In response to yesterday's query about whether anybody's written the Great Rock Novel, Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press writes, "The question should really be 'Can Any Literati Published by a Commercial New York Mainstream Publisher Truly Rock Out?' And the answer is, 'Doubtful... As we used to say in the '90s, corporate rock still sucks.'" As it happens, her press will be reissuing John Longhi's The Rise and Fall of Third Leg this summer, but, as she points out, "There are about a zillion more under the radar that unfortunately don't get reviewed in the NY Times because the authors aren't famous."

Many of which, it turns out, were cited in a 2005 Bookslut article that basically offers a beginner's guide to the genre (which reminded me of George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag, a dark fantasy about the resurrection of a band called the Nazgul that could be described as Led Zeppelin with Jim Morrison on lead vocals, which has just come back into print. Then there were books that were recommended to us by more than one reader, like Scott Spencer's Dylanesque Rich Man's Table and Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, although one reader had reservations about the latter, calling it "just decent" and "not [Meno's] best book." And then there was the note from Bucky Sinister, who cautioned that most rock novels tend to rely on archetypal stock characters like "the good looking lead singer, the dumb drummer, the tall bass player, the drugged out guitarist; sometimes they'll throw in a woman on bass if it's an alt rock band." He adds:

"In the end, Bob Seger's "Hollywood Nights" or Bad Company's "Shooting Star" are three-minute versions of these books. There's the rise to stardom, the disillusionment, and the OD. It's like Lester Bangs wrote a rock version of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and everyone's been following the same formula. What these writers know of rock bands is what they've seen on VH1's Behind The Music and from "Die At The End" biopics like Lady Sings the Blues or Sid & Nancy."

Here are some of the other titles our readers told us about:

• Not Fade Away, Jim Dodge
• Billion Dollar Baby, Bob Greene
• Finding Helen, Colin Greenland
• Go Now and Godlike, Richard Hell (a real rock star!)
• King Dork, Frank Portman

And, on the nonfiction tip, one reader reminded us of Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, and another mentioned a John Albert essay about a Black Flag concert in the recently published anthology The Show I'll Never Forget ("despite being technically true, his story has all the markings of good fiction"). But if we started talking nonfiction, then we'd have to throw in about half the works of Greil Marcus and all the books of Peter Guralnick, along with the better chapters of Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, for starters...