Alex Ross: five most important books

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, recently told Newsweek about his five most important books.

One title to make the list:

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion.

An awe-inspiring nonfiction collection. Didion imposes her style on the world, yet records the world as it is.

Read about all five titles on Ross' list.

--Marshal Zeringue