Having written about the best films and albums of our nascent century, it seems apt to turn my attention to literature, which is ostensibly the third leg beneath my personal stool of modern culture, which would tip precariously without each of its two fellows.

My 21st Century Film List contained 25 entries. My 21st Century Albums List contained 64 entries. And my 21st Century Books List? At the moment, it contains one entry that stands head and shoulders above all others in terms of my enjoyment and engagement, and that entry is A Book With No Title.

Allow me to explain my choice, please. Some years ago, I posted a blog item about how much I had been enjoying Thoughts On The Dead. It was a funny website, for sure, written by a very good writer, cleverly exploring cultural themes I enjoyed exploring, with laughs to be had, for those willing to guffaw about arcana of the most arcane variety. Good stuff! Ha ha ha!

But some time between then and now, a standalone story line emerged on TotD about a Neighborhood in America called Little Aleppo. That story line was anchored upon a truly robust substrate of universe building, where the place in which the story was framed emerged almost as a character in its own right, as rich as the human/physical characters with which it was populated. Think Gormenghast. Think Middle Earth. Think Upstate Wasted/Ether. Place matters, right? Right!

This week, that very sublime and well-crafted Little Aleppo story wound to its narrative close after 70 chapters, and I am saddened and pleased in equal measure by this turn of events. Saddened, because I loved getting new chapters every couple of days, usually reading them during my morning train rides between Chicago and Naperville. Pleased (on behalf of the author), because I know, as a writer, how satisfying it is to reach a point of closure on a long-term writing project like this one, be it for commercial purposes, or just because it feels good to write, by God, any other purpose be damned.

I have truly enjoyed reading The Book With No Title episodically, in real time, classic 19th Century Dickens-style. And you can read it that way, too, if you want, as all 70 chapters are independently referenced and linked for now on a single reference page. Once you start, or when you finish, or somewhere in between those points, I hope you will acknowledge the author’s awesome undertaking by hitting the “Donate” button on his site.

Because writing this good deserves to be paid for and purchased. It has both intellectual and emotional value, and we, all of us, should acknowledge and honor that fact by paying for it, when and where we can. I can certainly tell you, straight up, that Little Aleppo provided me with far more enjoyment than the vast majority of traditional/digital books I’ve purchased in recent years, so making a donation to support the work was good value for money from where I sit.

Lest you think I’m shilling for any nefarious personal/nepotistic benefit here, I want to note for the record that I have absolutely no clue who the author of Thoughts on the Dead is, in the  real world, despite the fact that I interact with him regularly in the social media world, and relish his blog postings, daily.  As a “longtime online” guy, I accept the fact that I often have digital friends and collaborative colleagues with whom I rarely/never cross paths in a real/physical world. See here for an intense personal example of that.

Marcia affectionately refers to these online relationships as my “imaginary internet friends,” and I have to admit that I probably have more of those than I do real world friends at this point in my life. So, yeah, that’s real, but not real. And that’s imaginary, but not imaginary. See also: it’s complicated. But at bottom line, genius is genius, whether we know who creates it or not in our real day-to-day lives. I’m happy to interact with such creative folks in the ways that they choose to make themselves available to me. They fuel my own creative energy as they entertain me, and I am very grateful for that.

And that’s a big part of why I confidently assert that the The Book With No Title is the best work of narrative fiction I’ve read in a long, long time. I think all of my readers here, friends real and imaginary, need to get on it too, and read it, and share it, and pay for it, soon. Or now. If you take my advice, then once The Book With No Title becomes the popular print hit it deserves to be in the years ahead, you can get mad props with your peeps by telling them all that you read it way back when, before it was cool.

And who doesn’t appreciate being in the know before the know was known, right?