It's a wonderful way to advance the cause of 20th-century music to an ordinary, intelligent general reader. Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican and a former Observer music critic, said: 'At a time when people are still talking about 20th-century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book about what I regard as some of the greatest music ever written. The Economist noted: 'No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording.' The New York Review of Books described The Rest Is Noise as 'by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music'. His blog – also called The Rest Is Noise – has been a trailblazer in harnessing the internet as a way of amplifying (often literally) his writing on music. An enthusiastic teenage musician and student broadcaster, he began writing music criticism after university and in 1996 was appointed music critic of the New Yorker. Ross, 40, was born in Washington DC, and studied English and history at Harvard. If there is an overarching idea to the book, it is perhaps contained in Berg's pronouncement to Gershwin: 'Mr Gershwin, music is music.' Along the way, fascinating connections are made: hip-hop has more in common with Janacek than you might think Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners Gershwin, in turn, was an ardent fan of Alban Berg and kept an autographed photo of the composer of Lulu in his apartment. Ross brushes aside the mythology of 20th-century music's 'inaccessibility' as he charts its meandering histories. Of all the artforms, modern and contemporary classical music is often seen as the most rebarbative. Ross, who is the music critic of the New Yorker, has distilled a lifetime's enthusiasm and learning into a rich narrative of musical history, setting the works of Mahler, Schoenberg, John Cage and the rest into their cultural and political contexts – but also giving a vivid sense of what the music he describes actually sounds and feels like. One of the members of the Waterstone's reading groups, who helped in the judging process, said: 'Every time I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose.' According to one judge: 'Where Ross lifts his book above the 'expert' and impressive to the 'good read' category is in the way he wears his learning lightly, never clutches for false or contrived ways of explaining music, and never dumbs down in order to explain.'

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross