The Best of 2009

Here you go. The best movie I saw this year. Best music I listened to. Best book I read. Ready, set, go.

• Movie: The critic in me wanted to choose The Hurt Locker, but I can't help but select Up, the great Pixar film that is certainly one of the most amazing film experiences of the year. Don't let animation get in the way of enjoying an uplifting and emotional work of art.
• Music: The album I enjoyed the most this year was released in 1967: Aretha Franklin's astonishing I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. Even though it's more than 40 years old, I rediscovered this dusty CD and never stopped listening to it this year. Beautiful and rocking.
• Book: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman was released in 2008, but it didn't make its way to the top of my reading stack until this year. This book has everything: warm characters we can't help but care about, a crackling plot that won't let you go, and a terrifically satisfying ending. I hope Henry Selick or Tim Burton get their hands on this one.

Music Review: When I Was Cruel No. 2

When a song gets under your skin, it can lodge there, fester and become a cancer. You can't escape it. Such a tune is When I Was Cruel No. 2 by Elvis Costello, a song that appears on his excellent 2002 album, When I Was Cruel. The song lasts more than seven minutes, and every one of them is necessary. It's a sparse, hypnotic track highlighted by Steve Nieve's wanting keyboards and a sample from Mina's "Un bacio è troppo poco." This song has a timeless, unworldly feeling to it, one that will leave you wrapped in its spell. As usual for any Costello song, his lyrics are literate, confusing and alluring: "The entrance hall was arranged with hostesses and ushers who turned out to be the younger wives nursing schoolgirl crushes, parting the waves of those few feint friends; fingers once offered are now too heavy to extend." I'm not sure what he's saying, but I dig it

Book Review: The Beatles: The Biography

If you're looking for the the definitive book about The Beatles, then you've come to the right place for advice. Look no further than The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz. If anything can be termed definitive as it concerns The Beatles, this is it. This is a massive tome: 992 pages of amazing narrative that captures everything and anything about the Fab Four that you've ever wanted to know. Unlike almost every other book about them, Spitz starts at the beginning, with fascinating, intimate biographies about each of their parents. Except for a brief prelude, we don't even meet John, Paul, George and Ringo until about a hundred pages into the book; we get to know where they came from, their lineage, their neighborhoods. As a result, The Beatles: The Biography does the best job of presenting who these people were, not just what they did. Here, we get the whole story, warts and all. And because it's the best biography of The Beatles, it's simply the best rock and roll book ever published. Well, almost. Eventually I'll get around to reviewing Peter Guralnick's terrific two-book biography of the King: Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.

>>> READ THE OPENING PAGES OF THE BEATLES: THE BIOGRAPHY HERE.