If You Still Buy Books Here Are A Couple You Should Buy

I am not the type of man who makes resolutions, knowing through bitter experience that past a certain point in life people are who they are and all the best intentions in the world won’t make any difference. Everything ends in failure and even the effort involved in trying to be better is energy you will regret having spent once your pathetic attempt at improvement proves once again to have failed and you find yourself doing the same sorry thing you did before, only now it carries an extra layer of self-loathing because of your inability to get it under control. The older you get the more clearly you see just how awful you turned out and how that’s the best you’re going to be, because you can’t change and it hurts too much to even try. That said, if I were trying to make myself something less worthless than I currently am I would resolve to read a couple more books next year. I don’t know how I set the bar so low that I find myself at a point where just making it through the fucking magazines for the month feels like some kind of medal-winning achievement, but that’s where I am at present. I mean, it is not at if I can point to any other tangible feats I have accomplished while not reading either. What else am I doing with my life besides being sad? Nothing, that’s what. And yet, in 2014, I read fewer books in any other calendar year than I have read since I achieved literacy, beating my previous poor showing in 2013, 2012, and each preceding year in a decade-long troubling trend of diminishing attention span and growing disinterest. I have almost given up on fiction entirely, because there is nothing most modern fiction can do for me. I mean, I suppose I would still read novels about post-apartheid South African photographers or Jamaican gang wars or 17th-century French lacemakers, but there is not much else that the type of people who write today’s modern fiction can tell me about what it is like to be a tortured, artistic soul in post-millennium Manhattan (or Brooklyn, I guess it’s Brooklyn now) that I don’t know now or can’t see coming anyhow. I UNDERSTAND ALL THOSE PRECIOUS FEELINGS ALREADY, I don’t need to see them padded out with contemporary product names and descriptions that overuse the words “middle distance.” Anyway, looking back I think there is only one book I read all the way through this year, and it was the reissue of Bob Colacello’s Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, which, even though it is long and repetitive and a carousel of nonstop vacuity, I was unable to put down; it gives you an insider’s view of how everything turned to shit from the top of the cultural pile and then trickled down to everyone else. I say that without judgment, because honestly what difference does it make anymore, we’re under a pile of doody so enormous that we’ll never have enough shovels with which to dig ourselves out, why not be entertained by watching how it happened in the first place? Couple this with the recent re-release of The Andy Warhol Diaries (a book that no New Yorker’s library was complete without back when New Yorkers still had libraries) and you’ve got a pretty good present for someone on your list who likes that sort of thing, or even just something to give to yourself. You’re worth it. I mean, you are, not me. I only read one fucking book last year, you can see what kind of scumbag I am.