Tom Gatti’s new anthology has all the hallmarks of a great playlist—the big hitters, the slow burners, the randomness of the selection, the relinquishing of control, the ones you never heard before, the ones forgotten by time. Starting with a superb introduction by Gatti...Long Players is informative and entertaining, charting the evolution of music formats over the past century, while giving glimpses of the cultural predilections and personal lives of the various contributors. Like a book equivalent of Desert Island Discs, the joy is in discovering what celebrated authors choose as their favourite music. The answers are considered, colourful and frequently surprising.

Subjects range from Mozart to Ms Dynamite and the further one gets from the canon, the more enlivening it is. There’s something charmingly idiosyncratic about Lionel Shriver’s passion for the film soundtracks of Mark Knopfler or Rachel Kushner’s urgent sales pitch for the Gun Club’s fourth album. Ironically for a book about albums, Long Players is one to dip into rather than absorb in one sitting. As the subtitle suggests, there’s a heavy bias towards memoir rather than criticism, with only four professional music journalists in the mix.

The pieces by Mitchell and Saunders are thoughtful about the writing process, and seem like true assessments of the impact of these LPs on their own creative growth. In the case of many of the other writers collected here, though, the claimed epiphanies are harder to digest.

... despite the engaging nature of Gatti’s own introduction, a whistle-stop history of the album from shellac to Spotify, the essays here struggle.

It...benefits from an excellent introduction by Gatti that is filled with interesting tidbits of information on various topics, including the history of the album form. Most contributors take up Gatti’s charge to engage with a single beloved album, and the result is often that the music chosen serves to unlock the gates of memory in the way that the madeleine does in Proust.

... impassioned collection of writers’ love letters to the music that changed them.