Rob Sheffield's six favorite books

Rob Sheffield has been a music journalist for more than twenty years. He is a columnist for Rolling Stone, where he writes about music, TV, and pop culture. He regularly appears on VH1. He is the author of the national bestseller Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut.

Sheffield named his six favorite books for The Week magazine. One title on the list:

Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson

An eccentric tour of historic crackpots—Shakespeare, Montaigne, Napoleon. Emerson writes about them as if they were rock stars, reflecting his own mad genius. Every time I stumble across an Internet flame war, I think of Emerson’s wise words: “’Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think.”

Read about another book on Sheffield's list.

--Marshal Zeringue