So I decided I need more relaxing bedtime reading, and The Right Stuff could wait for the weekends. I cast about my bedroom for something I hadn't read before, because I was craving new material. That narrowed the field significantly, because the books I keep on the bookshelf in my bedroom are my old favorites. I took a mental inventory of the newer acquisitions within arm's reach, so I wouldn't have to go downstairs in the cold.

They included: Angela's Ashes, which is about kids starving to death in Ireland; The Beast in the Garden, a nonfiction account of a recent string of cougar attacks on humans in Colorado (not to be confused with In the Garden of Beasts, the new book about Nazi Germany); and the collected short works of Herman Melville, which are mostly (as far as I've got in it) about people being stranded on desert islands.

I sighed, looking once more at the shelf of old favorites, resigning myself to relaxing with a re-read after all, something soothing, not too thinky...and my eyes alighted on my collection of JD Salinger's works.

I think I need to go to the bookstore. 

My dad bought me a book he said he'd read as a teen – Mary Renault's The King Must Die. I was seriously into Greek mythology as any aspiring nerd should be at that age, and my dad told me the book was a retelling of the Theseus myth.

Then as now, I was pretty bad at reading books that were recommended to me. It isn't that I don't believe my friends and relatives when they tell me these books will be good – it's just an inexplicable gut reaction that as soon as I'm told to read a book it plummets to the bottom of my to-read pile. I've dutifully taken that book with me from home to college, to my first apartment, and all the others after it, because my dad gave it to me and because he'd once read it and liked it.

Well, I finally read it. I've been experimentally starving myself of fiction, because I find it hard to write fiction when I'm wrapped in someone else's world. For the last few months I've been reading nonfiction – a biography of Jim Thompson, and a fascinating tale of environmentalism gone wrong – but I've just sent my newest manuscript to my agent and sank my teeth into the first novel I could find: The King Must Die. What a craving.

I found something else inside, that made me remember my childhood longing for exciting relics: an old hotel card, from a place in Greece. Apparently someone in the sixties (when my copy was printed) took it on vacation with him – maybe even to travel the places in the book?

The King Must Die was exactly what I needed. It follows Theseus's life – told in his own words – from his childhood in Troizen through his various wars and heroic deeds, up to the point when he sails home from Crete to Athens but flies the wrong color sails. I found it a surprisingly sophisticated tale, too – not just in Renault's use of real archaeological evidence to make her world real, but also in the attitudes of the characters, many of whom espouse a violent misogyny which she then peels back to reveal a surprising amount of tolerance for people different from themselves. It's a potently masculine book without being woman-hating.

As I read, I wondered why this book would be obscure now, why no one else I'd talked to had ever heard of it, including my college writing and literature professors. It was a visceral book in a decade when books which were considered “literature” were becoming more metatextual, or – in some cases, to be perfectly blunt, deliberately boring. John Updike was writing about suburban ennui and Jack Kerouac was writing about youthful wild adventures...as a cultural commentary. The King Must Die has many excellent literary qualities that make it worth study, but it's also unapologetically entertaining. Unlike many of the other highly respected or controversial authors of the day, she didn't expect the audience to come to her, but instead took the story to the audience. It's not without substance, however; its most powerful message, and its most complex one, is in the title itself: the king must die, over and over again in different ways throughout the entire book, carrying with each death a haunting lesson about what it means to be a leader.

I love Salinger and Cheever and several of Mary Renault's contemporaries who wrote more “difficult” fiction – fiction you had to think about to get into, fiction that wasn't all about making you feel good and giving you a break from reality. It's funny to think of her book coexisting with theirs, though I imagine she was shelved with the juicy genre-fiction books that kept sales churning, and perhaps was found less often in the hands of stoned beat poets in coffee shops. It's definitely a flawed book – sometimes she tries to hard to be poetic and ends up being incomprehensible – but one that I hope doesn't fade to total disappearance.

Soft as a Petal: A History of the World, Told through Handkerchiefs
Jason Smithson

This elegant little history is an excellent primer for anyone fascinated with the role of textiles in law, love, and literature. Many authors of popular history have hunted for the perfect "frame story" that would inspire general readers to make sense of the long and tangled threads of world civilization. Smithson's Soft as a Petal puts it in your back pocket. From the hankie's humble beginnings as an all-purpose rag and surrender flag for meek craftsmen on ancient trade routes, to its heyday in Victorian parlors, its near-extinction after the disposable tissue revolution, and its triumphant renaissance alongside the return of the handlebar mustache in the 21st century, the common pocket handkerchief has seen virtually every major turning point of history. Smithson weaves the hankie's story in a humorous, readable style that will make this book one to reach for for years to come.

Runners-up

Eating Will Kill You: The definitive diet book of 2012. Don't miss 2013's The "Eating Will Kill You" Cookbook: 415 Recipes That Will Leave You Hungry for Less. 

Guiscard's Lists: Famous People Who Aren't Dead Yet: Perhaps the most useful Guiscard list book this year, it will save you from embarrassing mishaps. Sadly, this one only made our runners-up because of our doubts about its enduring relevance.

Short Fiction

My Brain is an Anomoly: Stories.
Alexandra Lopez

Very little could be said about this book that would capture its haunting permeance into the dimmest corners of urban banality. Lopez is a master of making the small things of life even smaller, and the big things virtually nonexistent. Her brief tales -- sometimes only five letters long -- capture the desperation and quiet suffering of a soul trapped in American comfort. A must-read.

