• When all else fails, just read Joan Didion.

A piece by Gawker reporter Hamilton Nolan, Journalism Is Not Narcissism has stirred up quite the discussion. In the post, which has amassed thousands of page views and many comments since it went up yesterday afternoon, Nolan takes to task journalism students (and teachers) that emphasize writing about the self at the expensive of writing about the world. “Writing about yourself can be part of a balanced journalism diet, but it sure ain’t the whole fucking meal,” writes Nolan, before encouraging young writers to look beyond the mirror towards the billions of people in the world with interesting lives, and with stories that need to be told.

Stephan Elliott, the author of skewed and brilliant memoir The Adderall Diaries begs to differ in The Problem With the Problem With Memoir up today at the Rumpus. Elliot argues that writing about the self, in a form most often called memoir, doesn’t necessarily equal narcissism.

“If you know journalists then you know there are many among them you would consider narcissists. And if you know memoirists, especially the really good ones, you know they are more curious than most about the world around them. I’m thinking of the few that I know well, Dave Eggers, Tobias Wolff, Cheryl Strayed, Nick Flynn. These are all amazing listeners. They inhale their surroundings.”

For Elliot, good writing,whether about the self or the world (or both), means making connections to the larger world. This can be done with both the memoir and the journalism form. Over on her Tumbler, Roxane Gay (a writer who has mastered the art of making her own life into art without forgetting about the larger world) makes an argument for the necessity of telling a story in her post The Things They Carry, while arguing that its possible to make room for our own stories and and those of all of the more “interesting” people in the world. Like Elliot, who uses as Joan Didion and Tobias Wolff as examples of people who use the self to illuminate grander ideas, Gay argues that great writers can take any raw material and make it into something worth reading.

Besides, what’s so awful about letting people tell their stories? “There is a proliferation of first person narratives because our stories are the one thing we carry with us that cannot be discarded or lost or, we hope, forgotten,” she writes.

This morning, we had a short discussion in the Bohemian office about “navel-gazing” and its place in writing. The conclusion was that it’s all about balance. Mention yourself, but don’t worship yourself. And make sure to spend just as much time not mentioning yourself at all. Truthfully, journalists should be careful of over-using “I,” especially when the self becomes more important and interesting to the writer than the subject at hand. But journalists and memoirists are two different animals. A journalist is not a memoirist. A memoirist is not a journalist. I’ve written my share of “first-person” stories for the paper, but just as often enjoy writing third-person pieces about fascinating people and events in my small community. Stories like these provide a chance to step outside of the self and to make connections outside of the almighty pit of the I. It’s all about finding the middle ground between the two forms.

This week’s issue features a list of the top-selling books at Copperfields Books for 2012. Spoiler alert: Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotica series by E.L. James written for those who want their S&M draped in a gossamer lens, takes the top spot. The rest of the trilogy lodges into the third and fourth spots.

Confession: I didn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and don’t plan on ever cracking its lightly illicit cover unless I’m somehow engaged in some sort of Guantanamo-styled book torture. I’m a bit like Josh Radnor’s character in Liberal Arts when he berates Elizabeth Olsen for reading the entirety of the Twilight series “unironically”: “With the many amazing books in the world, why would you read this?”

That said, here’s a list of books that I loved in 2012. Mention these to me at a cocktail party and you’ll certainly get a smile instead of a tongue-lashing.

1. A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins

Hutchins’ story of a man who struggles with intimacy after a divorce (and working on a project that involves his dead father’s diaries and a computer) became one of my “can’t put it down” books for 2012. It’s always great to be surprised by a book’s elegance and depth.

2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Here is the one place I crossed paths with Sonoma County readers. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail as a way to exorcise ghost and demons was one of the best-written books of the year. Masterful, devastating and inspiring, all at once.

3. Violence Girl by Alice Bag

Bag is one of the L.A. punk originals. Her autobiography is raw, contagious and burning with feminist power. At the same time, the musician and artist doesn’t glorify the end results of punk rock and its many casualties.

4. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

It was a big year for the Dominican-American author. He won a MacArthur Genius grant, published an acclaimed collection of short stories, and made an appearance at Copperfields in Montgomery Village that included liberal use of the words “motherfucker” and “fuck” and “interlocuter.” This collection is riveting and ragged; it captures the dilemma of masculinity and the failure inherent in the blind drive to “man up” even as the world around crumbles and decays.

5. The Danger of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott

Alcott is a young writer, but you wouldn’t know it from this gripping, beautifully written debut novel. The Petaluma native, who now lives in New York, writes with the confidence of someone who’s been fine-tuning her work for a long while. The book is a fractured love story, a story that falls into lyricism more often that not, and one that flirts constantly with a sense of the tragic.

6. How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Warning: this book is not for everyone, and if you read it and hate it, please don’t stop me in the street and berate me for recommending something to you that you hated. Some (like Gawker, which called her one of the 50 Least Important Writers of 2012) have labeled Heti’s “novel” of artists living in modern-day Toronto as self-indulgent and navel-gazing. And it is! But Heti happens to have a navel that I find very interesting! I found this book to be brave and painful in the best possible way.