By Rob Sheffield

You already know how you feel about the Beatles. Who needs another book about them? Dreaming the Beatles makes you feel like a fool for even asking that question. This is the definitive Beatles book, the only one that comes close to the rush of listening to Rubber Soul or Revolver for the first time.

Sheffield—who, full disclosure, is a friend of myself and many other Pitchfork contributors—is full of wildly original insights on the Fab Four themselves. (Particularly Paul. The chapter titled “Paul Is a Concept By Which We Measure Our Pain” is a master class in how to write about one’s heroes.) But, ingeniously, he spends most of the book focusing on the fan’s-eye view of the band whose audience invented pop fandom as we know it. “When I listen to Hollywood Bowl, I do not imagine being one of the Beatles,” Sheffield writes. “I fantasize about being the girl in the upper-balcony cheap seats, ripping out my hair and shrieking, tapping into a ruinous eternal gnosis that not even the boys in the band could ever know.”

That ecstasy is what powers Dreaming the Beatles, and it doesn’t let up when the band splits; Sheffield cares as much about the second, third, and fourth waves of Beatlemania. With this endlessly delightful glass onion of a book, you’re constantly torn between racing ahead to the next chapter and rereading the one you just sped through. It’s a 318-page-long “yeah, yeah, yeeeeah.” –Simon Vozick-Levinson