The Reading Room’s Best Books of 2015

Ah, it’s that time of year once again; we’re making our lists and counting one, two, three times the albums on which we’ve dropped the needle most often or the books whose pages we’ve turned the most frequently and to which we’ve returned. I’ve become less and less a fan of making these lists over the years. I’m not operating from any consensus — sales, number of weeks on a bestseller list, being on a bestseller list at all, word-of-mouth recommendation — about the quality of the book, of course, but out of my own readings of the ways the books contribute to the larger — and often smaller — conversations about music.

I’ve decided this year simply to offer a list of forty important music books, many of which I have written about for No Depression, Publishers Weekly, or other places, that offer important perspectives on music history or on events in that history, or they provide singular new and fresh ways of looking at different forms of music. Since several of these books are memoirs, they reveal facets of a musician’s life that she or he doesn’t, or refuses, to reveal through her or his music.

So, here’s one list of important music books in 2015. There will be titles you want to add, and titles you don’t agree should even be a part of this list, but that’s the beauty of lists, after all; they’re starting points for conversation. With books or albums, we can take such lists to a bookstore or record store to use as helpful guides, and I hope this list will spark some interest in reading, or re-reading, some of these books. In the best of all possible worlds, reading one of these books will drive you back to the artist, or musical style, about whom the author is writing, and you’ll spin those tunes as you’re flipping pages.

1. Peter Guralnick, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll (Little, Brown) 
2. Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Dey St.) 
3. Patti Smith, M Train (Knopf) 
4. Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead)
5. Jessica Hopper, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (Featherproof Books)
6. Kristin Hersh, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt. (University of Texas Press)
7. Warren Zanes, Petty: The Biography (Holt)
8. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (UNC)
9. Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir (Dey St.)
10. Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Blue Rider/Penguin)
11. John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory John Seabrook (Norton)
12. Bob Mehr, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the Last Rock ‘n’ Roll Band (Da Capo)
13. Steve Knopper, MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson (Scribner)
14. John Fogerty, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music (Little, Brown)
15. Ray Benson and David Menconi, Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel (University of Texas Press)
16. Robert Christgau, Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey St.)
17. Richard Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s (Bloomsbury USA)
18. Chrissie Hynde, Reckless: A Memoir (Doubleday)
19. Robert M. Marovich, A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music (University of Illinois)
20. Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue (University of Texas)
21. Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson, Kent Finlay: Dreamer (Texas A&M)
22. Bobby Braddock, Bobby Braddock: A Life on Nashville’s Music Row (Country Music Hall of Fame/Vanderbilt University Press)
23. Alan Light, What Happened, Miss Simone: The Nina Simone Diaries (Crown Archetype)
24. Robert Gordon, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (Bloomsbury USA)
25. Mark Ribowsky, Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul (Liveright/Norton)
26. Preston Lauterbach, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis (Norton)
27. Rick Hall, The Man from Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame (Heritage Builders)
28. Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (Verso)
29. Eilon Paz, Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting (Ten Speed)
30. James Kaplan, Sinatra: The Chairman (Doubleday)
31. June Millington, Land of a Thousand Bridges: Island Girl in a Rock & Roll World (IMA)
32. Bill Kreutzmann, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead (St. Martin’s)
33. David Browne, So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead (Da Capo)
34. Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (Viking)
35. Willie Nelson, It’s a Long Story: My Life (Little, Brown) 
36. Fred Goodman, Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out the Beatles, Made the Stones, and Transformed Rock & Roll (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
37. Carrie Kanla, ed. Groupies and Other Electric Ladies: The Original 1969 Rolling Stone Magazine Photographs of Baron Wollman (ACC Press)
38. Greil Marcus, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations (Harvard University Press)
39. Greil Marcus, Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014 (Yale)
40. Carly Simon, Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (Flatiron Books)