ANOTHER CHRISTMAS, another Beatles book. They seem to get bigger, too - Philip Norman's John Lennon: The Life (HarperCollins, £25/offer £22.50) breaks the 800-page barrier but, given his subject's epically unsettled existence, it never drags. This is the first serious Lennon biography in 20 years and, unlike Albert Goldman's bilious effort in the Eighties, Norman's style is trustworthy, contextual, and plainly told, yet with enough splashes of historical colour - so Lennon's Oedipal and homo-erotic experiences are given room, but not too much. The biggest surprise is that his previously one-dimensional villain of a father turns out to have been quite complex and emotional after all; looking at his son, we shouldn't really be taken aback.

By contrast, The New Yorker's Alex Ross breaks entirely new ground with The Rest Is Noise (Fourth Estate, £20/£18), a history of the 20th century through its music; he does not want for ambition. Ross sees Erik Satie as a proto-jazz beatnik, and describes a group of chords in a Duke Ellington piece as “circling around like a cool crowd of onlookers”. He compares the postwar avant-garde in former Fascist nations to “high-tech, hush hush Cold War work”. Music as politics, the whole twisted century condensed and made sense of; this is an astonishing book.

Mark E. Smith's autobiography Renegade (Viking, £18.99/£17.09) tends to switch from surreal pub talk (the best parts) to poorly ghosted, rather mannered sniping. Dave Simpson took a more rewarding step sideways into the story of The Fall and their capricious leader with The Fallen (Canongate, £18.99/£17.09), in which he tracks down every ex-member (41 and counting) of the Manchester group. Their opinions on Smith vary from crazed genius to benevolent dictator and, oddly, a large number have been sacked and rejoined; there's too much of the author in the text, but this is still the best book yet on a band that have evolved into a cross between a large Victorian family and a rehab unit.

Fleetwood Mac, producers of some beautiful if anodyne mid-Seventies rock, always seemed to have a far more interesting backstage story than their music let on. Carol Ann Harris dated the Mac mainman Lindsey Buckingham after he split with the witchy Stevie Nicks. The strong resemblence between the two women should have planted seeds of doubt in Harris's mind and, indeed, in her memoir Storms (Aurum, £18.99/ £17.09) it transpires that Buckingham missed his ex so much that he dated a lookalike. Drugs and violence feature strongly, though most memorable is an occasion when Buckingham has an epileptic seizure and turns blue; Harris recalls how Nicks compared the incident to the near-death of her dehydrated poodle in a greenhouse.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

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Sharon Davis's A Girl Called Dusty (Andre Deutsch, £18.99/£17.09) is an almost diary-like telling of the Springfield story. It's a warm counterpoint to the singer's former manager Vicki Wickham's rather harrowing Dancing With Demons. This Dusty - super-musical but neurotic - is hard not to love, whether through her penchant for throwing cheap crockery, or recalling the first time she met Burt Bacharach: “I was falling off my stool in ecstasy. He gave me four nice songs and now I'm thoroughly concussed.”

The Clash (Atlantic, £30/ £27) is the story of the band, by the band. Here is every piece of artwork, every ad, plus the original line-up's reminiscences. The most mythic and gang-like of British bands are always likely to wither under the microscope of a historian (see Redemption Song, the Joe Strummer biography), so this beautiful, heavyweight punk-pink item is how every devout fan will want to remember them.

The Rolling Stone writer David Wild's affectionate How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Neil Diamond (Old Street, £14.99/£13.49) is a wryly amusing tribute to the “Jewish Elvis”. Personal touches work well, as Wild realises that, pushing 50, he has become embarrassingly obsessed with the sequined performer. His closeness to Diamond pulls out some cracking lines from the singer, too (on recording the soundtrack to Jonathan Livingston Seagull: “I didn't have the vaguest idea how to write songs from a seagull's point of view”).

Tom Moon's 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die (Workman, £12.99/£11.69) would be a decent start point for a curious teenager with an empty iPod, covering Haydn, Pantera and Serge Gainsbourg with equal gravitas. More easily digestible to anyone who already has a record collection, especially if it's on vinyl, is Travis Elborough's The Long-Player Goodbye (Sceptre, £14.99/£13.49). On the 60th anniversary of the first LP, Elborough covers groundbreakers such as Glenn Gould, Frank Sinatra and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music with English reserve and bemused pleasure; it reads like a P.G. Wodehouse guide to pop history.

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