The Ten Greatest Books About Rock And Roll

Every fledgling rock and roll fan goes through the same phase. Whether
passed down from an older sibling, a hipper friend or simply found on one's own, some time after getting your first real dose of classic rock, copies of No One
Here Gets Out Alive, the lurid Jim Morrison biography; 'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, a tell-all about the legendary Jimi Hendrix and Legend, Tim White's well researched biography of Bob Marley, inevitably make their way into your
hands. However, as Bon Jovi once said, 'it's all the same, only the names have
changed.' The same decadent tales contained in the Led Zeppelin memoir Hammer Of The Gods are echoed in Danny Sugerman's Appetite For Destruction: The Days Of Guns N' Roses only to be retold in the chronicles of Motley Crue compiled in The Dirt: Confessions Of The World's Most Notorious Rock Band.

While there will always be an allure to tales of sex, drugs and rock and roll, especially amongst the high school set, stories of Satanism, sharks and groupies only present a small albeit colorful aspect of rock and roll. While any one of those
'unauthorized' tomes of 'literature,' may give a sense of the artist's origins and human failings, they rarely provide any perspective on the larger world of rock and roll.

What follows is a list, in no particular order, of the ten greatest books ever written about rock and roll. As you will see, it doesn't always have to be non-fiction to delve into the psyche of rock music, grasp the artistic essence of a generation or provide insight into the music that probably plays too large a role in some of our lives. It's only rock and roll, but we like it.

Ulysses

You Cities - Warning risque bits

Via Peter Darbyshire

Today's Haul

The Book Depot had a box sale today. I bought two boxes, mostly art books, for $60.00 and am about to sit down outside with a glass of wine and gloat over my haul.

FRESH YARN Presents

What Plastic Patio Furniture in my Living Room?
By Tiffany Zehnal


'It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.'
- Bill Watterson, author of Calvin & Hobbes

* * * * *
My childhood was nothing to write home about. It was neither extraordinary like Bobby Fischer's nor bleak like Frank McCourt's. I didn't play chess and never once took on an Irish accent. Not even on St. Patrick's Day when anybody with a mouth did. More or less, my childhood was just your basic, run-of-the-mill, generic kind. Like the ones you'd see on TV. But with less flattering light and an inferior kitchen set.

I remember it fondly.

MUNRO TO RETIRE?

Is Alice Munro fixing to hang up her pen?
Canadian literary icon Alice Munro is expected to announce at a Toronto fundraiser tonight that she has written her last book.
Munro is scheduled to give a reading at a benefit and book launch for Writing Life, a PEN Canada anthology of essays from 50 Canadian and international authors that is scheduled to hit stores July 1. In her contribution to the volume, Munro cites a tremor in her writing nerves in the face of constant interruptions and advancing age. (She will be 75 next month.) She says she can quit writing 'in the interests of a manageable life' and with the knowledge that it's rare for outstanding work to be produced in a author's later years, 'so one or two books fewer won't really be anybody's loss.'

Babar the Elephant turns 75

Babar the Elephant, a timeless figure of children's literature, turns 75 this year, his trademark crown and green suit unmarked by changing fashions and criticism that his jungle realm is a relic of colonialism.
Babar was created one evening in 1931 when Cecile de Brunhoff, a piano teacher, told her two small sons the story of an elephant whose mother is killed by hunters and who flees to a town where he learns to dress as a human.

George Sand, Chopin

On this day in 1804 George Sand (Aurore Dupin) was born. Sand was as popular in revolutionary France as her contemporary, Charles Dickens, was in Victorian England, and even more prolific: over seventy novels, two dozen plays, and published correspondence which runs to twenty-five volumes. But if Dickens remains well-known because of his characters, it is the dare of Sand's own life that now attracts most attention -- her cross-dressing, her cigars, her feminism, her bisexuality, her relationships with Chopin and other leading figures (de Musset, Delacroix, Flaubert, Balzac, Liszt) in literary-artistic Paris.

Doug Coupland's High School Confidential

This past spring I worked with four friends from my 1984 art-school grad class ripping apart the innards of a decommissioned high school in North Vancouver and then reassembling the bits into something new. It was for an art installation called Vancouver School. The experience opened up some old wounds and healed a few. The five of us were given an entire school that was decommissioned in June 2005. There was still homework in the desks, and lockets and retainers in the lost and found bucket. It was like old New England, where entire villages vanished, their meals still on the dinner table.
The first two weeks in the abandoned school were Steven Kingy, but once the creepiness left it was like working inside my dreams at night, except it was real and I had control. I could literally, legally, artistically bash the crap out of anything that displeased me. At will I could mangle and trash lockers or AV equipment or uninspired textbooks. It was like being handed a superpower: the power to reconfigure the way I existed with my memories. Within a month, I was no longer having recurring dreams of trying to remember my locker combination or being late for a test in a class I didn't even know I was enrolled in. Gone. Thank you, art.

Nick Brooks: top 10 literary murderers

Nick Brooks' first novel, The Good Death, is a murder mystery with a difference. Less whodunit than who-am-I, the murderer is pursued more keenly by his conscience than by the police.

'Literary killers hold a deep fascination for us, taking grip of the imagination when other forms of writerly voyeurism have long since faded. During the writing of my own novel, The Good Death, a number of the works on this list occupied my thoughts, and I could easily have included many more novels and stories, settling instead for the ones that have been most influential on a personal level, the ones that stick with me still, many years after my first bruising encounters with them. It is no exaggeration to say that the characters who inhabit these works seem to exert an undue - possibly malign - power upon the psyche of the reader who stumbles, hapless, upon them. Since the best is often the enemy of the good, this list has been compiled with no particular order.'

Harper Lee breaks her silence in letter to Oprah

Oprah Winfrey is known for endorsing the virtues of settling down with a good book, but now, in something of a literary coup, the chatshow host has recruited an ally even more powerful than herself.
Published in the summer issue of Oprah's magazine, O, a rare item by the veteran author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, tells of her discovery of books as a girl growing up in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town.
The 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner stopped giving interviews about 40 years ago and, other than a 1983 review of an Alabama history book, has published nothing of significance in some four decades.
Lee tells of becoming a reader before first grade: she was read to by her older sisters and brother, a story a day by her mother, newspaper articles by her father. 'Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggly at bedtime.'
She also writes about the scarcity of books in the 1930s in Monroeville, where she grew up and still lives for part of the year. That deficit, combined with a lack of anything else to do - no movies for kids, no parks for games - made books especially treasured, she writes.
'Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.'