Ben Ratliff, jazz critic of the New York Times, obviously spent a lot of time listening to jazz in order for him to pick out 100 Most Important Recordings. Let it be known that these selected albums are based only Ratliff’s taste and he does have quite a range: from the well-known figures (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong) to lesser-know cats that I haven’t heard of. What makes the book worth-reading is Ratliff’s clear, approachable, and astute criticism. Here is a beautiful except on John Coltrane:

His playing is intense, lusty, and sometimes smeared with harsh, abrasive noise, but it is not scattershot. He finds areas of exploration and methodically roots around them. Four minutes into “Venus,” he finds a pivot point in the middle register, oscillating back and forth from it toward dark low notes that work their way up the horn. Two minutes and twelve seconds into “Jupiter,” Coltrane starts gushing descending scales, almost making them sound as if they’re overlapping; he starts altering these with shrieks a minute later. Then around the five-minute mark he finally returns to the three-not theme, repeated and bounced around between octaves; when he’s finished, as always, he shakes the bells again—as much a signal to Ali that he’s finished as to the listener.

This is a pleasurable read for both novices and aficionados.

A spare yet intriguing collection of typographic puns like “sexxx,” “incomplet” and “!xclamation.”

Jeff Fisher’s Identity Crisis! presents the old and new logo side by side to show how each brand had been redesigned. With 50 case studies, concise explanations and hundreds of visual illustrations (including websites, stationary packages and collateral pieces), the book is a useful resource for graphic designers.

Published in the same year after his death, Trinh Cong Son 1939-2001 is a collection of essays on the life and work of one of the greatest Vietnamese songwriters of all time written by his closed friends and confidants around the world.

Songwriter Van Cao kicks off a short piece as an introduction. Painter Buu Chi reflects on the last memory before TCS laid down to rest. Poet Trinh Cung shares their friendship and the fortunate of having TCS composed his poem titled “Cuoi Cung Cho Mot Tinh Yeu.” Philosopher Thai Thi Kim Lan points out his love for Hue in his songs including “Nhin Nhung Mua Thu Di,” “Tnh Nho,” “Diem Xua,” “Mua Hong” and “Moi Ngay Toi Chon Mot Niem Vui.” Singer Khanh Ly refers to him as “a half of her life.” Singer Hong Nhung thanks fate for allowing her to meet him. Law professor Cao Huy Tan breaks down TCS’s peculiar lyricism and his unorthodox wordplay.

Still, the best pieces are from TCS himself. From his philosophy on love, life and death to his personal reflections, we could understand why he writes music the way he did. Furthermore, who could reveal the inspiration and motivation responsible for the classics such as “Uot Mi,” “Diem Xua” and “Ha Trang” better than the man in his own words?

Through clear musical analysis, accessible language and engaging narration, Ben Ratliff, The New York Times jazz critic, captures the sound of Coltrane onto the pages. The first half of the book focuses on the development of Trane’s sound including his lustful ballad playing and his spiritual exploration. The second half delves into the influential as well as the controversial of Trane’s power. From Giant Steps to My Favorite Thing to A Love Supreme, Ratliff points out: “[Coltrane] helped people freak out; he gave them extramusical ideas.” How did he do that? Coltrane: The Story of a Sound will answer that question.

With a collection of timeless designs from 1880 (Victorian) to 1980 (Post-Modern), Retro Graphics is a fantastic source for visual inspiration. The book covers not only the intriguing stories behind the stylistic movements, but also shows you how to re-create a design in as little as four simple steps. Flipping through this book I know I gotta have it.

David Sedaris’ Naked is yet another hysterical collection of his autobiographical essays. Whether being told through his firsthand experiences or direct observations, what makes Sedaris’ personal stories addictive is the dark sense of humor in his writing. Here is an excerpt from “I Like Guys” to illustrate his whimsicality:

There was a boy at camp I felt I might get along with, a Detroit native named Jason who slept on the bunk beneath mine. Jason tended to look away when talking to the other boys, shifting his eyes as though he were studying the weather conditions. Like me, he used his free time to curl into a fetal position, staring at the bedside calendar upon which he’s x-ed out all the days he had endured so far. We were finishing our 7:15 to 7:45 wash-and-rinse segment one morning when our dormitory counselor arrived for inspection shouting, “What are you, a bunch of goddamned faggots who can’t make your bed?”

