Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. It profiles a bunch of underground (mostly punk) bands from the 80's (Black Flag, Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Replacements, Husker Du, Big Black, Beat Happening, and Mudhoney). It just about required reading for anyone interested in the music, the period, the lifestyle, and the thought process of these people. Mission of Burma, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Minor Threat are especially interesting so far. I hadn't listened to either Burma or the Minutemen before the book and now I love them. Better late than never. It's a great experience to listen to the music as I'm reading about it, it really makes you focus on it all the more.
That's a lot said about one book...
Other than that:
- A Dragon Age book (The Calling). It's not good so far. Moving on...
- Berklee Music Theory. I'm trying to expand my playing style so I figured learning music theory would be a good way to aid in that endeavor.
- Atlas Shrugged. God. I pick this book up and generally find it interesting and then I get busy and put it down for a long time. I'm only about 200 pages in and I started this over the summer. Yeesh. My mid-July to September lifestyle of only MCAT studying in the day and partying at night, then surfing the rest of the time derailed my reading of it big time.