Here are 85 books that Just Can’t Get Enough fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a Gex Xer who came of age in the 80s, I haunted record stores, collected albums, and listened to music to gain insight into the bands I loved. As a musician I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process of songwriting. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics that make and break bands. I’m drawn to the business side of the music industry and the way iconic bands and music were marketed to us. The five books I’ve recommended are my personal favorites for highlighting how the music so many Gen Xers love was created and how years later it can still move us and give meaning to our everchanging lives.
Being a musician in a band has been a hallmark of my life. When I first read Roddy Doyle’s book, I was amazed at how he expertly captured the exhilarating emotional peaks that come with starting a band. The early days of being in a band are some of the best, and Doyle writes exquisitely about the joy of shared dreams, spontaneous creativity, and the camaraderie that comes as you create a new musical family.
He also illustrates the inevitable tensions that can and do arise—egos clash, personalities differ, and the pressures of maintaining unity. But like Doyle, I agree that, in the end, the effort and energy are their own reward. The goal should always be making art for art’s sake.
First published in 1988, THE COMMITMENTS follows a small band of musicians from the Barrytown area of Dublin as they try to make the big time. From the author of THE SNAPPER, THE VAN and PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA.
As a Gex Xer who came of age in the 80s, I haunted record stores, collected albums, and listened to music to gain insight into the bands I loved. As a musician I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process of songwriting. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics that make and break bands. I’m drawn to the business side of the music industry and the way iconic bands and music were marketed to us. The five books I’ve recommended are my personal favorites for highlighting how the music so many Gen Xers love was created and how years later it can still move us and give meaning to our everchanging lives.
The first time I heard Two Hearts Beat As One by U2 was glorious! I was entranced by the driving drums and the bass line and inspired by Bono’s lyrics, which spoke to my burgeoning interest in how to be cool. And U2 was cool in the 80s. And Bono was one of the coolest musicians I looked up to back then.
His memoir goes deep into explaining where his bravado and “cool” come from. It was a darker and more complicated place than I expected. Having recently endured the death of my own mother, shortly before I read this book, I was moved to read about how the death of his mother impacted him and motivated him.
I came away with even more respect for Bono’s life philosophy and his commitment to his family, his bandmates, and his ongoing craft as a musician.
One of the greatest rock memoirs ever written and a Sunday Times bestseller now out in paperback - the honest, irreverent and powerfully entertaining life story of the U2 front-man.
Bono - artist, activist and the lead singer of Irish rock band U2 - has written his autobiography- honest and irreverent, intimate and profound, Surrender is the story of the remarkable life he's lived, the challenges he's faced and the friends and family who have shaped and sustained him - now out in paperback.
'When I started to write this book I was hoping to draw in detail what I'd…
As a Gex Xer who came of age in the 80s, I haunted record stores, collected albums, and listened to music to gain insight into the bands I loved. As a musician I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process of songwriting. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics that make and break bands. I’m drawn to the business side of the music industry and the way iconic bands and music were marketed to us. The five books I’ve recommended are my personal favorites for highlighting how the music so many Gen Xers love was created and how years later it can still move us and give meaning to our everchanging lives.
Daniel Rachel is a master storyteller whose book answered every big and small arcane question I’ve ever had about the birth and popularity of the British 2 Tone ska movement and bands. As a 2 Tone nerd, I know a lot about the bands, but Rachel revealed stories and anecdotes I never knew.
I also consider him a huge influence on my approach to writing music history. He expertly combines incredibly detailed archival research and deep, personal interviews with musicians, label heads, journalists, and rabid fans to tell the definitive story of 2 Tone and its cultural impact, which remains relevant more than 40 years later.
In 1979, 2 Tone exploded into the national consciousness as records by The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, The Beat, and The Bodysnatchers burst onto the charts and a youth movement was born.
2 Tone was black and white: a multi-racial force of British and Caribbean island musicians singing about social issues, racism, class and gender struggles. It spoke of injustices in society and took fight against right wing extremism.
