What to read this week, from Alice Coltrane to Michael Pollan

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane by Andy Beta

For decades, the harpist Alice Coltrane was little more than a footnote in the story of jazz – a history dominated by her husband John Coltrane. But play her 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda and you may find you have the same reaction as Andy Beta, who felt he had discovered “the most beautiful music in the universe”. Beta’s superb biography tells the extraordinary story of Coltrane’s musical evolution and personal journey: her marriage to John produced three children but lasted just two years before he died of cancer; she then was plunged into a depression that involved self-harm and attempted suicide. It is, however, Alice Coltrane’s profound spirituality that guided her until her death in 2007, as she continued to make devotional music that aspired to a higher state of being.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

Not for nothing is it called “the hard problem”; the mystery of consciousness is so opaque that even Tom Stoppard – who named a play after it – could not solve it. The science writer Michael Pollan does not promise to explain why or how we have subjective first-person experiences, writes Sophie McBain, but in this humane, persuasive and – most importantly, perhaps – eminently readable book, he shifts from philosophy to psychedelics to AI in order to give us a deeper understanding of a biological miracle.
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Dear Historian by Joff Winterhart

Killian Fox’s third pick this year for graphic novel of the month is a delightful odd-couple story from Joff Winterhart, whose books include Days of the Bagnold Summer, which was turned into a charming film by director Simon Bird and writer Lisa Owens, and starring Nick Cave’s son Earl Cave. Winterhart’s long-awaited new book, Dear Historian, is about the relationship between Margaret, a historian in her 70s, and Lucy, a thirtysomething TV producer at a whizzy TV company. “I thought it would be hard for Winterhart to top Driving Short Distances, one of my favourite graphic novels of the past 10 years,” Killian writes. “But somehow, with this rather offbeat premise, he’s managed it.” 
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Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps

Lucy Apps, one of The Observer’s debut novelists of the year, was yesterday longlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction for Gloria Don’t Speak, a book that asks us to see the world through the eyes of a young woman with learning difficulties. It is, says our reviewer Ellen Peirson-Hagger, emotionally profound and politically important: a marvel of a debut novel.
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance