Music touches everything. It pervades our memory, accompanies us through emotion and history, and becomes the lens through which we understand culture or politics. The essays in "Read the Music" are just as wide-ranging. The book kicks off with a ride through the post-9/11 landscape alongside Tori Amos and 12 cover songs she calls "girls," and concludes with a treatise on "Zoon," the album by British death-metal outfit Nefilim that retells an ancient Apocryphal text. In between, there's dialogue with Russian heiress Anastasia Romanov on the nature of trauma survival, the songs that might be sung by a robotic girl in love with the world, and a trip to the deepest part of the Scandinavian winter. If you've ever loved music, if you've ever found it seeping into every aspect of your life, then you will understand "Read the Music," even if you've never heard these songs before.