Rock Reading List: 30 of the Best Books of 2023

With the end of 2023 rapidly approaching, it’s time to revisit this year’s literary offerings.

For some, this was the year of long awaited memoirs.

“For as long as I can remember folks have been asking me to tell my story, I wasn’t ready,” Sly Stone, one of several to finally write out his life, said in a press release. “I had to be in a new frame of mind to become Sylvester Stewart again to tell the true story of Sly Stone.”

Stone wasn’t the only one. Geddy Lee, Lucinda Williams, Geezer Butler, and Bernie Taupin also put out their first biographies.

For others, this was an opportunity to do something brand new, or cover a topic they hadn’t in previous books. Dolly Parton wrote about fashion, Willie Nelson revisited his own song lyrics, 160 of them to be exact, and Paul McCartney dug out old pictures he took himself during the Beatles‘ early days traveling the world, a “photographic journal” as he put it.

There were also some posthumous releases — stories of those who have passed on made possible by writers determined to provide a new perspective on a particular artist. Lou Reed, Nirvana, Karen Carpenter and David Bowie all had fresh books written about them this year.

So for rock ‘n’ roll fans looking to catch up on their reading, we’re taking a look at 30 of the Best Books of 2023.