Recommended If You Like: A Novel by Adam Voith – Details, episodes & analysis

“Absolutely excruciating. I loved it.” — JOSH TILLMAN, Father John Misty

What happens when your taste is real but your world is fake? When your longing is legit but channels for expression have been defanged and sanitized?

RECOMMENDED IF YOU LIKE is a novel built from the recorded cassette tape monologues of Anderson Humphrey, a music obsessive and aspiring snob known curiously as The Christian Humper in a vast but isolated underground scene in the 1990s. The stories are oral but recall zine culture at its photocopied peak, when music was still a total identity machine.

A chance encounter with a wildly unsuccessful punk band and a newfound zeal for life beyond church camp lead The Humper and his friends on a chase for selfhood, status, and cool inside a world designed to stifle all three.

Took me on a surprising tour through a life I did and didn’t lead. I found familiarities in deep places I wouldn’t have without this story. So complete. So beautiful and fun. Totally and utterly a home run. — JUSTIN VERNON, Bon Iver

Under the surface, or maybe blending into the surface so smoothly you might miss it, there are countless undergrounds beyond those commonly celebrated in word and song. R.I.Y.L. lovingly but unsparingly details the Christian punk scene of the early to mid '90s. What is it like to love something that will someday belong to an earlier version of yourself? Voith's immensely readable book explores a side of being young both familiar and strange. Recommended if you like mirrors. — JOHN DARNIELLE The Mountain Goats

Please Kill Me from inside a confessional. Get in the Van after being baptized. — KEVIN MORBY

Brutally honest, and it’s beautiful. Get on this book immediately. — DAMIEN JURADO

Andy’s tapes are a vulgar comedy of compromise peppered with micro-economies, status games, moral codes, humiliations, delusions, and little bursts of joy as he and the band attempt to cover up their scarlet letter and avoid paying the Christian Rock tax.

For the three years he records, Andy’s dispatches are conversational, breezy, and funny, but the jokes belie the depth of The Humper’s project as he wrestles with doubt, shame, and embarrassment while seeking adventure, autonomy, and validation.