Rhett Miller’s Superfriends: Joe Pernice

We asked Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week, and he pawned it off on a bunch of his famous friends: other musicians, actors, writers and comedians. Well played, Rhett. But you can’t hide behind a self-titled solo album. Rhett Miller (Shout! Factory), a Beatlesque beauty featuring Jon Brion, is out this week.

Joe Pernice is living my dream. As part of the Pernice Brothers, Chappaquiddick Skyline and Scud Mountain Boys, he makes beautiful albums with winning melodies and deep, rich lyrics. He also just finished his first full-length novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop. And he lives in Canada, where everyone is nice all the time! Joe Pernice recommends:

The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson
The Unfortunates is an amazing autobiographical novel from 1969 that is both grim and oddly life-affirming. In the novel, B.S. Johnson, on a work assignment as a sportswriter covering a football (English) match, revisits the town where his good friend and colleague had some years earlier lived and later died from cancer. Johnson finds himself unexpectedly bombarded with fresh memories from all angles. The novel consists of 27 unbound chapters. Johnson, who committed suicide in 1973, suggests the reader read chapter one first and chapter 27 last. The other 25 chapters are to be shuffled and read in any order. Not what I’d consider summer beach reading, but you shouldn’t be in the sun anyway. Actually, it’s exactly what I’d consider summer beach reading. (Once you finish Johnson, you’ll want to read Jonathan Coe’s stunning and monumental 2004 biography of B.S., Like A Fiery Elephant.)

Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville
I know what you’re thinking. To this I say, “Get over it.” I didn’t like Bartleby, The Scrivener in high school, either, because my head was in my ass. The book is a master stroke. And it’s very funny. And it’s short to boot. So go read it. You’ll sound smarter around the punchbowl because, by God, you will be smarter. And isn’t smart supposed to be sexy now, what with Obama and all? (Once you power through Herman Melville, you’ll want to dip your toe into Walden and Self-Reliance and the rest of the American Romanticism shit. Like me, you will no doubt come away asking how was it that Massachusetts produced the majority of historically significant heavy hitters in American literature for that era. I’m just saying. Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson—that’s a serious roster. That’s like Motown serious.)