A Series of Unfortunate Events teaches us that the random, absurd cruelty of the world and all the people in it cannot always smother the fires (is that a bad pun) inside of us.

While The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not the first book I’ve thrown across a room, it’s certainly one I’ve thrown the hardest.

Maybe it really is cheating to include my favorite Dorothy Parker poems on my list of Top Ten Books. But they come from a book, a book that taught me words for a struggle I wasn’t sure how to describe…

The rest of All Our Wrong Today’s beauty comes from the full-throttle embrace and love the story has for its topics, for human nature, for time, weirdly enough for architecture, and for this general sense that it’s our responsibility to make the world we want to have. Because we’re not supposed to have it. We’re supposed to make it.

That is the story nestled inside the intense, moving prose of Normal People. A relationship spanning years. A love story, real enough to see the pain. A beautiful train wreck, witnessed near enough to feel the fire. Normal people, and everything that entails.

If you’re able to put your fears aside, or else relish in them, appreciate Hyperion for what I said at the beginning. It’s a story of stories. The story of stories.

In which Justin X. M. Corriss and Murray Hoyt reflect, through the page, on the slips, the falls, and the entanglements beside the irreplaceable experiences, the time spent with companions, and the things you only tell others after a few drinks.

The advantage here is that you’re enjoying yourself and, at least subconsciously, thinking about the topics you assign to the songs.

Anna Karenina’s characters are players on the stage of life, ships at sea swept along by forces larger than themselves in a storm only the skillful survive… But skillful does not mean good, and good does not promise happiness.

Last Call helps, and it helps because it focuses on an industry where people are the center, creation is the fun, and, nowadays, survival is the goal. But, at some point, it’ll be about living again.