If you've ever asked someone else to why they like a particular piece of music, this is highly recommended!


If music be the food of love......   March 20, 2003
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

If you have a solitary CD to your name, I defy you not to get caught up in Nick Hornby's infectious love of pop music and what it has meant to him from puberty to middle age.

So what if you have not heard of most of the songs ? By the time Hornby has finished a particular essay, I'm sure you want to listen to any number of pleasingly esoteric ditties from "You've Had Time" from Ani Difranco to "Let's Straighten it Out" by O.V. Wright, if only to hear what all the fuss is about.

But curiously the book is all the more effective for not being a collection of well trodden favourites, the important thing here is not the songs themselves but the various effects that they have wrought on the author from a simple warm fuzzy feeling to the closest a secularist can come to spirituality. It takes a brave and confident writer to attempt to link a song from a film sound track to his deepest feelings about his autistic son, but Hornby pulls it off, and in doing so, makes us all those who derive our cultural pleasures exclusively from pop music, think more deeply about our relationship with those songs which have accompanied our personal highs and lows.

So if you love music and recognise the emotional responses it can produce then buy this book or maybe, given its price and brevity, demand it as a birthday present ?


An authors inspiration   March 10, 2003
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Reading this, took me back to Hornby's High Fidelty, it feels like he's making a compilation tape of his life for his readers and then writing a book about it, instead of giving them the tape to listen to. Its interesting to see the type of music that has influenced him and you get the feeling that music plays a very important role in his life and work. Really good if you're a fan or of the same generation.