Book Shrine

I offer this list not because what I read is so important, but simply as one reader to another: these are books I love, books that fundamentally changed my life. These are books I’m always thinking about, always returning to.


Music:

Milton Babbitt: Words About Music

Luciano Berio: Two Interviews

Morton Feldman: Essays (originally the German Zimmerman edition, later Exact Change in U.S.)

Graham Lock: Forces In Motion (Anthony Braxton)

Tim Page, ed.: The Glenn Gould Reader

Charles Rosen: The Classical Style

Arnold Schoenberg: Style and Idea

Arnold Schoenberg: Theory of Harmony

Arnold Schoenberg: Structural Functions of Harmony

David Schiff: The Music of Elliott Carter

Not a week goes by when I don’t return to almost all of the above titles, searching for a little inspiration, insight, or what used to be called “good vibes”.

Nonfiction:

Lester Bangs: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

Theodore Rosengarten: All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

An oral history by a black sharecropper in Alabama.

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature

His discussions of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Joyce’s Ulysses changed the way I read.

Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems; Selected Letters

David Hockney: Hockney On Photography

Elias Canetti: Memoirs (three volumes);

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry And Prose (Penguin)

D. H. Lawrence: Studies In Classic American Literature

William Carlos Williams: In The American Grain