Books for giving: music

It has been a bumper year for memoirs, from Shaun Ryder to Nile RodgersWhen looking back on a year of music books that themselves tend to look back, it makes sense to start with Simon Reynolds's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (Faber, £17.99). The cohesive polemic the title appears to promise never quite materialises, not least because Reynolds, a shrewd, self-questioning critic, is susceptible to the very nostalgia he's so worried about. But it's this candid ambivalence tha...

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