Dylan Behind Closed Doors (The Recording Sessions 1960-1994), by Clinton Heylin (Penguin, £11.00 in UK)

"On a deeper level the songs operate in context, as a series of parables in ballad form..."

Here be Dylan delights galore, as Clinton Heylin makes his leisurely way through take after take of the great man's recording sessions not, as he admits in his introduction, exactly a task of mammoth dimensions, since Dylan managed to record his entire studio output in just 90 days from home tapes made on cheap reel to reel tapes made by fellow folkies to the somewhat overblown soundtracks and tribute albums of 1994. Basically, this is the book of the finicky detail, so unless you really need to know that Blood on the Tracks was speeded up by two per cent in the mastering, and such like, it's best left to the buffs.