Best of 2018: Our favourite pop culture books of the year

While the outside world was a raging dumpster fire in 2018, we still had a great number of pop culture books hit the shelves this year, from the wildly creative Beastie Boys Book, the very open and engaging Busy Phillips memoir, a look back at the 1994 punk rock explosion, and more. Below you’ll find our favourite pop culture releases of the year, in no particular order. For even more recommendations, you can check out our 2017 list here.

We Sold Our Souls- Grady Hendrix (Quirk)
After causing us to drain our wallets all year trying to scoop up as many horror paperbacks as we could get our hands on thanks to Paperbacks From Hell, his hilarious and insightful look at the genre fiction boom, Grady Hendrix returns to the fiction world with We Sold Our Souls, a fast-moving occult thriller that updates the Robert Johnson and the Devil story for the heavy metal generation.

Kris Pulaski was once the guitarist for the perfectly named metal band Dürt Würk, who eventually disbanded and faded into obscurity as the band’s singer Terry Hunt struck out on his own, forming the wildly successful nü-metal outfit Koffin. As Kris begins to learn that Terry’s success might have a diabolical connection, she embarks on a dangerous road trip to confront her former friend and band member at a giant outdoor festival in Las Vegas, putting her life, sanity, and very soul on the line.

Hendrix does a great job of putting us in Kris’ mind as she struggles to come to terms with what her life has become, and the voluntary (and involuntary) choices she made over the years that led her from a semi-successful metal band to working cleaning up vomit in a decrepit motel. Apart from a solid character study, this is also a great road trip novel, filled with a cast of strange side characters and old bandmates that Kris meets up with along the way to her eventual confrontation with Terry. What really makes We Sold Our Souls shine is Hendrix’s attention to detail, from the sort of insider jokes that help keep a band sane on the endless drives between gigs to the fully orchestrated Dürt Würk concept album he creates (complete with lyrics!) in order to tell this moving and eerie tale of greed, friendship, and the sometimes uncanny power of music.

This Will Only Hurt a Little – Busy Philipps (Touchstone)

You will learn more about Busy Philipps in this memoir than you ever expected to, and she seems fine with that. If you’re one of the 1.5 million people who follow Busy on Instagram (the success of her Instagram stories has spurred a whole new chapter of her career, including this memoir and Busy Tonight, her new E! talk show), then you know that she is incredibly open and honest with her followers, which makes many of the stories in this book resonate even stronger.

Through her breakout roles in Freaks and Geeks and Dawson’s Creek, Busy’s life and career has been a story of overcoming obstacles in her way, including a scarring early sexual experience, a physically abusive James Franco on Freaks and Geeks, networks insisting she lose weight, and being pushed aside by her childhood friend and writing partner on the Will Ferrel film Blades of Glory, where she was denied a writing credit. Written in a conversational tone, Philipps often uses CAPS for emphasis, and at times this memoir feels like being let in on a long text message chat between old friends. This is a very honest and open look at Philipps’ life and career, and apart from an insider view of Philipps’ personal life, also provides an important look at the entertainment industry’s often terrible treatment of women, which is finally being openly addressed.

Beastie Boys Book – Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz (Spiegel & Grau)
As wild and all-encompassing as their music was, this massive look at the career of the Beastie Boys is a sprawling dive into the minds of Ad Rock (Adam Horovitz), Mike D (Michael Diamond), and especially MCA (Adam Yauch), who passed away from Cancer back in 2012. Filled with photos and often hilarious recollections from Horovitz and Diamond, this book truly feels like the Beastie Boys are letting you into their inner sanctum, warts and all. For a band that initially made waves for frat house favourites like “Fight For Your Right to Party” and for touring with a giant penis stage prop, the band progressed over the years into an act that championed women’s rights and organized star-studded festivals to benefit Tibet’s struggle for independence.

This phone-book sized collection delves into the band’s numerous changes over the years, while adding in contributions from a number of outside voices, including a feminist response to the band’s early music, a number of recipes (!), a graphic novel, and much more. In many ways, this is basically a swanky version of the band’s much beloved mid-90’s Grand Royale Magazine, and serves as a fitting multi-media testament to the wild creativity and genuine fun that have kept the band’s music relevant for decades now.

