There is no way I am going to keep up with myself if I try to write a separate post about each book I read, so here are the books I have read since last time I wrote about books:
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Michael Azerrad
Rating: 
An interesting overview of some interesting stuff that happened while I was much too young to notice. I've never gotten into hardcore or punk music in any meaningful way, but the anecdotes and (disarmingly frank) first-person accounts of various local scenes in the 1980s made for great reading. It also turned me onto some music I'd never been motivated to check out before, Mission of Burma's Vs. being a particular highlight.1
The writing was not outstanding, often destabilised by Azzerad's habit of inserting fannish blurbs into his historical overviews. In a way it added to the book's charm, I suppose, in that the stories of a bunch of DIY-loving amateurs who wrote fanzines and started their own record labels is related in the style of an over-excited but knowledgeable fan. Sometimes he wanders well away from his stated topic - for instance, each chapter is titled for the band it focuses on, but the Mudhoney chapter is really about Sub Pop, Mudhoney being a conveniently-placed band from which to hang the story.
Overall, not a great book, but a good enough book about great things, and that is often sufficient for non-fiction.
Black Coffee Blues, Henry Rollins
Rating:
Henry Rollins' writing has something in common with Chuck Palahniuk's. There is an immature or at least arrested quality to it, with cynicism and aggression being celebrated and, in Rollins' case, clung to. Rollins seems to insinuate that anyone smart, anyone who really thinks, would be as alienated and angry as he is; I think that is a cop-out.2 Instead of aiming for an improved future, he turns pain into his identity and proceeds to defend it at all costs. The monotonous cocktail of violence, anger and fear that propels Black Coffee Blues almost completely drowns out Rollins' moments of insight and humanity.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
Rating: 
This book is amazing. Anybody who says otherwise is crazy or lying.
And yet I didn't give it five stars! There are only two reasons for this: I found the ending slightly unsatisfying (possibly because I had been bracing myself for something quite different since approximately page three), and dialogue of any length, while rare, was difficult to follow (probably because both of the main characters were "he" and there were no quotation marks).
Everything else about this book is amazing. It is bleak and realistic like nothing I have ever read before, and so unobtrusively written that it's possible to completely forget that one is reading at all. I read it on the train and before work and in my lunch break, and despite the piecemeal consumption and the public, emotionally-neutral locations I found myself wanting to cry, or crawl under something and hide away for hours, or both. It hits hard.
I am extremely skeptical about the upcoming film adaptation. I seriously doubt that any filmmaker could capture McCarthy's world on film, especially with a live-action adaptation. At the same time, though, I am a bit excited about it. Maybe it, too, will be amazing.
On Writing, Stephen King.
Rating:
I had been resisting On Writing for a long time. Anything recommended so highly by people I admired and people whose tastes I often shared couldn't possibly be any good, right?
Right?
In the end it was a mixed bag. I liked the personal-memoir "CV" section, found the "Toolbox" section interesting despite King's avowed love of Strunk & White3, and could take or leave much of the "On Writing" section. Interestingly, that was the part that King mentioned struggling with in the last section, "On Living", which was by far my favourite.
I think my problem with much of the writing advice was that I had already either received it second-hand from King's many acolytes, or figured it out for myself. That is hardly an objective basis for criticism of the book, but I have never pretended that my opinions about these things are anything but subjective.
Against the Stream, Noah Levine.
Rating:
The subtitle of this book is "A Buddhist manual for spiritual revolutionaries", which really makes me cringe, but I read the thing anyway. The subtitle is a good indication of why I dislike the book as a whole. Levine spends a lot more time playing up to his his militaristic theme than he spends on actual ideas, which makes me think I am just not his target audience. He is also glibly literal about reincarnation and prone to using a lot of buzzwords, but he does have some interesting things to say about celibacy and equanimity (the latter being something I struggle with, and the main reason I picked up Against the Stream to begin with).
