READING MATERIALS WITH ROSS SCARANO

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Some questions. What’s your book type? As a reader, are you compelled by prose that teaches, stirs, is a slow-burn or mood-elevating? Writing that orients you? Do your reading habits reflect a response to the day’s events—if you prefer to interrogate them, understand them, resist them? Is your nightstand a rotation of half-read books? How does a writer’s voice—if you let it—impact you? The sneaky way a book might stall time and crack open your world, and conversely, the book that launches you far from it—that plays against type. As a reader, is disrupting what you know the ultimate pleasure?

Here, writer and editor (previously at Complex, currently at Billboard), Ross Scarano, shares a shortlist of books that have complicated and deepened his life in the most meaningful ways; that have challenged him on the line, as a writer, and provoked him as a music critic.

The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

There’s fresh hell every day. Morning, afternoon, and evening we’re invited to look at something horrible, if we’re lucky; most often, this violence arrives without warning or consent. And that’s just the news. Art has its own knives and hammers, and it’s a long-held belief among many artists and critics that we the audience must be shocked into a better apprehension of our reality. But what do we gain by absorbing these blows? What can we learn by turning away?

Those are some of the primary concerns of Maggie Nelson’s book-length work of art criticism, The Art of Cruelty. In the past few years, Nelson has become a fan-favorite among the people who read this sort of thing. (Bluets, her singular meditation on romantic loss and the color blue, is often the point of entry.) She’s widely beloved, enough that there’s already some backlash—stray shots at her memoir of queer partnership and parenthood, The Argonauts; complaints that she’s actually not very radical, that for all her dedication to nuance, she’s got the same frustrating blind spots so many other whites do.

Amidst this conversation, there remains The Art of Cruelty,a book I find every bit as remarkable as Bluets for its curiosity, multidisciplinary appetite, and first-person perspective. This is Nelson’s taste, the idiosyncrasies and contradictions are never less than her own. For a young critic reading Nelson for the first time, it was especially freeing to watch her work so fluidly, with such a wide range of material, from Kara Walker to Sylvia Plath, Nao Bustamente to Karen Finley. It’s my favorite kind of model—the kind that can’t be replicated but nevertheless invites you to imagine your own.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

The thing is, literature is as meaningful and convincing as it is bitterly useless and esoteric. Roberto Bolaño understood that sentiment with a vengeance; this deflated balloon of a paradox is the sad heart of The Savage Detectives, first published in Spanish in 1998, and then in English in April 2007, where it launched the cult of the drawn-faced Chilean expat into the literary mainstream. By then, he had been dead for nearly four years.

If there’s a funnier, more ambitious and sorrowful novel about what it’s like to have the world wring your faith in art out of you, I haven’t read it yet. At first, though, the novel doesn’t let on what it’s capable of. Imagine encountering a stick of dynamite without recognizing it—that’s how streamlined and tight the story appears to be, initially. It’s Mexico City, in 1975, and our narrator is Juan García Madero, a wannabe poet and wannabe bad boy. He finds the trouble he’s looking for in the form of the Visceral Realists, led by Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, doubles of Bolaño and his friend Mario Santiago, respectively. Drama with a pimp and a journey into the desert to find a missing poet lights the fuse on what’s been typical A to B to C storytelling, and when the bomb explodes, the novel goes with it. Madero’s first-person storytelling is replaced by 400 pages of new narrators, like shrapnel raining down slowly around the globe and across the ensuing decades. The energy and conviction of youth slides into a bummer, where your dreams go kaput and your friends no longer speak to each other. Chance lays claim to more of your life than any nourishing prose can.

ego trip's Book of Rap Lists

ego trip’s Book of Rap Lists is your grandma’s attic, but for the history of hip-hop. Like its cover art suggests, this compendium from the short-lived rap magazine is an entire world jammed with ephemera, tchotchkes, and knowledge. Irreverent and informative, its lists document classic venues, samples, unreleased Mobb Deep cuts, lyrics about boobs, stories from Greg Mack, program director of the great L.A. radio station KDAY. At 13 or 14, when I first took it home, from a Borders in suburban Pittsburgh, it made me think about hip-hop and, crucially, race in critical ways. Before you even open the book you have to deal with its canted angle: “ego trip’s Book of Rap ListsIs More Popular than Racism! Black and Whites All Agree” reads the back cover, before proceeding to the blurbs from critics and celebrities. (There’s also a chapter called “Race.”) For lyrical content alone, it should be impossible to be a white hip-hop fan without thinking hard about what that means—with this book as my primary text (along with the Okayplayer forums), it simply was impossible.

Not in my wildest dreams did I believe I would one day encounter the folks responsible for this gold mine. I’ve met or emailed with all of them at this point, if not worked together substantially. Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, Brent Rollins. I drove around L.A. with Brent before a photoshoot, listening to his stories. This guy, who designed the logo for Boyz N the Hood, who designed the entire Book of Rap Lists —he was speaking just to me in an air-conditioned sedan in sight of the Hollywood sign. When Prodigy passed, I edited Gabriel’s obituary for the Queens MC. Noah Callahan-Bever, Rob Kenner, Dave Bry (RIP), three incredible writers who are thanked in the intro—they all played significant roles in my life. Thirteen year-old me couldn’t have imagined loving hip-hop more, but I do now, because it’s 

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Not including this book would be tantamount to lying, like some dishonest try-hard in a comedy of manners trying to mask their past, when they were something common. Jesus’ Son is widely taught in undergrad writing classes—it’s short, the voice is immediate, lots of drugs. Jeff Martin, my first college fiction-writing professor, assigned it and I read it in just about one sitting, at a two-top in a Panera Bread, facing Fifth Avenue, in Pittsburgh. The prose made me put the book down every so often to let my brain buffer, and so I can recall hearing New Order’s “Age of Consent” out of the chain’s speakers; and at one point I ordered a hideously sweet bagel with plain cream cheese. There’s my origin story.

Johnson’s novel finds weird grace in the heroin and the small-time scrap-metal loserdom of the book’s nameless narrator. You’ll want to steal from it, and that’s part of the book’s trick: you think you could do it, too. (Write about drug misadventures, string your short stories together into something resembling a novel, and make simple, short paragraphs pop with an off-kilter surprise in the middle, or at the end, like laced punch.) Except of course the book is smarter than you, and it warns you plainly about mistaking its strange mechanics for a toolkit at the conclusion of its first masterpiece, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Thankfully, no one listens, and we all keep trying.

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