Books on Musical Performance

• Form and Performance - Erwin Stein
• Musical Form and Musical Performance - Edward T. Cone
• The Inner Game of Music - Barry Green & Timothy Galway

Books on music by musicians

• Absolutely on Music - Haruki Murakami & Seji Ozawa
• The Poetics of Music - Igor Stravinsky
• The Unanswered Question - Leonard Bernstein

Music, language and the brain

• Brain and Music - Stefan Koelsch
• Music, Language and the Brain - Aniruddh Patel
• The Singing Neanderthals - Steven Mithen
• This is Your Brain on Music - Daniel Levitin

Novels with music in an important role

• An Equal Music - Vikram Seth
• Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann
• The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse

(Auto)biographies and egodocuments

• Chronicle of a Friendship - Robert Craft
• Goethe - Rüdiger Safranski
• The Story of a Life - Konstantin Paustovsky
• The World of Yesterday - Stefan Zweig

Books on history

• A Distant Mirror - Barbara Tuchman
• A History of the Twentieth Century - Martin Gilbert
• From Dawn to Decadence - Jacques Barzun

Historical novels

• Baudolino - Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
• Wolf Hall - Hillary Mantel

Classics from literature

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
• Der Zauberberg - Thomas Mann
• Notre-Dame de Paris - Victor Hugo

Fantasy

• Earth Sea Trilogy - Ursula K. LeGuin
• Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
• The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Nobel Prize winners

• Buddenbrooks - Thomas Mann
• Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
• Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled
• Orhan Pamuk - Snow
• Romain Rolland - Jean Christophe

Roman-fleuve (novel cycles)

• A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
• A la Recherche du Temps Perdu - Marcel Proust
• Het Bureau - J.J. Voskuil
• Les Thibault - Roger Martin du Gard
• Strangers and Brothers - C.P. Snow
• The Cazalet Chronicles - Elizabeth Jane Howard
• Wolf Hall Trilogy - Hillary Mantel