Runner-up

Twelve Days of Nothing: This collection, "a novel told in short stories," follows the lives of twelve unconnected residents of a small Ohio town. Each chapter portrays in microscopic detail a day in each person's life, in which nothing happens.

Fiction

Excitable Times
Terry Bart

Goofy, irreverent, stylized, manic, cynical, chartreuse, wobbly, vivisexual: these are all words critics have used to describe Terry Bart's breakout novel, Excitable Times. Other words have included: golumphuous, weebinkle, magisterial, vainglorious, yeoman-like, pioneering, geological, corpuscular, baroque, and hardy. The thousands of ways to describe this energetic, wholly one-of-a-kind debut are innumerable. Instead of trying to understand it yourself, just glide among its phalanx of reviews. Eighty-five percent of people who try to read Excitable Times on their own just aren't ready for it.

Runner-up

The Ever-Expanding Willow Tree: A novel so profound you'll never forget its message, even if you forget everything about it.

the writing on my desk: I did cover my desk with e e cummings poems (though I don't often sit at it)Writing longhand is now such a lost art that people are penning nostalgic essays about it and they're getting shelved in history. Not even the retro hipsters can bring it back fully. Hand-writing anything is an act of love, a dedication of time beyond what the task of communication requires, and sometimes, an elitist flair to show off one's true literary creds. It can be those things separately, or together; but does it make anyone's writing better?

The answer should be obvious from the start. Did the oral tradition lessen Homer's works? Did the typewriter degrade John Cheever? The method of recording a story does impact it – I've read that structured rhythms and rhyme schemes were important to the early poets of the oral tradition because it made their works easier to remember and transmit; while writing longhand takes more time than typing and might encourage more deliberate prose. But skillful writers find ways around even these physical restrictions. The point is, writing produced by each method might be different, but that doesn't mean one is better than the other.

Let's just talk about getting things done. I write virtually everything on a computer. Recently I've started using a lined notebook more, because I'm prone to migraines and sometimes staring at a screen makes me feel like a drill bit is pressing just above my right eye socket. But I'm never wholly satisfied with what I write longhand and I never feel like my writing day is complete (even if I've filled pages) until I type it up and tighten it up. On a computer, I can move whole paragraphs without interrupting my flow, and then see the finished result. I can dance around the page, fill out a scene pages ago with a new detail to make it consistent, then hop ahead and write in a scene that I'd just sketched out in outline between two existing chapters. It suits the way I write: rarely do I start a story at the beginning and march straight on through to the end. I write an outline, then fill it out with scenes as they become vivid and fully realized in my head, usually starting with the ones toward the end.

This doesn't make my writing any better or worse than that produced by people on typewriters or with fountain pens. But in terms of my own process, my computer writing is better than my notebook writing. And I'm not so hung up on ritual that I'll let the method of writing keep me from getting things done. I won't say I'm a good writer – readers decide that – but I can say with full confidence that I am a writer, because I do whatever I have to to keep writing: word-dancing on my computer whenever I can, scrawling illegibly on a notebook when I can't.

The point is, to me, being a “real” writer is not a complex formula involving what pens you use and what organic tea you drink and what music you put on softly in the background while you sit down in your meticulously constructed “creative space.” It's about writing: more specifically, whether you actually do it. In college creative writing classes, we studied interviews with great writers like handbooks, trying to figure out what combination of liquor and sex and dangerous travel and leather armchairs and extremely specific cigars made someone into a writer. We didn't spend so much time talking about what it really takes to be a writer: self-discipline, focus, and just getting it done.

Read the whole thing here.

Thank you Mr Editor, Dave Swindle, for encouraging me to get 'er done!

It's harder to write book reviews, now that I've been on the receiving end of a few. I've learned to imagine how the author would feel if she were reading the review over my shoulder. I've learned:

Just because it's possible to make a jibe or snarky joke about a book, doesn't mean the book deserves it. It's easy to write bad reviews of things, just to be funny. Think about how the author feels, though -- was the book really so bad as to deserve all that, or are you just writing it to make yourself look funny? Even if the author is rich and famous, does she deserve cruelty just because you assume "It's okay, she's still making tons of money."

It sounds obvious, but people are nearly always discouraged from reading a book by a bad review, even if the review itself is poorly written or shallow. I know virtually no one who's said, "I read a horrible review of this -- I want to read it to find out if the reviewer was wrong," unless that person also read at least one good review of the book. With blockbuster books, it's easy to find lots of reviews online from different points of view; but for a lot of smaller books, every review becomes your one chance to reach that reader, or lose her.

Ask yourself "Is this book really bad, or is it just not my taste?" If it's good, but not your taste, don't write a horrible review of it. Most random readers on the internet won't know it simply wasn't your thing, and the impression they'll walk away with is that it's a bad book.

Even if it was a bad book, find at least one nice thing to say about it. The very best of reviews do two things -- they give a reader guidance on what to read next, and they provoke thought on the nature of literature. A good review should challenge readers to look deeper into everything they read -- and there are really a small number of books out there in the world that are so comprehensively awful one could say there wasn't anything good about them at all.

Trying to be nice makes you stop and think hard about everything you say -- which has the beneficial side-effect of sometimes making the things you say more intelligent.

Well, I hope I don't turn out to be a Polonius, dispensing advice and wisdom I only dubiously follow myself. I guess you (invisible readers!) will be able to tell me in the comments when I post my review of J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy on PJ Lifestyle a bit later on!