a) Who I Am, by Pete Townshend
This is perhaps the most lucid celebrity memoir, spanning all 60-odd years of an author's life, that I've ever seen, certainly by a rock star. I'm sure Townshend had a lot of help jogging his memory with the obsessively archived and memorialized history of The Who, but even beyond the verifiable public records of what he was doing at any given time, he just has an incredible emotional memory of all these private moments and instances that inspired songs. That's both the best and worst thing about the book, because after a while you're just in this guy's head for hundreds of pages, as his output peters out (no pun intended) into the post-Keith Moon decades. But he's got an incredible amount of stories, certainly one of the best rock memoirs ever.

b) Behind The Boards II: The Making of Rock 'n' Roll's Greatest Records Revealed, by Jake Brown
This was an impulse buy, when I was in a bookstore with my wife and she offered to get a book for me while buying hers, and I just grabbed the most interesting-looking thing from the music section. I partly grabbed it because there's a chapter about the biggest music industry figure who shares my surname, Def Leppard mixing engineer Mike Shipley (no relation), but there's a lot of great stories about producers who've worked on tons of classic records but aren't really household names. Unfortunately, Brown is kind of an incompetent writer and he mostly just writes these tepid little blurbs, often writing tepic little paragraphs that heavily draw from All Music Guide reviews and such to frame big block quotes from the producers. But it works for me because it's fun to just hear the producers tell their own stories, and I got tons of great trivia from this book.

c) Signifying Rappers, by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello
As a David Foster Wallace fan who listens to and writes about a lot of rap music, I had always kept kind of a nervous distance from this book, which doesn't have a great reputation. But I'm glad I finally picked it up. Some of the passages haven't aged well, but in some ways their awkward outsider survey of the late '80s rap landscape really gives me  a lot of "the more things change, the more things stay the same" feelings about the current hip hop industry and local scenes I obsess over and dwell on the fringes of. A lot of the writing is kind of over eager Lester Bangs lite, and sometimes Wallace gets a little too into his own world while Costello is engaging more with the actual topic. But either way, pretty fun read.

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