Best music books of 2025 | Best books of the year

Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters with the Kings of Rock
Kate Mossman (Bonaire)
There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with largely unfashionable older male artists—among them Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Journey’s Steve Perry, and Jon Bon Jovi—through a series of silly, insightful, disturbing, and strangely poignant interviews. But she is elevated to unmissable status by Mosman’s writing, which is so brilliant, intelligent, and savvy that your personal feelings about her subjects become irrelevant amid the mixture of self-awareness, affection, and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired myths, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: a completely original look at rock history.

Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
Jeff Pearlman (HarperCollins)
Some accounts of the posthumous life of rapper Tupac Shakur have leaned toward the autobiographical: better known as a writer on sports than music, Jeff Perlman has written an incisive biography that reveals a person infinitely more complex and contradictory than the “thug” he used to portray himself as, or the saintly figure in the 2003 documentary Tupac: Resurrection. He suggests that the persona he presented was carefully constructed: the young Shakur was in fact a sensitive and eccentric ballet student, albeit from a deeply troubled background. But his aspirations for a hip-hop career coincided with the dominance of gangsta rap, and he changed his approach accordingly: The mask’s progressively face-eating saga makes for bleakly compelling reading.