I giggled out loud at his stupidity. If anyone knew how to make a bed, it was a faggot. It was the others he needed to worry about. I saw Jason laughing, too, and soon we took to mocking this counselor, referring to each other first as “faggots” and then as “stinking faggots.” We were “lazy faggots” and “sunburned faggots” before we eventually become “faggoty faggots.” We couldn’t protest the word, as that would have meant acknowledging the truth of it. The most we could do was to embrace it as a joke. Embodying the term in all its clichéd glory, we minced and pranced about the room for each other’s entertainment when the others weren’t looking. I found myself easily outperforming my teachers, who had failed to capture the proper spirit of loopy bravado inherent to the role. Faggot, as a word, was always delivered in a harsh, unforgiving tone befitting those weak or stupid enough to act upon impulses. We used it as a joke, an accusation, and finally as a dare. Late at night I’d feel my bunk buck and sway, knowing that Jason was either masturbating or beating eggs for an omelette. Is it me he’s thinking about? I’d follow his lead and wake the next morning to find our entire iron-frame unit had wandered a good eighteen inches away from the wall. Our love had the power to move bunks.

Hip-hop gets blame for everything from violence to misogyny to homophobia. Even when a white guy spilled out a racial slur on public radio, “nappy-headed ho,” hip-hop takes the flame for it. Many, including the older generation of black people, look down on hip-hop with their bigotry instead of listening to what young black artists have to say with an open mind. In his new book, Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip-hop, Michael Eric Dyson sets the record straight from an academic point of view. Whether his argument is on the authenticity in hip-hop (“They see and they say”), the rhetoric and language usage (Lauryn Hill rhymes: “Even after all my logic and my theory / I add a motherfucker so you ignorant niggas hear me”), or the women contradictions (“praising their mamas, slamming their babymamas”), Dyson shows his intellectual criticism and his broad of knowledge on hip-hop culture. In the intro, Jay-Z praises Dyson as someone who “started out translating between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and now he’s helping put together a world where there is only ‘us.’” In the outro, Nas sees Dyson as someone “who can give CPR to hip hop” and he’s glad that Dyson is on their side.

You know you’re a damn good writer when you make even shit hilarious. As recounted in “Big Boy,” a short essay in his witty Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris discovered a big turd sitting in the toilet someone left back in his friend’s bathroom. After the second flush failed, he “scrambled for a plunger and used the handle to break the turd into manageable pieces, all the while thinking that it wasn’t fair, that this was technically not [his] job. Another flush and it still didn’t go down. Come on, pal. Let’s move it.” From the way his sister pranks his father to the way his brother, “the Rooster,” talks to the old man—“The past is gone, hoss. What you need now is some motherfucker pussy” (after his mom passed away)—Sedaris’ simple, natural writing makes personal storytelling seem so engaging yet effortless.

Living with Music is a collection of insightful, masterful jazz writings from the musician-turned-writer Ralph Ellison. To him jazz was like poetry, as he pointed out in “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” a piece on Charlie Parker: “Consider that at least as early as T.S. Eliot’s creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxtapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a similar technique for jazz.”

In “Homage to Duke Ellington on His Birthday,” Ellison skillfully captured the essence of Ellington’s nickname in one sentence: “Somewhere during his childhood a friend had nicknamed Edward Kennedy Ellington ‘Duke,’ and he had proceeded to create for himself a kingdom of sound and rhythm that has remained impregnable to the fluctuations of fad and novelty, even the passing on of key members of his band.” Isn’t that just beautiful?

Ellison also had no problem speaking with eloquentness when disagreeing with another critic. In “Blue People,” Ellison corrected Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) for making an erroneous differentiation of the blues: “Jones makes a distinction between classic and country blues, the one being entertainment and the other folklore. But the distinction is false. Classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore. When they were sung professionally in theaters, they were entertainment; when danced to in the form of recordings or used as a means of transmitting the traditional verses and their wisdom, they were folklore. There are levels of time and function involved here, and the blues which might be used in one place as entertainment (as gospel music is now being used in night clubs and on theater stages) might be put to a ritual use in another. Bessie Smith might have been a ‘blue queens’ to society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues where part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man’s ability to deal with chaos.”

If that kind of thorough comprehension doesn’t prove Ellison was living with the music, I don’t know what is. He truly meant every word when he said, “In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”