May the guitar riff from the slowed down version of "Up On the Sun" never leave my brain.

It must be exhausting to be Steve Albini all the time.

I thought the Meat Puppets were the secret behind-the-scenes players. They seemed to get mentioned constantly.

Meat Puppets were like the unofficial 14th band profiled. If felt like they got mentioned in nearly every chapter to the point where i was wondering why they didn't get a chapter themselves.

You had me at "Superchunk but even better." Definitely will be checking out Brick Mower.

The Beat Happening chapter might be my favorite too, which is weird because they were the band that I hadn't ever actually heard when I read it. I think it did a really effective job of giving me a sense of place in the Pacific Northwest of the late 80s and in describing that nascent scene and the rise of hipster…

Fuck yes

That would be someone who has sucked for an incredibly long period of time that we take it for granted he or she will suck. On very rare occasions, this person will shock us with quick glimpses of competency and even potential greatness.

But The Nice Guys is gonna be awesome! I'm excited to see him play all loosey goosey.

Isn't being so sad kind of Connelly's thing? I'd like to see her in a zany madcap farce. Maybe a Rat Race reboot.

And Alex Proyas directed it?! The fuck???

Added!

This is the first of his I've read and I thought it was a great slice-of-life. I was anticipating a wackier tone for some reason, but I wasn't at all disappointed at the more somber take that it ended up being. I'll definitely check out more of his work (although I have no idea when - my queue is forever growing).

That's too bad! I found The Blade Itself to be entertaining but I also thought it suffered a lot from what was said above. However, Abercrombie grows by leaps and bounds with every successive novel through his first six. I think it was maybe a third of the way through the second one where I suddenly said to myself,…

That book has the greatest sense of place. It seriously uses its surroundings like nothing else I've ever read. I literally felt cold while reading it.

I thought he softened up on the racism too though. Didn't he marry a Jewish woman?

Zelazny's Lord of Light was pretty great but it's a lot to wrap your head around at first. It took me like 80 pages to figure out what the hell was going on, but once I did it was rather rad.

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan, We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe and currently reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson and The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian.

The lack of heavy this year is somewhat disappointing, but the sheer breadth of music that is represented every year is always pretty fantastic. Seems to be a strong avant-jazz showing (Thundercat, Sun Ra, Kamasi Washington) which is something they've never really done before. All in all, the whole lineup this year is…

There are a ton of hidden gems in there that I kind of glossed over the first time i read through the lineup. Sun Ra Arkestra, who I assume will be headlining on Sunday, are going to blow some people's heads up.