Was It Good for You?

Rock, Bebop, Etc.

Arthur Phillips' The Song Is You (Random House) opens with a riveting prologue that not only stands on its own as a brilliant short story about musical obsession but also sets the stage for similar mania in our iPod generation. While the novel works on many levels, at its core this is a story about music. In this case, rock & roll, but any music, really: how it affects us emotionally and psychologically; how we obsess over it, surrender to it; how the artists who create it cast a spell over us. It's a lesson about why music matters in our lives and why it plays such a powerful role in chronicling our lives.

The German Mujahid (Europa Editions) by Algeria's Boualem Sansal has been called "the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust." The author also draws direct parallels from Nazism to modern Muslim fundamentalism. Banned in Sansal's home country, this award-winning novel tells the story of how two Algerian-born brothers, who grew up in the Arab ghettos outside of Paris, deal with the realization that their father, a hero in Algeria's War of Independence, was a Nazi war criminal during World War II.

Thelonious Monk was the first jazz musician to really capture my imagination, and so I absolutely luxuriated in all 588 pages of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press) by Robin D.G. Kelley. In what is surely the most exacting and comprehensive biography to date on this thoroughly fascinating and monumentally creative pianist/composer, we come to understand how his idiosyncratic innovations laid the foundation for modern jazz.

Most Arduous Read: Rudyard Kipling's Kim. So much for some historical insight into our endeavor along the Afghan/Pakistani borderlands.

Guilty Pleasure: Rereading Jack Kerouac's On the Road after 30 years. His frenetic, bebop prose is still a rush.