The music of 2 Tone was exuberant: white youth learning to dance to the infectious rhythm of ska and reggae; and crossed with a…
As a Gex Xer who came of age in the 80s, I haunted record stores, collected albums, and listened to music to gain insight into the bands I loved. As a musician I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process of songwriting. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics that make and break bands. I’m drawn to the business side of the music industry and the way iconic bands and music were marketed to us. The five books I’ve recommended are my personal favorites for highlighting how the music so many Gen Xers love was created and how years later it can still move us and give meaning to our everchanging lives.
As a musician and a fan of bands, I love the creative process of how songs are written and recorded. I’m obsessed with the big and small decisions that musicians, producers, and engineers make in crafting the songs that became part of my Gen X musical landscape. As a fan of Prince’s 80s albums Purple Rain and Around The World In A Day, Duane Tudahl has accomplished the nearly impossible.
He’s packed his 555-page book with all the details I crave, detailing how Prince wrote, recorded, and collaborated with his band with never-before-heard stories. Tudahl has uncovered hidden truths about the origins of my favorite Prince songs like Purple Rain, When Doves Cry, and Raspberry Beret in a way that makes my listening experience fuller and more satisfying.
Featuring insights on even more groundbreaking recording sessions, rehearsals, and sound checks, the expanded edition of Duane Tudahl's award-winning book pulls back the paisley curtain to reveal the untold story of Prince's rise from cult favorite to the biggest rock star on the planet.
His journey is meticulously documented through detailed accounts of his time secluded behind the doors of the recording studio as well as his days on tour.
With unprecedented access to the musicians, singers, and studio engineers who knew Prince best, including members of the Revolution and the Time, Duane Tudahl weaves an intimate saga of an…
I’ve had the urge to write stories as far back as public school. And despite encouragement from a creative writing teacher in high school, my first career ended up being corporate financial analysis. By the time I reached 59, I was (a) unemployed and unemployable (due to age) and (b) in a relationship with a wonderful woman who loved science fiction and was very creative (a former art teacher). With her encouragement, I finished my first SF novel at just the right time to benefit from the explosion of interest in reading ebooks bought on Amazon. I’ve now written 37 novels.
I found this book, the first of four in the series, to be fascinating in its portrayal of a race of intelligent, upright-walking lions. Cherryh’s ability to invent believable and fully fleshed-out alien races is delightful.
In this series, humans are the aliens. I loved how Cherryh made the reader root for the lions and their strange but understandable culture. It's a great concept by a great writer.
I'm a long-time journalist, wife, mother, and grandmother, who was diagnosed with GYN cancer at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020. My usual subjects are the arts and trauma, but since I’m now one of the more than 600,000 American women with GYN cancer, I decided to write this report about my year of treatment.
Unexpected Lessons in Love broke new ground by discussing anal cancer and a colostomy in this autobiographical novel. A former schoolteacher and psychotherapist, she brought long-honed skills of observation and analysis to her compelling and highly readable story, which features mental illness, nuns, a kidnapped journalist, and many complicated family dynamics as well as a mother, wife, and grandmother facing terminal cancer.
Cecilia Banks has a great deal on her plate. But when her son Ian turns up on her doostep with the unexpected consequence of a brief fling, she feels she has no choice but to take the baby into her life. Cephas's arrival is the latest of many challenges Cecilia has to face. There is the matter of her cancer, for a start, an illness shared with her novelist friend Helen. Then there is Helen herself, whose observations of Cecilia's family life reveal a somewhat ambivalent attitude to motherhood. Meanwhile Tim, Cecilia's husband,…
Growing up in Zambia and then South Africa, I was immersed in the natural landscapes and the fantastic variety of African plants and wildlife. However, I increasingly became aware of many other human injustices happening around me—e.g., human to human: the extreme racism of white supremacy (apartheid). Additionally, human to other animals: the ivory and wildlife ‘trade,’ resulting in what has been called The Sixth Extinction (of plants and other animals.) Alongside this destruction of life is the critical climate crisis and the financial appropriation of vital resources for profit—none more vital than water, for water is life. These books emphasise the ethical sanctity of all living beings!
