Fun Home is an engaging, somewhat surprising graphic memoir about a girl and her obsessive/small town/intellectual/in-the-closet/ domineering/mortician/gardner/interior designer/passionate/frustrated father.
It's about her mom and wanting to be a boy and her brothers and being a lesbian and literary classics, too.
But mostly her dad.

2008's Best Music Writing contains an essay from one of my favorite writers, Mr. Craven Rock. While not a household name like Chuck Klosterman or Nick Hornby, for years now Rock has done Eaves of Ass, one of the finest and most underrated zines around. When he released the music issue earlier this year (issue 6, which we at Orca also carry for the lowlow price of three dollars), I knew he was bound for glory. His music writing is not some dry analysis of music or bands or albums, it's about the great many ways our lives connect to music and how the stories of our lives can connect back to a song, a band, a concert; how a piece of music can define a period of your life.
So, now you have an excuse to pick up 2008's Best Music Writing, which was probably already tempting.

If you feel lost in the sea of opinions/information/misinformation about immigration and the issues surrounding it, The Politics of Immigration is a good place to get set straight. Set up in a Q+A format, pretty much every question you would think to ask is asked and well responded to. While openly biased towards a pro-open border stance, their research, fact-checking, and statistics keep it from being a preaching-to-the-choir/one person's opinions-type book.

A uniquely woven novel, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, The History of Love is a strangely beautiful tale of age, connections, change, memories, and (you wouldn't have guessed it, but...) love. Sentences that speak volumes, take pieces of you, then gives them back as something you never knew you had.

Nick Flynn has put out two of the finest new poetry collections I know of, namely, Some Ether and Blind Huber. Some Ether deals with childhood and losing his mother and the physics only kids should know. It is intense and a must read for any modern poetry fan.

Useful Knowledge (Ms. Gertrude Stein's fine experiment in total absurdity) took me some time to get into. I kept checking it out from the library every few months because I'd get something from it stuck in my head. Then, when I'd actually have the book, it would lose me pretty quick. I'd get annoyed with it.
Then I discovered the secret...you read it out loud. That's right, just sitting alone, reading aloud. Try it. It's tons of fun, as long as you take it in small doses (if her poems were music, I'd categorize them somewhere between bubblegum pop and noise). Let it sit around and pick it up from time to time.
It's especially good if you've been feeling too sane for your own good. You'll feel like you've lost it and you couldn't be happier.

How Elizabeth Alexander translates dreams to paper (and makes them, at turns, interesting, amazing, and hilarious) is beyond me. Her dreams are often pure social commentary, taking history, pop icons, civil rights heroes and running them through the blender of the dreamworld.