Nick Hornby’s Songbook isn’t a novel or a story like his other books. It’s more like a loose autobiography via essays that relate somehow to his favorite songs. And it’s absolutely wonderful.

Hornby — who, in case you forgot, wrote High Fidelity (love the book; the movie adaptation is my favorite film) and About a Boy — is a music-lover and always has been. So he figured he would write about songs that stick with him. He devotes a few pages to each song and moves on. Sometimes it’s how the songs make him feel, or memories that he ties them to, and often they become philosophical, psychological or sociological conversations on pop music and its place in our lives. In other words, it’s a book I’d love to write myself someday that, hopefully, wouldn’t end up seeming like a copycat derivative of Songbook.

Hornby writes in such a calm and simple candor that it’s easy to agree with him, or to at least to understand his where he’s coming from. He has a common sense that looks past the divisions that music creates between generations, examining its place in all our lives, reflecting on his own youth as well as his current middle-age, all the moments in between, and how music connects them all.

And with that, I leave you with this quote from a chapter about Röyksopp:

How is it possible to love or connect to music that is as omnipresent as carbon monoxide?

This may partly explain the teenage fondness for the profanities and antisocial attitudes of hip-hop: neither Starbucks nor The Body Shop nor the Hotel Minimalist wishes to assault their valued customers with obscene raps about Uzis and pussy set to beats that attempt to remove part of your skull, thus allowing contemporary youth to bond with their favorite artists in private. I was able to do that with Led Zeppelin because no one else was interested: you never heard “Dazed and Confused” on TV, or in department stores, or in pubs, or even on the radio very often; there was only one TV program dedicated to the music I liked in Britain. (Now there’s probably a “Dazed and Confused” cable channel somewhere that plays the song twenty-four hours a day.) I was therefore able to foster the notion that Zeppelin was something special, a secret between me and my friends. Such is pop music’s current tyranny that it must be almost impossible for kids to think that major artists are speaking directly and intimately to them — how is that possible, when those same artists are speaking to everyone who buys peppermint foot lotion or eats at Pizza Hut? The simplest retort to this ubiquity is to listen to and learn to like music that is essentially dislikable, stuff that would bring the Starbucks compilation people to their knees begging for mercy.

I highly recommend this book to all readers and music fans. As if I needed to say it.

When I came across a memoir wrapped up in a series of mix tapes, I knew I’d found something special. Even though I had other books to read, they had to be paused for Love is a Mix Tape.

Written by Rob Sheffield, a rock journalist and long-time fan of pretty much any good music, Love is a Mix Tape is an autobiography of sorts. Each chapter starts with a mix tape — a listing of songs important to that point in Sheffield’s story. He traces his roots, telling the reader how music has always played an important part of his life. He talks about growing up as a Catholic boy in Boston listening to Zeppelin, a twenty-something listening to Pavement, a thirty year old discovering Missy Elliot. But, most importantly, he tells us how he met Renee, the love of his life.

It’s no spoiler: Rob and Renee aren’t together for long. They got five years before she died suddenly. I knew it was coming, and yet was still surprised when it happened. Halfway through the book, Sheffield’s memoir suddenly transforms into a reflection of how he coped with loss, sometimes through friends and family, but mostly through music.

Perhaps I took this story more to heart than most. After all, as a wannabe music journalist with a girl by my side who has drastically altered the playlist of my life, I get where he’s coming from a bit. Reading what it was like for him to suffer was nearly unbearable for me; I hate hearing what it might be like to lose my other half so quickly and suddenly.

I guess this was a book meant for me. It was encouraging to see that someone else keeps track of what he was listening to, and has found a way to use it to learn and grow and reflect from his own history. I hope I can find a purpose for my own history-recording someday as well, though I’d prefer for it to be a happier experience.

If you feel music, if it helps you to live and love and grow and reflect, Love is a Mix Tape is for you. Call me a sap or an over-dramatic fool, but love and music were meant for each other and this book nails down the idea like none other could.

I saw this movie last night and pretty much sat in the theater in wonder for two hours. Not only were the sounds these three guitar legends able to coax out of their instruments amazing, but it held up as a journey through many philosophies about creativity and artistic creation. Immediately upon leaving the theater I felt an intense urge to pick up a guitar, find my voice and play whatever comes out.

Talk about resetting the synapses. They make it look so easy, but I wonder sometimes if they are created special beings. Beings that can tap into a sense of focus and creative meandering and a freedom and confidence to put notes and words on paper and hope other people feel the same way they do about them.