Young Man with a Horn

If you've ever seen the 1950 Kirk Douglas movie based on this book, please forget that you did: the book is so much better. It's the story of a rootless, almost anonymous boy who finds himself in music—a white boy, specifically, who finds himself in the black musical tradition of jazz, though the book manages to avoid many of the clichés such stories have made familiar. Like Beth Harmon on the chessboard in Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, Rick Martin is an orphan driven to perfect a talent that seems to fall out of the sky, and like Tevis, Baker builds her story, and Martin's half-inarticulate interior life, from the simplest of language. It's a moving and spacious portrait of passionate (and destructive) creativity, and of friendship too, between RIck and his other true love: his fellow players.