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. – Jeff Tweedy (Dutton)

The title of Jeff Tweedy’s memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), is a saying he inherited from his father, and it’s one that can be viewed a few different ways. According to Tweedy, his father initially began using it as a fun inside joke with his family before any outings, but over time it took on more of a resigned air — let’s get this over with, so we can move onto other things. That sort of balance applies to much of the Wilco frontman’s long-awaited biography, which is often aloof and entertaining, without ever shying away from the darkness that Tweedy has wrestled with over the years.

Tweedy sets the self-deprecating tone of the book right from the introduction, where he plays with the audience’s expectations of what to expect from his memoir. “If you picked this book up looking for wild, druggy stories about my addiction to opiates, you’re out of luck. I want to put those years behind me,” he writes, with the full knowledge that his well-documented addiction is an integral part of his story. It’s a set-up he quickly remedies just a few lines later, adding: “The last part was a joke. Jesus, of course I’m going to write about the drugs.”

That sort of push and pull weaves its way through the book, which takes a relatively chronological approach through his life, with some interesting and often very funny sidebars, where he includes some very honest transcriptions of conversations with his wife and sons about the writing of the book. In the sort of open and honest storytelling that’s become a staple of Tweedy’s solo shows, the book follows his upbringing and early attraction to music, the founding and dissolution of Uncle Tulepo, his long and occasionally complicated history with Wilco, his struggle and eventual triumph over a crippling addiction to opiates, and most enthusiastically, his marriage, and his work with Tweedy, a collaboration with his son Spencer.

In some ways this is a bit of an odd time for a Jeff Tweedy memoir — Wilco is still putting out new records, and Tweedy is set to release his debut solo LP, WARM, later this month. Tweedy is still very much an active musician, one who hopefully has many more years of records and touring ahead of him. For whatever reason he decided to take stock now, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) feels like an inviting and breezy conversation with one of the greatest songwriters of this era. It may not answer every burning question diehards fans want to know, but that’s what the next book is for.

Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s – Michael Gingold (1984 Publishing)
Before you could instantly stream movie trailers with a swipe of your finger, newspaper ads and printed reviews were often the only piece of information you would have on a certain film, which meant those ink-stained ads had the power to launch a cult classic, or damn a film to obscurity. Former Editor-in-Chief of Fangoria Magazine, Michael Gingold has had a lifelong fascination with these often lurid and provocative ads, hunting down and preserving them over the decades, a massive curated collection which forms the basis of this treasure trove of bygone horror marketing.

Filled with hundreds of ads from the 70’s-80’s heyday of horror films, this tome also features a number of review highlights, as well as Gingold’s own commentary on the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of the ads, along with the quality of the films themselves. A fun and entertaining look back at the glory days of genre advertising, Ad Nauseam deserves a cherished spot on any self-respecting horror fan’s coffee table. And it won’t even stain your fingers!

Smash!: Green Day, The Offspring, Bad Religion, NOFX, and the ’90s Punk Explosion – Ian Winwood (Da Capo Press)
The past few years have seen a number of great punk rock memoirs that touched on the 1994 punk rock explosion, from Larry Livermore’s look at the early years of Lookout! Records (which put out the first Green Day releases) with How to Ru(i) n a Record Label: The Story of Lookout Records, to NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, co-written by the band themselves. Those titles offered an insider look at how the sudden interest in punk rock in the mid-90’s following Green Day’s breakout success affected the labels and bands in the scene, but UK journalist Ian Winwood does something a bit different here.

Instead of the standard oral history, he instead creates a series of chapters each delving into a particularly successful band from the era, including Green Day, Bad Religion, The Offspring, NOFX, and Rancid. While much of this material has been covered in other recent books, the most interesting sections of this book focus on Epitaph Records, the label started by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz that released landmark albums by his own band, alongside The Offspring’s Smash and Rancid’s ...And Out Come the Wolves, two of the most successful independent releases of all time. The sudden growth of Epitaph Records, and the cult of personality that grew around Gurewitz during this time as the bands on the label vied for his attention are by far the most fascinating moments in this story, especially because they haven’t been retold to death yet (though hopefully Gurewitz pens his own memoir at some point).

If you’re a fan of any of the featured bands, or just interested in how a group of young punks turned the recording industry and the mainstream musical landscape completely on its head, Smash! is a must-read.