I waited a couple of months before letting myself open up Walter Isaacson's acclaimed new biography, Steve Jobs. Given Isaacson's known gift for storytelling and my own penchant for computer-age pop culture history, I knew I'd be in for an obsessive reading experience once I cracked it open. This is a book I needed to clear away some uninterrupted time for.

The most enjoyable part of Steve Jobs is the first section, in which two delightful Silicon Valley counterculture tech nerds named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak grow up and invent the world-changing Apple II, the first commercially viable personal computer, in 1977. Here, the book offers the familiar satisfying thrill we look for in the early pages of every celebrity biography: those achingly pregnant moments in which the players stand at the precipice of greatness ... and then finally step over.

The dawn of the computer age is always a compelling subject, because we can all relate in some way to the feeling of surprise, personal growth and liberation that has accompanied this rapid pace of technological change (this is a dawn, after all, that we are still somewhere in the middle of). Isaacson's Steve Jobs is a classic computer-age tale of transformation and wonder -- from the quaint beauty of the first Macintosh (a wonderful little machine, so efficient that its entire operating system fit along with several applications and free user space on a single one-megabyte diskette) to the wide smiles generated by the Toy Story movie franchise (this is what Jobs worked on in the 1990s, between the Mac and the iPhone), to the invention of the dynamic iPad device, his last offering to the world before his early death.

I just finished Charles J. Shields's gripping, inspiring, sensitive biography of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, a book that brings me back to my earliest days as a serious reader of semi-serious fiction. Kurt Vonnegut wasn't the first grown-up writer I ever read, but his Breakfast of Champions was probably the first novel I ever related to on adult terms. I sensed that I was crossing some line when I read this book at the age of 12, and I remember feeling myself transformed by the act of declaring to the world that Kurt Vonnegut was my favorite writer (as he would remain through my high school years). I guess he was my first literary role model.

I admired his message and also his pop/expressionist aesthetic, which is neatly encapsulated by the ultra-cool cover designs for the 1970s-era editions of his paperbacks. I collected these Vonnegut books like baseball cards, though I only liked about half of them. I favored Welcome to the Monkey House, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, but Breakfast of Champions remained my favorite, not only because it was the first Vonnegut book I read but also because it was the most far out book he ever wrote. This was the one he drew pictures in, the one in which he invented a doppelganger for himself (the beautiful creation called Kilgore Trout) and then walked into the novel himself (as Kurt Vonnegut) to hang out with his own doppelganger. I remember feeling a big grin on my pre-teenage face when I read that chapter of Breakfast of Champions for the first time: is he allowed to do that? Apparently he was allowed to do that.

1. I'm so glad that Charles J. Shields's biography of Kurt Vonnegut (whose birthday is today!) is finally out. I've been looking forward to And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life for a long time -- though now that it's out I've got a few other books to get through before I can begin. This will be my slow pleasure reading for the holiday season.

The rock star memoir has emerged as a serious format in the past decade. Exceptional efforts by Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Keith Richards have lit the way, and news broke this week that Neil Young signed a contract with Penguin for a book, tentatively titled Waging Heavy Peace, to be released late next year.

I rarely allow myself to get excited about a book that hasn't been written yet, but there are reasons to bet that Neil Young will take this assignment seriously and deliver a book substantial enough to stand next to the examples mentioned above. Two of these authors are among Neil's own early role models: he's cited Keith Richards's Rolling Stones as his greatest musical influence (he and Keith share a you-can-never-be-too-sloppy musical ethic), and has managed his entire career according to the Bob Dylan playbook (give hilarious interviews, and completely reinvent yourself every two years). We can reasonably guess that Neil Young must have been inspired to write his own memoir after reading Bob's and Keith's impressive works, and this portends very well for the upcoming book.

The remarkable novelist Katharine Weber has published her sixth book, her first work of non-fiction. The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities is a memoir with a subtitle that evokes the great Broadway composer George Gershwin, who played a key role in Weber's family past.

