Berry reads the available documents patiently and with admirable sympathy for the people who wrote them — people who in many ways didn’t understand their society any better than we do. It was as if the whole society had melted, so that every detail of their lives could change tomorrow and often did.

The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change by Art Kleiner (Currency Doubleday, 1996)

This is a journalistic history of an important chapter of the 20th century that could easily have gone unwritten: a generation of attempts, more or less countercultural, to reform and reinvent the corporation. It’s all here: unpredictable experiments in social engineering, weird tales of engineers dropping acid, computer programs predicting the future of the whole world, and the truly odd omnipresence of an Armenian mystic named G. I. Gurdjieff. We’re nowhere near putting these innovations in context. Some of them led to genuine reforms and others did not. Some of them transcended the limitations of 20th century rationalism while others were just irrational. In any event, Kleiner promises a sequel in which he brings the story up to the present day, and I bet it’s going to be great.

Cosmopoiesis: The Renaissance Experiment by Giuseppe Mazzotta (University of Toronto Press, 2001)

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Italian through and through. He is also very smart. The result is a sort of alternative intellectual reality that takes some getting used to. For a short book it is hard to summarize, and not least because the traditions of allegorical writing that Mazzotta reads in such detail are lost to us. So, for example, one poet writes a vast epic to argue with Machiavelli’s psychology, and Lorenzo de Medici and his contemporaries argue about his despotism by, of all weird things, writing Neoplatonic poetry whose numerous layers of meanings Mazzotta revivifies in phrase after unexpected phrase. Maybe it’s just the foreignness of it, but I’m not sure I’ve read a book that was so densely intelligent.

roy christopher, Editor, frontwheeldrive.com

The History of Forgetting by Norman Klein (Verso)

After seeing Norman Klein speak at UC Irvine last March, my girlfriend and I began a frantic search for all of his books. This one is about L.A. and proves a nice companion to Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. Part memoir, part critique, and part fiction, The History of Forgetting is an amazing glimpse at the city — and its past eras — looming at the edge of civilization.

Wounds of Passion by bell hooks (Owl Books)

Subtitled “A Writing Life,” Wounds of Passion chronicles bell hooks’ path to the role of Black public intellectual. It’s a deeply personal account of her struggles at home in Kentucky, leaving there for school at Stanford, her most important relationship during college and after, and all of the other trials that lead to her writing her first book (Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism), and indeed her writing life. hooks has always reveled in poetry, lived through words, and escaped in books. Wounds of Passion is a painful, yet liberating glance into one writer’s journey with the word.

Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana (Oxford University Press)

I wish I’d gotten this book a long time ago. I have several books about Glenn Gould and this one is by far the most complete look at his life, his music, his eccentricities, hislove of solitude and of Canada, and his passion for composing. Admittedly, my knowledge of classical music is limited, but Kevin Bazzana writes in such a way that one needn’t know the minutia of counterpoint, colour, and timbre. If you’re curious about Glenn Gould, this is the place to start.

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (University of Chicago Press)

This brilliant little book explores and explains metaphor not as a form of language, but as the central structure of language. Written in clear, easy-to-understand language and rife with excellent examples and extensively explained linguistic concepts, Metaphors We Live By is a book everyone should — and can — read.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa (Zone Books)

Meaning to have read this long ago, I grabbed it off the shelf just before leaving on my summer trip, and I’m glad I finally sat down with it. Using applied chaos theory, De Landa rewrites history as a dynamical system. It’s an amazing perspective on what is normally left to the dreaded “grand narrative.”

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman (Scribner)

Leave it to Chuck Klosterman to write the best pop culture book of the year. His previous work, Fargo Rock City, was an excellent piece of commentary on 80s Hair Metal, but Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs proves that its subject matter obviously limited his abilities. This book finds him pontificating on everything from Saved By The Bell and Vanilla Sky to the 80s Celtics-Lakers rivalry as a political metaphor and why Soccer sucks. No one is safe from Klosterman’s keen sense of humor and uncanny knack for what’s going on behind the most seemingly mundane pop culture trends.

[Above, Sidney browses the books at Jackson Street Bookstore in Athens, Georgia. Photo by Roy Christopher]