feeling

devastating

3 books2 albums

album1971

Blue

Joni Mitchell

The benchmark. Everything laid out without flinching — the loneliness, the wanting, the California lightness that somehow makes the sadness heavier. 'A Case of You' alone justifies the whole thing. Every serious songwriter has had to reckon with this record. You can hear it in everything that came after.

★★★★★5.0

timelesstenderdevastating

stayed with me

novel1956

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin

Brutally short and impossible to forget. Baldwin writes about love and cowardice in a way that makes cowardice feel like the original sin — not the failure of loving, but the failure of admitting you do. The prose is clean and absolutely unforgiving. A book about self-deception that doesn't let you be self-deceived while reading it.

★★★★½4.8

devastatingliterarypainful

stayed with me

novel1989

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens drives across England and constructs a perfect defense of every choice he ever made. By the end you understand exactly why he needed to build it. The restraint is almost unbearable — every scene where he almost says the thing and doesn't. Ishiguro's greatest book, I think. And that's saying something.

★★★★★5.0

restraineddevastatingquietly-brilliant

stayed with me

novel1965

Stoner

John Williams

The saddest book I've read about a life that looks, from the outside, like a failure. Stoner becomes a professor, has a miserable marriage, one love affair, one friendship that matters. The world ignores him almost completely. And yet the prose won't let you ignore him. It insists his life mattered. It insists yours does too.

★★★★★5.0

quietdevastatingtimeless

stayed with me

album2008

For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver

Made alone in a cabin over one winter, and it sounds exactly like that — isolated, raw, built from grief with company somehow. The lo-fi recording, the falsetto, the layered guitars: it's the sound of someone making art to survive something. Re: Stacks is one of the best closing tracks on any record.

★★★★½4.9

devastatingbeautifulsolitary

stayed with me