5 books I've been reading

I love how music, and cultural movements like punk and alternative rock, always have something new to tell. It’s fascinating to discover how an insult in a baseball stadium can help document an entire scene, how a sci-fi story keeps looking dangerously close to reality, or how someone dares to question what seemed like a safe space and decides to take action. And don’t even get me started on my other great musical weakness: grunge. It is comforting to confirm that, behind the distortion and the televised apathy of the nineties, there was fierce political resistance and incredible women trying to survive the corporate meat grinder without losing their souls. That’s why, here are five direct trips into the heart of dissent.

Sink or Burn by Cristy Road Carrera

(100 Block by Row House, 2026)

As a lover of sci-fi novels, comic books, and punk rock, when a story like this is recommended to me, I’m already inside the book before the recommendation is even over. Cristy Road Carrera, an illustrator, novelist, and punk musician, throws us straight into a ruined America, where the air requires gas masks and the East is nothing but the rubble of old empires. In the midst of this desolation enters Cheap Glitter, a queer resistance band that crosses the continent in an armored van to fund the insurgency and attempt to overthrow a totalitarian regime. The inspiration is clearly drawn from today’s headlines and her experiences with her own bands, The Homewreckers and Choked Up, but the true heart of Sink or Burn isn’t the hatred toward post-apocalyptic fascism; it’s how Carrera captures the pure essence of being a marginalized person in your own land: the loners, the resilience, and, above all, the unbreakable brotherhood of those who have nowhere else to go. It’s a reminder of why underground music, our beloved punk rock, always was and always will be an indispensable lifeline for the dispossessed. Carrera perfectly documents that fierce loyalty born among pariahs covered in neon makeup and studs, achieving a flawless portrait of marginalization. It is a loud, vital tribute that proves that when the world collapses, the punk rock will always be our only refuge.

You can buy it here.

You can listen to Choked Up here.

And listen to The Homewreckers here.

You can follow her Substack here

From Seattle to the System: Grunge as Political Expression by Sintija Brence

(Independently published, 2025)

Sometimes it takes someone with academic credentials to tell us that our ragged teenage clothes actually mattered. In this exhaustive essay, researcher Sintija Brence (Author and PhD Researcher of American Protest Music and Sociomusicology) gives us a true master class on the subject. It’s quite easy to dismiss grunge as just a bunch of sad white kids playing muddy riffs, but Brence convincingly argues that it was, in reality, a political movement deeply rooted in the working class of the Pacific Northwest. The author strips the genre of the prefabricated narratives pushed by TV networks and exposes its anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, and fiercely anti-Republican mindset during the Reagan and Bush era. The book’s academic tone makes Sintija sound like the cool history teacher; she talks about the path that 80s hardcore and alternative music took to culminate in the Seattle sound, and how the hegemonic industry systematically co-opted this dissent. She details how the act of shopping at thrift stores, which began as a genuine symbolic protest against rampant consumerism and a sense of belonging to the working class, ended up being packaged and sold in fashion magazines and mall windows. It is an impeccable historical dissection that restores ideological dignity to Generation X, making sure not to detach grunge from the evolutionary path that punk rock took over the years. Oh, and yes, she also leaves us with homework, because all her sources are anchored so we can keep expanding our reading backlog.

You can buy it here.

You can read an excerpt here.

You can follow her Substack here.

Fenway Punk: Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry by Chris Wrenn

(Running Press, 2026)

I really enjoy reading biographies about musicians, bands, or musical movements, but I have a special interest in the people on the other side of the scene: the founders of record labels. But I’m not talking about the major labels, I mean the independents—the ones who, armed with just an idea and sheer bravado, can build something massive where you can feel the genuine passion for the scene. In Fenway Punk, Chris Wrenn tells us how he created one of the best indie labels in Boston’s gritty scene. His epiphany came when he noticed thousands of Red Sox fans yelling “Yankees Suck” in the stadium, yet no official store sold merchandise with that insult. So, he printed his own t-shirts and took over the sidewalks. What’s fascinating about the book is seeing how he defends that idea tooth and nail: dodging cops, getting into fistfights for control of street corners, and enduring the pavement just to keep his project alive. With that money, earned with blood and sweat through street vending, Wrenn built Bridge Nine Records, a home that gave a platform to several influential hardcore punk bands and which has earned respect both on the streets and in the boardrooms today, without ever forgetting where its passion was born.

You can buy it here.

and visit the Bridge Nine website here

It Starts With Anger by James Spooner

(Pantheon Books, 2026)

We often fool ourselves into thinking that alternative subcultures are an oasis of tolerance where all misfits are equally welcomed. In It Starts With Anger, James Spooner gives us a much-needed reality check. The author, weaving in photographs and the magnificent illustrations we already saw in his graphic novel The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere, plunges us into 1991 New York, following a biracial teenager with a mohawk seeking refuge in punk clubs, only to crash into an unbearable echo chamber of white exclusion. Spooner narrates with raw honesty the exhaustion of having to validate his existence to purists who sang against racism but practiced it on the dance floor. But beware, this is not a book about defeat; it is an action manual. Faced with alienation, Spooner grabbed paper and scissors, made zines, organized parties, and documented the scene to build his own space and tell the stories of thousands of kids going through the exact same thing. That drive birthed the acclaimed documentary Afro-Punk and later led him to co-found the renowned festival of the same name. However, the book isn’t an absolute glorification of his career; the masterstroke is his self-criticism: the bitter and lucid frustration of asking himself how that genuinely underground effort ended up chewed up by the system until it became a multimillion-dollar corporation. Spooner invites us to a vital read about the thin line between building a community and feeding the commercial monster.

Pre-order here

You can follow his Substack here

Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ‘90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur

(Da Capo, 2026)

We all remember our first love. That moment you saw her for the first time and everything around you started moving in slow motion, that instant of revelation when you first heard her voice and, above all, that mysterious desire to peek, at least for a little while, into her intimate diary. Finally, decades later, that lovestruck teenager gets that privilege. In Even the Good Girls Will Cry, Melissa Auf der Maur showcases her observational maturity both in the glare of the stage and MTV videos, as well as in the darker facets of the music business. Instead of the umpteenth recount of excesses, she offers us the sharp and compassionate gaze of someone who was right in the engine room of the alternative movement. The book chronicles her transition from Montreal’s bohemian scene to her sudden joining of Hole in 1994, coinciding with a time of extreme mourning following the tragic deaths of Kurt Cobain and Kristen Pfaff. Auf der Maur describes the experience as walking into the very eye of a hurricane, finding herself forced to take on the role of a stabilizing force against the deafening grief and absolute chaos surrounding Courtney Love. But the true edge of the book doesn’t lie in backstage gossip, but rather in her fierce indictment of the corporate machine. All of this is narrated with an unbreakable instinct for self-preservation and a profound feminist perspective, highly aware that the female historians of the future would be watching how these young women took ownership of the stage.

You can buy it here.

Pre-order her new book ‘Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs’ here

You can follow her Substack here.

Thanks for reading!

Other book recommendations here, here and here.