But Weber is a novelist, and her faithful readers will not approach this new book as a diversion but rather as the sixth entry in a series marked by creative and stylistic variation. None of her previous five novels resemble each other in terms of storytelling approach, tone or setting; she has reinvented her mission as a novelist with each work, and the memoir is clearly the latest step in this progression.

The notion of a Katharine Weber memoir raises immediate questions, because she has always played with real life and fiction in her novels. Her characters play with real life and fiction too. Her well-loved first novel Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear presents a young female narrator so full of verve, affection and enthusiasm that she has to constantly contain herself and rein in the power of her imagination. The tension between Harriet's beckoning sense of romantic possibility and her impulse to control herself and appear polished to others supplies the core of this character's voice. Weber's second novel The Music Lesson offers a heroine who willingly falls for a charming criminal's thin veneer of lies, preferring not to abstain from the great sex that accompanies the story. Her third novel The Little Women, a jaunty comic tableau, then presents an entire family of incorrigibly fanciful souls, spinning together in the whirlwinds of their half-composed psychological theories and illusions. Her powerful fourth novel Triangle also explores what it means to live a life defined more by fiction than by reality, and her fifth True Confections, her broadest comedy, takes the form of a legal affadavit by a woman who is obviously straining at the boundaries of truth.

Many of these works capture the voice of a child's mind, though the "child" may be in the body of an adult. Some writers eschew parent-child relationships (Charles M. Schulz of "Peanuts" comes to mind, since he never drew a parent or an adult in a "Peanuts" comic strip). Katharine Weber is his opposite, as far as subject matter is concerned. Without a parent or grandparent to defy, disappoint, become enraged by, look up to, accept gifts from or give help to, a Katharine Weber character wouldn't know how to live.

Rock biographies and memoirs don't have a lot of literary cachet, though I seem to keep reading them. If I believed there was anything for me to feel guilty about (I don't), I'd call this my guilty pleasure. It's more accurate to say that, as with any literary format, books like Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir by Steven Tyler and Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock by Sammy Hagar bring pleasure to the degree that they are authentic, surprising and truthful.

The fact that both of these memoirists are well-known for loud, brash personalities and stadium-level exuberance (Steven Tyler refers winningly in his book to an affliction of the ego known as "Lead Singer Disease") should not disqualify their books from thoughtful literary consideration at all. Steven Tyler and Sammy Hagar may feel comfortable juicing up gigantic, cheering crowds, but they must each overcome the same creative anxieties and moral doubt as any other writer when they stare at themselves in the mirror and try to describe what they see. Sure, celebrity memoirists have ghostwriters (David Dalton for Tyler, Joel Selvin for Hagar), but that may not help as much as we think. It's worth analyzing how both Steven Tyler and Sammy Hagar measure up to the memoirist's moral challenge with these books.

My Infamous Life, the new memoir by classic rapper Prodigy of Mobb Deep, kicks off with a surprise: Albert "Prodigy" Johnson carries an amazing musical legacy in his genes. His grandfather Budd Johnson was a bebop saxophonist who worked with Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Ruth Brown, Gil Evans, Count Basie and Quincy Jones. His grandmother Bernice Johnson created an influential dance school in Jamaica, Queens and hung out with Lena Horne, Ben Vereen and Diana Ross. Prodigy's mother Frances Collins was a replacement member of the 60s girl group the Crystals. This gangsta rapper has some major musical roots.

But he struggled as a kid with sickle-cell anemia, a painful condition that helped him develop a stoic sense of life and a fervent, straight-edged drive. He and his high school buddy Havoc were still teenagers in 1993 when they put out the first Mobb Deep album. They were unknowingly at the vanguard of hiphop's greatest age, born in Queensbridge and the Lefrak projects, where Prodigy crossed paths with A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, the Large Professor, Onyx, Cormega and Capone-N-Noriega. The new gangsta sound spread through New York City, where the Queens rappers were joined by Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, Lil Kim, Busta Rhymes and M.O.P. from Brooklyn, Mase, Big L and Cam'ron from Manhattan, Big Pun and Fat Joe from the Bronx, DMX and the L.O.X. from Yonkers. Mobb Deep fans, all of them.

