While my reading pace has slowed since last year as I’ve taken on catching up on movies, I had good luck in finding three contenders for my all-time top 30 favorite books and another two in my top 50.

Lewis Shiner – Outside the Gates of Eden (2019)

I really enjoyed Shiner’s early cyberpunk book Frontera (1984) and Glimpses (1993), music fiction with a bit of time travel. So how the heck did I miss this book when it came out? A thousand page epic chonker, I was fully engaged the whole way through the War and Peace of 60s counterculture and music, and was left quietly devastated in a way I hadn’t since Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2004). Having been in bands himself, this felt like a personal passion project, thoroughly researched with the helps of the likes of music writer/guru Richie Unterberger. It follows two best friends, Cole and Alex, from their first garage band in 1965 Texas (props for including the 13th Floor Elevators and Armadillo World Headquarters) through the Haight-Ashbury just after it’s Summer of Love peak, Woodstock, a Virginia farm commune, Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters and Texas Outlaw Country, and even the rise of the early 80s art loft scene in SoHo, NYC. In between there are marriages, breakups and makeup babies, academia and post-structuralist discourse, politics, Latino street gangs, gentrification, digital technology and, as always, that always lurking spectre of drug addiction to ruin everyone’s party. Thankfully that doesn’t dominate the story, and if it weren’t so well written, one might feel like boxes are being checked in trying to encompass the entirety of American counterculture from 60s optimism through disillusion to pragmatism to, just maybe, dreaming big once again.