83 books like Every Good Boy Does Fine

Dyer is a gorgeous writer, and this book, which takes its title from a hauntingly beautiful 1947 song, is one of the most musical pieces of prose I’ve ever read. This paragraph captures both his voice and penetrating musical insights: 

“If [Thelonius] Monk had built a bridge he’d have taken away the bits that are considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts–but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have held together, but it did, and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment, just as Monk’s music always sounded like it might get wrapped up in itself.”

This is the most fun you’ll ever have reading about music history, guaranteed. Gioia focuses on outsiders, renegades, and people at the margins of society who launched musical innovations that were later adopted – and legitimized – by leaders of mainstream culture.

“So don’t be surprised,” he warns early on, “if a woman’s erotic love song gets turned into a scriptural utterance by a king. That’s how the history of music unfolds, especially for anything innovative or transgressive.”

I especially appreciated how, in examining music’s 4,000-year history, Gioia never fails to highlight contributions by women, which sets his book apart. 

I was struck by the ease with which Hodges moves from her own experience learning the violin to the scientific underpinnings of her subject: from math, physics, and neurology to quantum mechanics, biology, and entanglement theory, always in search of a clue to how music informs our experience of time.

Complex topics are suddenly eased by an anecdote from her personal life and practice: a bow dropping during Paganini or the story of her mother buying her “a red dress, bright as D major.” There’s a quality of searching that runs through these essays, both for scientific meaning in music as well a deeper understanding of the dynamics of her own life. 

The only work of fiction on my list is by an author who, perhaps more than any other contemporary novelist, seems to be composing music even as he’s writing fiction. A theme that keeps coming back in this book is this: “Music doesn’t mean things. It is things,” and in this story about an inventive – and persecuted – composer, Powers imbues practically every page with musicality. One example is on the note of G-sharp:

“For every pitch that ever reaches your ear, countless more hide out inside it. The things he can never tell her, the music he never wrote: it’s all rolled up, high up there, in the unhearable frequencies.”

This story also includes a dog, Fidelio, which makes it all the more essential on my list.

When one reads Bernhard, one never reads anything else the same again. In fact, every story feels false by comparison. Maybe it’s because The Loser is written in one unbroken paragraph or because it repeats a line ad nauseum or because the story, in any other writer’s hands, would feel mawkish.

But this novel about a triangular intellectual relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and his two students is anything but. It’s funny, heartbreaking, and confusing. The way life is. 

Among the many works of fiction inspired by classical music, that include Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and Tremain’s Music and Silence, I have opted for Vikram Seth’s, exquisitely written and highly personal novel of unrequited love, loss, and longing, because his intimate knowledge of the world of classical music, the music and the characters is unsurpassed. 

The novel’s protagonist is a member of a successful string quartet, haunted by memories of a relationship he had had ten years previously. An unlikely reunion with the object of his infatuation, a pianist now happily married with a son, unleashes all kinds of personal and musical dynamics against the magical setups of Venice, Vienna, and… Manchester. The music performed by the different characters and the emotions that music triggers and unleashes are described with consummate sensitivity and insight. Every music lover will love this novel which is a treasure-trove… show more.

This book illustrates why this list had to be called the best Australian books about music. Because it’s an Australian author writing about an American musician. This is an exchange that works both ways: just this year, British musician/author Tracy Thorn published a book about Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison, called My Rock’n’Roll Friend. Blind Tom is a biography of slave pianist Tom Wiggins, one of the first African-American musicians to crossover to success with white audiences, and remarkably he had not been so accounted for until Deidre O’Connell took up the cudgels. O’Connell is an academic, but thankfully doesn’t write like one, and this her first and thus far only book is totally engrossing. I hope she writes some more.

I love this book because it's about the power of music, and how songs are a means to express ourselves and communicate what we feel. These are all topics that I am passionate about.

In the book, the main character travels the world to play the piano, and people are drawn to the music because songs always create a sense of community.

Deborah Levy’s novels are often set in places where the location becomes a character – blazing hot Spain in Hot Milk, south of France in Swimming Home – but also estrangement unsettles her characters enough to begin to really consider who they are.

In her latest, August Blue, Elsa is a classical piano prodigy, still reeling from a catastrophic concert, when she sees her doppelganger in an Athens flea market. The encounter triggers gauzy memories of her upbringing, as she travels to Paris, to London, and then to Sardinia where the man who adopted her at the age of six and nurtured her talent is dying.

Each place is so viscerally described, I wanted to be physically there as Levy drops obscure metaphorical clues about Elsa’s true identity. 

Sometimes you need a good read to curl up with on a rainy day, one that’s a bit melancholic yet romantic at the same time. I know I do, and The Lost Melody checked both those boxes. My heart ached for heroine Vivienne Mourdant, for have we not all struggled with reality now and then? And who wouldn’t if trapped within an insane asylum? This one kept me guessing until the very end as to how poor Vivienne would ever escape in one piece. 

Definitely more Jane Eyre than Jane Austen.