a) The Kids In The Hall: One Dumb Guy, by Paul Myers
The Kids In The Hall, both the troupe and their eponymous '90s TV series, are a big personal influence, they're like The Beatles of comedy to me. I own every episode of the show on DVD and have watched them all multiple times. When I quote something my wife doesn't recognize, she asks me if it's a Kids In The Hall sketch, and it usually is. So it was really gratifying to get their entire story, as individuals and as a group, in loving detail. I follow Paul Myers on Twitter but didn't realize until I got into the book that he's actually the older brother of Mike Myers -- one of the more fascinating revelations of the book is that when the troupe was thinking of adding a 5th member, they were considering both Scott Thompson and Mike Myers. It's fun to get a deeper context of Canadian comedy, how these guys grew up and how they got into comedy, and some of the behind the scenes moments of making the show -- I almost wish there were more anecdotes about specific sketches, but there was really plenty of that, I'd just be happy with even more.

b) Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, by Jonathan Gould
This is a really impressive book, in part because Otis Redding died young, had a relatively short career, and didn't have a whole lot of his personal life and family background documented at the time of the death. So Gould really goes digging deep, using Redding more or less as a lens through which to detail a whole century of black America and black music, from the end of slavery up through Redding's death. Songs that Redding mentioned hearing growing up will be zoomed in on for a whole history of an artist or a musical tradition. Sometimes it feels like for every page about Redding there are 10 pages about other people, which can be a little frustrating, but it's not exactly padding, it's researched and written well and I've been learning a lot from it.

c) The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, by Michaelangelo Matos
I've been in the same online circles as Michaelangelo Matos for a long time and have met him once or twice, always a really smart and impressive guy, and he may have made his masterpiece with this. The specificity of the title is useful because it's really as much about what it isn't about as what it is about -- the story basically starts after disco, when the template of DJ culture and modern dance clubs has started to set in, with the birth of Chicago house and Detroit techno. And then, when dance music and rave culture explodes in the UK in the late '80s, it becomes a story of how electronic music stayed more of a niche underground culture in America for much longer, very gradually bubbling up to become half as mainstream as it's been in Europe for decades. By setting those kinds of boundaries, he gets to really tell a lot of great stories that you wouldn't necessarily get out of a broader book about dance music.

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