172. "Just Kids" by Patti Smith

Singer and writer Patti Smith recounts her love affair and lifelong friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids. She met him on her first day in New York City in the late 1960s, and during subsequent encounters, they quickly formed a strong bond that endured Mapplethorpe's exploration of his homosexuality, his "hustling" for money, their poverty, and their mutual artistic aspirations and successes.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS complications in 1989. Knowing this makes for nail-biting reading about his sexual practices, but it's clear that he wasn't an anomaly in the young, broke crowd of artists of which he and Smith were part. While she never worked as a prostitute, she dated several men who did, and her own survival seems almost miraculous. She talks movingly about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, as well as other acquaintances and friends who died young and tragically.

One weakness in the book, at least for me, is that Smith assumes her readers are familiar with the entire motley cast of characters that hung around the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s. While I recognize many of these names, many others are completely foreign to me, and this made the narrative difficult to follow at times.

Overall, however, this is an honest, poignant memoir of youth, exploration, love, and loss. Enjoyable, provocative, and powerful.

154. "Mama Makes Up Her Mind" by Bailey White

Mama Makes Up Her Mind, Bailey White's first book of essays about her eccentric family and life on the edge of Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, is entertaining in some ways and disappointing in others. Some of the anecdotes are belly-laugh-inducingly hilarious; others meander to weak endings or vaguely Aesop-like morals. It's a fast read and entertaining, and enough of the essays were quirky, funny, or insightful enough that I'll keep it on my shelf, although I don't plan to read the sequel.

36. "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen" by Larry McMurtry

I have yet to read any of Larry McMurtry's fiction--a situation I plan to remedy soon--but I very much enjoyed his nonfiction Roads: Driving America's Great Highways. So I was eager to read Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. It did not disappoint.

McMurtry discusses Benjamin's essay on storytellers, written in 1936, the year of his (McMurtry's) birth. From there, he discusses the role of Dairy Queen as a community gathering spot for Archer City, the Texas panhandle town where he grew up and lives today. He then delves into his family background, talking about his grandparents' settling of Archer County at the same time Europe was swept by Freudian thought. He analyzes the European literature of madness, the literature of the American West, and the (often silent) stories of madness in the American West. He shares stories of the Texas land and its people, including the old woman who was sold to a trader at age 13 for a winter's worth of skunk pelts. He discusses some of his own books, including the effect The Last Picture Show--which became a movie filmed in Archer City--has had on the town's mythology. Finally, he discusses reading and bookscouting, shares tales from his years in the antiquarian book trade, and explains why he thinks bookselling is a better complement to writing (at least for him) than teaching proved to be.

He reconnects with Benjamin at various points. This sometimes works as a common theme to connect his various tales, but sometimes feel contrived.

Apart from this one shortcoming, however, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is an excellent, satisfying read on many levels: as literary criticism, as travelogue, as memoir, as history, as a reflection on how a place has shaped this particular writer. Highly recommend.