For our NBCC Reads series on favorite music books, we thought it'd be natural to pose the question to Dana Spiotta, a 2011 NBCC finalist for her rock novel Stone Arabia. Her choice: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Spiotta writes:
There is something about the aggregated voices of a scene that interests me. I'm not as compelled by the stories of famous rock stars as much as the stories of lesser known people. I like how this book lets everyone have their say, and you can see that people have very different perceptions of how things went down, who was for real, and why it all falls apart.