Gratuitous (as in slightly self-serving) plug: Field-Tested Books is a cool annual Web project wherein a group of writers are asked to relate how a particular book especially resonated with them at a very specific time and, most importantly, place.

As the opening page of the recently posted 2008 edition puts it, "We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe it’s possible to determine how a book colors the way we feel about the place where we experience it."

In any event, I'm honored to have been asked to contribute this year, along with writerly peers such as Eric Spitznagel, Will Leitch, Liz Danico and my big fan Jessa Crispin of Bookslut. I wrote about Stanley Booth's masterful biography of the Stones (with some passing mention of Jack Kerouac to boot) in an entry posted here.

If you haven't read it, you absolutely should -- The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, that is, not necessarily my essay -- because as I've said before, it ranks among the top two or three best books about rock 'n' roll ever written.