Books like Absolutely on Music
Murakami and the conductor Seiji Ozawa listen to recordings together and talk about Mahler, Beethoven and Ozawa's apprenticeships with Bernstein and Karajan.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Absolutely on Music
Novelist as a Vocation
Essays on how Murakami became a novelist, from the baseball game where he decided to write his first book to the daily routine and stubbornness that have kept him writing since.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Murakami reflects on decades of long-distance running and what the discipline has taught him about writing, ageing, and pain.
Chronicles: Volume One
Dylan's memoir, which skips from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to the making of New Morning and Oh Mercy, and back to his Minnesota boyhood.
The Forest of Wool and Steel
Tomura, a quiet boy from a mountain village in Hokkaido, hears a piano tuner at work in his school gym and decides to become one, apprenticing himself to a small piano shop.
Just Kids
Patti Smith remembers her years with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York, from the Chelsea Hotel to their first successes, two young artists holding each other up through hunger and ambition.
The Philosophy of Modern Song
Sixty-six short essays on songs by other people, from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, each with a riff on what the song is really about.
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
A pop-culture essayist drives across America visiting sites where rock stars died, using their deaths to examine what music means to the living.
Life
Keith Richards tells the story of the Rolling Stones with the same raw energy he brought to the guitar.
City of Night Birds
Natalia Leonova, a star of the Mariinsky Ballet, comes back to St Petersburg after an injury and a breakdown to dance Giselle again, and the story of how she got there unfolds alongside her return.
Autobiographies
Yeats's own account of his childhood in Sligo and London, his youth among the artists and occultists of the 1890s, and the Irish literary revival.
The Life of the Bee
A naturalist's meditation on the year of a beehive, from the swarm and the founding of a city to the nuptial flight and the massacre of the males, and on what the hive suggests about human life.
The Writing Life
Dillard's short book on the daily work of writing, the cabins and studies where she has done it, and what it costs, with a detour to a stunt pilot who wrote in the sky.