My love for Dub and Dub reggae  music started one sunday morning when I listened for the first time to the Aggrovators and King Tubby's Dub Jackpot LP.
Since then my dub record collection has grown quite a bit.

A brilliant book on jamaican music from the early ska to dub and reggae is Bass Culture.

Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King by Lloyd Bradley
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

“Jamaican music at last has the book it deserves” PRINCE BUSTER, from his foreword

“The first comprehensive history of every aspect of reggae (and) it could be the last that talked to those who were there at stage one...Bradley leaves no stone unturned in a coruscating rollercoaster ride through murder, major label gripes, ganja paranoia and racism, ending with Luciano hoping for a return to good songs and good singers. And if UB 40 get a mention, I missed it. Isn`t that recommendation enough for you ? “ MOJO

“Switches between informed analysis and intoxicating aural history...With epic contributions from major players such as PrinceBuster, Horace Andy, Bunny Lee and Dennis Bovell” GQ

“Fascinating...written with passion, style and gusto. This is a book many musicians would benefit from reading” JAH WOBBLE, Independent on Sunday

“A compelling social and musical history running from Fifties soundsystem roots to contemporary dancehall...filled to the brim with anecdotes to keep the most hardened music-head happy” FACE

“A classic...Hilarious in places, peppered with social and historical comment in others, this is a fascinating account detailing how reggae evolved in Jamaica and became a global phenomenon” NEW NATION

Funny enough Lloyd Bradly Lloyd Bradley is also classically trained chef, which links this reccomendation to the last one ;-)

So if you are into Jamaican music read this book!

Another book I would like to recommend in this context is :

Collin Macinnes, City of Spades
Penguin Books Ltd

A portrait of black immigrants in the London of the 1950ies.

"...His reputation, although somewhat faded now, rests on his three "London novels" of the 50s, all of which betray a great deal of sympathy for the underdog. Absolute Beginners (1959) suggests the turmoil of a decade that witnessed the rise of the teenager as a cultural force. Mr Love and Justice (1960) examines the glamorisation of crime and criminals and the hypocrisy of the police, especially when dealing with pimps and prostitutes. But it is the first of these novels, City of Spades (1957) that is in many ways the most remarkable, both in its subject-matter and form.

Montgomery Pew, a cautious and shy Englishman, is employed as a welfare officer among London's new black immigrants. He is told to expect trouble from these somewhat excitable and not always trustworthy West Indians and West Africans, but he does not heed his superior's words of warning. He is attracted to the invigorating, vibrant, and above all new world that these newcomers inhabit, and he subsequently loses his job. What he gains is entry into a world altogether different from Jimmy Porter's or Jim Dixon's or Billy Liar's. It is a hidden, bohemian London of nightclubs, shebeens, West African late-night restaurants, squats, brothels, cafés, bent coppers, gay pick-up joints, Indian restaurants on the Thames, all operating with dizzying intensity behind the façade of post-Edwardian respectability that 50s Britain tried desperately to affect.

City of Spades has an ingenious structure, being narrated in short, episodic bursts, first from Montgomery's "white" point of view, and then from that of Johnny Fortune, a genial West African scoundrel who befriends him..."

Read the whole Guardian article "Kingdom of the blind"

City of spades is out of print and has to be bought second hand.