Emily Yahr in conversation with Sarah Rodman, "Taylor Swift: The Debut Years"

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You can date your own life by whichever album you were ruining yourself to at the time, and for an enormous number of people the first one arrived with a banjo and a MySpace page attached. Before the stadiums there was a teenager in Nashville nobody was betting on, and the story of those years is messier and more interesting than the mythology built on top of it since. Yahr covered that stretch in real time for the Washington Post, which is the difference between a book about fame and a book by somebody who was in the room while it was not yet fame. Rodman sits across from her, and both are music journalists rather than fans with laptops, so expect actual reporting and some unflattering specifics. The crowd on the Sunset Strip will be the interesting part: people who have argued about track-five placement for fifteen years, standing in a narrow aisle thirty chairs deep. Free. Arrive early, because Book Soup's events fill from the front and the shelves do not move. Tuesday at seven.