High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
A New York Times Notable Book. Now a major motion picture from Touchstone Pictures starring John Cusack. Rob Fleming is a London record store owner in his 30s whose girlfriend, Laura, has just left him. At the record shop named Championship Vinyl, Rob and his employees Dick and Barry spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics and constructing "top-five" lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music.
 

The Celestial Jukebox
 By Cynthia Shearer
The Celestial Jukebox is set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar. Shearer's rural south is dependent on the rather less attractive fruits of capitalism. The mood feels like a very humid melancholy. The tie that binds all her characters lives is American popular music, its origins and power. The purity and beauty of the writing - like the purity of the imagined soundtrack of more than 30 songs that exists within this story - marks The Celestial Jukebox as a rare book. The pages in this novel are filled with music, struggle, and spontaneous joy.
 

The Songcatcher: A Ballad Novel
By Sharyn McCrumb
Haunted by a memory, Lark McCourry traces the passage of a song through generations of her family, from a Scottish island through the pages of American history, to the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina. As the memory of the song dims over the years, Lark's only hope of preserving her family legacy lies in mountain wise-woman Nora Bonesteel, who communicates with the dead.


Reservation Blues
By Sherman Alexie
In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident, until the day a stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and a guitar slung over his back. The man happens to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young musician Thomas-Builds-the-Fire-storyteller, a magical odyssey begins.