The title says it all: It does not have to be this way—we can build a better, more just and kinder world together, if…we learn to act on our dreams/visions in order to make this happen. But this path—as Capetonian author Alistair Mackay outlines, in a passionate and riveting exploration of fraught existences in an increasingly divided and desertified Southern Africa—will always come at personal cost. What price are we willing to pay for a better and more inclusive human future? What artificial ways of seeing (and consuming) do we need to resist to see and value each other as we all truly are? I loved this book as it is both darkly funny and tragic, yet never loses hope for a new and better world.
Spanning from present day until the near future, this novel tells the story of three men facing the rapid unravelling of their world, due to cataclysmic climate collapse. Luthando’s environmental activism leads to a clash with the government. His life partner, Viwe, becomes embroiled in religious end-of-days fanaticism. And their friend Malcolm worries that his work in biotech augmentation will be used for sinister purposes. A story about resilience and our capacity for love in the face of fear.
Because sometimes I think they go further than the formulas set by traditional publishing. I love fantasy and similar genres because there are no limits for the imagination. The books I’ve chosen fulfill what I think is important – world-building, imagination, thought-provoking, intelligent, and wonderful characters on a mission of some kind.
Seth Rain has a knack for building believable worlds, then inserting brain-teasers to make you wonder if this could happen. The writing is fast-paced and hooks you from the start. This particular series made me wonder what is real and what is not: who really is in charge? I’m sure that people who like to think, will love this series.
In a near dystopian future, Artificial Intelligence uncovers the clockwork nature of the universe, capable of revealing the date each person will die.
But when Scott Beck is told his given date of 22nd April is wrong, he sets off on a journey that explores the true nature of free will, morality, and sacrifice.
Combining dystopian, post-apocalyptic, and cyberpunk fiction, The Warm Machine is the first novel in the haunting five-part Humanity Series, depicting a future in which humanity is on the brink of annihilation.
After a career that took me from designer to design professor, I’ve spent the past decade leading user research practices for growing product organizations. I’m excited about user research because it positions us closer to the people we design for, and challenges us to capture and explain complex scenarios in service to them. Though there are many books that teach user research, my list of recommendations is meant to demonstrate why we research, how we make sense of what we learn, and where research might take us.
If you're a researcher, designer, content strategist, writer, developer, etc., you work with information. And while that information might be understandable to you, it likely isn't clear to your audience or users. That's where this book comes in. Abby Covert transforms the scary, frustrating process of bringing order to information and makes it feel achievable in this enjoyable read.
Everything is getting more complex. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Whether at work, at school, or in our personal endeavors, there’s a deepening (and inescapable) need for people to work with and understand information.
Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole. When we make things for others to use, the architecture of information that we choose greatly affects our ability to deliver our intended message to our users.We all face messes made of information and people.
I study people-plant relationships from perspectives including ecology, history, cultural studies, and biogeography. Cannabis is certainly the most famous plant I’ve studied. A decade ago I was researching how Africans used an obscure tree in historical Central America, and came across accounts of cannabis use that surprised me. As I dug into cannabis history, I was continually amazed at how little the topic has been researched. It’s a great time to start learning about the plant’s past, because it’s a fresh, new field for professional academics. Cannabis has been portrayed so simplistically for decades, but in reality it’s a complex plant with a complicated history.
Although this book is written by and for professional historians, it’s really accessible and provides a great geographic range of chapter-length cases of the plant’s past. This book is where to go for a sound knowledge of the plant’s worldwide past. The chapters cover places and times ranging from 19th-century France to apartheid-era South Africa and post-revolutionary Iran—and many of the studies aren’t published elsewhere.
Cannabis consumption, commerce, and control in global history, from the nineteenth century to the present day.
This book gathers together authors from the new wave of cannabis histories that has emerged in recent decades. It offers case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It does so to trace a global history of the plant and its preparations, arguing that Western colonialism shaped and disseminated ideas in the nineteenth century that came to drive the international control regimes of the twentieth.
More recently, the emergence of commercial interests in cannabis has been central to the challenges…
