From Moby memories to the music of David Lynch: six great summer reads

As the summer nears, it’s time to stock up on some reading material for airport lounges, flights, and those times by the pool when the sun is too bright to play with your phone.

One of the biggest music memoirs of the year belongs to Moby. Titled Porcelain after what is probably his most moving tune from the massive 1999 album Play, the book charts a decade in the electronic musician's life. The genesis was Moby telling stories a few years ago at a party in Brooklyn about his experiences in New York in 1989. When someone said "you should write a book", he did.

Moby wrote on his website how the memoir details his life between 1989 and 1999, but is also about New York, the city he called home, “as it transitioned from being a broken, dirty city to the bizarre and stratospherically expensive city it’s become”.

Porcelain is also about the underground hip-hop and house music scenes of the late 1990s, and the birth of the club kids and the rave scene," he writes.

1966: The Year The Decade Exploded is the latest from Jon Savage. He is a master of the big picture, as we've learned from his unsurpassed history of punk, England's Dreaming, and indeed with Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture.

But he is also a devil for the detail, and so 1966 zooms in on a specific year in music history. The book has already won the second annual Penderyn Music Book Prize. Expect fiendishly researched musical facts linked to pop culture and social history.

Bob Boilen, the host of NPR's All Songs Considered is behind Your Song Changed My Life, a book that asks musicians about the songs that inspired them. Thirty-five artists contribute, including Hozier, Jimmy Page, Carrie Brownstein, St Vincent, James Blake, Dave Grohl, Cat Power, Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne, Jenny Lewis and more.

The tone is conversational oral history, and given the breadth of contributors, it’s one you’ll be able to pick up repeatedly to grab a slice of which songs influences some excellent artists, both established and a little more up-and-coming.

Rita Coolidge's memoir Delta Lady is co-authored by Hollywood Reporter contributing editor Michael Walker, who also wrote the excellent Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock'n'Roll's Legendary Neighbourhood. Coolidge gained renown as a backing singer for the likes of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, before she hit the pop charts in the late 1970s with her own cover versions. The book is pitched as "a front-row seat to an iconic era", and Coolidge certainly had that, as a musician in her own right, and a muse to Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, her ex-husband Kris Kristofferson and others. Check out this recent interview with Coolidge by Catherine Conroy.

Before Twin Peaks returns, check out Beyond The Beyond: Music From The Films of David Lynch, out in late May. Produced with Lynch, Beyond The Beyond examines his use of the music and sounds of others, along with his own original music, and plenty of photographs and from his personal archive. The book also features interviews with artists who performed at a 2015 benefit for the David Lynch foundation, including Karen O, The Flaming Lips, Duran Duran, Sky Ferreira and more.

Also out in May is Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, Cohen is also the co-creator of the HBO series Vinyl. This is one for the fans, charting the band's history, as well as Cohen's own on-the-road adventures with them as a journalist.