a) It's A Long Story: My Life, by Willie Nelson and David Ritz
I found this marked down in a bookstore so reading it was kind of a whim, I almost didn't feel ready for it since I only know a relatively small amount of Willie Nelson's dozens of albums. But it turned out to be a pretty useful listening guide, Nelson goes into amazing detail about every period of his life, from his childhood up to his albums from this decade. He wrote an autobiography in the '80s before his big IRS scandal, so perhaps understandably that becomes the big pivotal event that a lot of this book is framed around, which gets a little tiresome at some points but I guess I understand, it was a huge news story. But I love how granular the details are, from the music he heard as a kid that inspired him to pick up a guitar to the songs he'd play as a radio DJ (including "Red Headed Stranger," many years before it became the centerpiece and title track of his greatest album) to lots of frank and interesting details about making many of his albums. Anybody would be lucky to remember this much of their life in their 80s, especially a guy who's lived such a remarkable life, Ritz did a great job of preserving Willie's spoken voice in the text and organizing the story.

b) Petty: The Biography, by Warren Zanes 
You might think that the 4-hour Peter Bogdanovich documentary Runnin' Down A Dream would be so comprehensive that there's not much more to tell of Tom Petty's story. But Warren Zanes published this book about 8 years after that film was released, so he had the chance to know exactly how to go deeper and in some ways react to the movie and be a little more frank about things like drug use (Petty's co-lead singer in Mudcrutch for a few months, pissed that the doc glossed over his involvement in the band, gets to air his grievances, although he doesn't necessarily come off better for it). The whole book is really wonderful and engrossing, though, I'm glad I was deep in it recently when the An American Treasure box set came out and the anniversary of Petty's death passed. Incidentally, I've started to take an interest in Leon Russell because he was never really someone I heard about at all, growing up, relative to other stars of the late '60s and '70s, but he's kind of a notable recurring figure in both the Willie Nelson and Tom Petty bios and you get a sense of what a big deal he was at the time.

c) Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang
This book was out for well over a decade and rightfully widely praised before I finally got around to putting it on a Christmas list and owning it, I think something about the title or cover was off-putting to me, I can't even put my finger on it. But this is really excellent, I love how deeply Chang gets into the social and political climate of The Bronx and Jamaica in the '70s to give you the context that DJ culture and hip-hop was birthed from. The detail about the accidental birth of the dubplate was by itself just such a cool nugget.

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