This was recommended to me by Lawrence English, who called it one of the great, transformative texts that’s come out of the 20th century in one of my first and favorite interviews. It's an odd one to recommend to acquaintances here in Denver; as a loose plot summary, a man writing obsessively and beautifully about following a bird around, and eventually his consciousness fuses with the birds tends to garner the wrong sort of interest.

Ray Ray From Summerhill is YFN Lucci's second project named in tribute to a dead friend (following last year's Long Live Nut), and there's no reason to think that it will be his last. It's an album less about grieving than living with and beyond grief; the integration of a gaping void into one's ongoing existence. Emotionally, lines like can't believe my cousin died before the deal came are irreducible into individual vectors of good/bad/sad; for Lucci, loss is less a discrete occurrence than a permanent caveat to his own ever-growing success.

For a very long time, I had no interest whatsoever in Sufjan Stevens. This would still be the case if (a) I had never discovered his series of Christmas albums (b) I had not come downstairs one day as one of my roommates (shouts out Kevin) was listening to the single most interesting moment on this entire album. I have surely described a dozen albums as [artist's] 808s & Heartbreak through the years, but the claim holds up better with The Age of Adz than most (even if it feels a bit useless as a label for anything already within the indie folk idiom).

I first read this in high school, which reflects very well on my high school's English department and did the book a great disservice. It was well worth revisiting not only because books are better when they aren't read begrudgingly, but because the one month of class time spent on this remains the high water mark of my exposure to Egyptian literature of any sort (there are no prominent ____ writers might be even more dangerous as illusion than reality).

This album's real good, and probably my favorite of the genre from last year. R'n'b builds upon itself, and where there are obvious stylistic antecedents it's really nice to see them referenced overtly (the interpolation of Akon's Don't Matter on Undercover, the sample of New Edition's If it Isn't Love on In My Feelings, the album title's update of TLC's CrazySexyCool) rather than by way of a pale, uncredited imitation of the source material. SweetSexySavage is the quintessential document of r'n'b in 2017, capturing the flavors of the year in terms of production and subject matter while highlighting the requisite doffs of the cap to the throwback hits on which its target audience grew up.

More than anything else, this is an incredibly stylish book. Perhaps surprisingly, I have a big thing for books (or stories in general) set in places which by their very existence render any discussion of the financial maneuvers underlying the endless shuttling between, say, a series of Alpine resort towns unnecessary. In assuming that this is indeed what life is like for the fabulously wealthy, the reader gives the author a great deal of both credence and, more importantly, attention; when the author is Daddy Vladdy Nabokov himself, the latter is richly rewarded.

This is apparently the more famous Cisneros work, although I was introduced to her via Woman Hollering Creek (recommended to me by Sandy at Daedalus; written about in the 6/29 Hip Replacement). Mango Street is similar, keeping up the form of vivid portrait by way of vignette but maintaining consistent narration and location throughout. I've written already about the ability of Sandra Cisneros to inhabit absolutely anybody, and that's still at play here; she's unbelievably adept at filling scenes with complete characters whose contribution may be as little as mere presence or a single line.