Belle & Sebastian

Book Club is a new monthly series exploring the literature that inspires some of our favorite musicians. Whether it’s a music biography that got them through the slog of tour, the poetry collection that eked into their most poignant lyrics, or the novel that sparked a rock opera, we’ll get to the bottom of it so you can add it to the top of your book stack. This month, we speak to Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. Stuart Murdoch fell in love with books in his early 20s, and obsessing over literature shaped some of his earliest Belle & Sebastian songs. “My book phase changed my life,” he says over the phone. “I felt that with every book I was reading, I was being changed as a person, more so than music ever did for me.” Though he characterizes a lot of his earliest reading mate...