1. Billy Joel had a contract to write a memoir, but got cold feet. Too bad. We know this Long Island boy can write, and I bet he had some stories to tell. The alleged book (my personal guess is that he never began it, though the cover artwork was finished and released) was supposed to have been called The Book of Joel.

2. You know I've been wanting to read this Long Island boy's life story. Jay-Z's recent semi-memoir Decoded had its moments, but Jay hardly dug deep. Good hiphop memoirs or biographies are rare, but I eagerly snapped up Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went from Street Corner to Corner Office, a new unauthorized biography by business writer Zack O'Malley Greenburg, who has covered hip-hop culture and money for Forbes magazine. I suppose it works as a business book, but I found it very disappointing. This white boy, unfortunately, does not know hiphop. The author also seems to think Jay-Z's best years must be right now (naturally, because this is when he's making the most money) which proves, once again, that he doesn't know anything about hiphop.

Here's some stuff I've checked out and liked lately:

It's annoying that Keith Richards is more widely known today for his long-past hard-partying rock star excesses than for being (still) a world-class musician and songwriter. I almost didn't want to read his extensive, acclaimed new autobiography Life because I'm not interested in hearing "the stories", and I certainly don't care about the legend. But I do care about the great music and career of the Rolling Stones, so I dove into the book, and was immediately captured by the author's warm, thoughtful voice.

Life is at its best when Keith Richards talks about the music, about rhythm guitar, about the wisdom of Chicago blues (as he understood it growing up in Dartford, a suburb of London). There are brilliant passages about the lazy guitar tricks used by Jimmy Reed, about the difference between six-string standard tuning and five-string open tuning, about what it's like to collaborate with the talented but egotistical Mick Jagger. Richards is laying down an ethical point of view in this memoir: he values friends (male and female) and close family (his parents and his children) above all else, he laughs at the trappings of fame (his disgusted reaction to Mick Jagger's recent knighthood is fun to read), he reads avidly and keeps a vast library in his own house, he works hard as hell to make every Stones record and concert as good as it can be. He also gave up heroin thirty years ago, and I hope this book will help people realize that junkie-hood was never the most interesting thing about Keith Richards.

NOTE: trying something new, I listened to this book on audio CDs in my car instead of reading it. I don't always enjoy the audio format, but Johnny Depp's well-considered impersonation of Keith Richards's distinctive slow drawl and chuckle makes this one work. Well done.

(As a longtime Ramones fan, I was very moved by Mickey Leigh's memoir about growing up as the younger brother of Joey Ramone, who died tragically of cancer in 2001. The book has just come out in paperback with a new epilogue. I was thrilled to have a chance to ask Mickey Leigh a few questions. -- Levi)

Levi: Though it has a sort of jokey title, I sense that I Slept With Joey Ramone is meant to be a serious entry in the field of punk rock literature, along with many other good books like Rotten by Johnny Rotten, Go Now by Richard Hell, Poison Heart by Dee Dee, Please Kill Me by Legs, the new Just Kids by Patti Smith, even And I Don't Want To Live This Life by Deborah Spungen. Why do you think punk rock has become so literary, or has it always been so?

Mickey: Firstly I'd have to say that, in my opinion, the term "punk rock literature" could serve as a prime dictionary example of an oxymoron. That said, it appears you have a perceptive sense of senses. Jokey title aside, I certainly did mean this to be a serious literary entry, in any field. What I mean by that is -- let's say, for example -- that a book about the life of Sigmund Freud does not necessarily have to be an entry in the field of psychiatric literature. This book is about the person, not the field.

Though serious, I had to accompany it with material entertaining and humorous enough to balance out the seriousness. As the subject matter was so emotionally sensitive for me, if I hadn't done that I would never have been able to finish it. I shed so many tears writing it, if I didn't make myself laugh often enough, I would never have been able to complete it -- nor would I expect anyone else to.