I felt like High Fidelity showed more of his love for music than this book did. I don’t feel that he really, in most of these essays, even tied the song to anything in his life in a meaningful way. And what might have been mildly entertaining to read in a character in a book like High Fidelity is not entertaining to read in a person who is not a quirky character in a book, but a true human who is claiming to have something to say worth hearing. For example, his constant judgement of others is off putting, I quote, “the ubiquity of The Pretender in all the record collections of the girls I met at college confirmed my suspicion that when it came to music, girls didn’t Get It” - maybe you didn’t meet the right girls in college because you were a pretentious loser? Maybe people who don’t agree with your music tastes could still be smart or interesting people who have their one viewpoint on music? Maybe a whole lot of people don’t have the money to invest in buying up every obscure album they find that they might like, and don’t have the financial luxury to curate obscure music tastes (for all Spotify has done to not support artists and music at least it has leveled the playing field for listening to a lot of diverse music). Maybe some people have that obsessive passion about literature or visual media or other forms of expression but their music tastes mean they love to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and that’s OK and they’re OK. OK, scratch that last part, anyone who loves the Red Hot Chili Peppers needs help.

My new purse book.

I had been looking forward to this book for a number of years. I enjoy Nick Hornby's writing, and his credibility as to music is certainly set in my mind after the fun HIGH FIDELITY. I was a little let down by the book itself. Hornby makes it very clear from the beginning that he is concentrating on only pop music and its only songs he loves, and the reasons he loves them, but I found each essay a bit too meandering, without a real center. Often Hornby spent almost no time talking about the songs themselves. Overall it struck me as a book that was likely far more fun for Hornby to write than it was for me to read.

That said, you won't be reading for ten minutes before you start mentally compiling your own songs for YOUR list, and that is great fun!

okay less a review...more a brag...I have a signed copy of this!

I actually like a number of the songs Hornby highlights in his book about the influence of pop music on his life--but I should never have listened to the accompanying CD, which I found to be mostly dreadful. It definitely colored my reading of the book.

I like Rufus Wainwright, but "One Man Guy" is far from his best song. The only other song that seemed worthy of the book was Ani DiFranco's "You Had Time".

The writing itself covers a much broader canvas, and even if you aren't that familiar with, or don't like, some of Hornby's greatest hits, you can appreciate the connections he makes between age, life events and experience, and the way music can keep you company while soothing and supporting. Hornby can be a bit overbearing with his particular approvals and dismissals, and has an aura of superiority about his taste which can annoy--but still, the book is entertaining and got me thinking, even if I was just arguing with him in my head.

The best chapter for me was "Gregory Isaacs--Puff the Magic Dragon", where he talks about his autistic son and how music anchors him in the world as a wordless but completely understandably method of interaction and communication.

"That's why I love the relationship with music he has already, because it's how I know he has something in him that he wants others to articulate....It's the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part, and Danny's got it too, of course he has; you could argue that he's simply dispensed with all the earthbound, rubbishy bits."

Music is magic, no argument there at all.

A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe they'll be another. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living.

I love Nick Hornby. I love his voice. And I love that he's so neurotically obsessive about the things that he loves.

Here he dissects 31 of his favorite songs. I have a hard time believing that these are his actual favorite 31 songs. I felt like they were 31 good lead-ins to 31 essays, in a way. He had some points to make about music, and these particular songs, or artists helped to illustrate them.

I was most intrigued by the song "notes." I looked up each one on You Tube so that I could hear them as I read. He listed pretty specific details on some, and it was fun to catch on to what he was talking about. I was introduced to some songs and artists I'd never heard. Some struck a chord with me, some didn't. I made a list of some I'd like to hear again. (OK music freaks, I know you want specifics...how about Rufus Wainwright doing "One Man Guy"...or "Caravan" by Van Morrison?)

Hornby here writes like a magazine music critic. He likes to explain the "why" behind a song. He reminds me of a Biology professor, carefully dissecting a frog. There's a nerd, and a poet within him.

Only three stars because there were some uninteresting parts (did I really need a whole essay about why Los Lobos makes a good boxed set, but not Stevie Nicks? Aren't boxed sets already dated anyway, in this day of digital downloads?) But there were some highs, too, including Hornby devoting an essay to the musical interests of his autistic son--a very tender moment. Love you, Nick! You can make me a mix anyday.

When I put this on my wishlist, I thought it was a novel. I just read a couple of Hornby's books and decided I wanted to read them all. I was a little disappointed when I discovered it was just him talking about 31 songs he liked, especially when I looked at the list of songs and either don't know or don't like any of them.

But this isn't really about those particular songs. This is a musical journey that pretty much everyone can relate to. Even though the songs are different, they way he's gone through genres at certain stages of life, echos my own.

I laughed out loud when he mentioned starting to look towards country music, as it tends to be like heavy rock music where it's not that mainstream and you still feel like you have something special to you. I am loving country music at the moment, I must have reached that age!

Everyone who starts to notice they are getting older will relate to not understanding the music of today. My niece was playing some rap song for me yesterday, kept going 'boys, not hot'. And I was judging it for being stupid. This book has made me remember that I love the song 'Barbie Girl' and I will sing along to 'The Cheeky Girls' if it's being played. And I'm guessing my parents didn't understood why I liked those tunes, as their parents no doubt didn't understand what they were listening to.

Still can't get over that all the songs I like are now being played on 'Magic' . A radio station that used to be reserved exclusively for songs my mum liked.

Hornby injects his trademark humor into the writing and although I did try and listen to a few of the tracks on youtube, they are not my thing. But that doesn't matter. Like I said before, this is about the relationship people have with music. Very relatable.

Hornby has a strange and anxious personality as a music critic. He often seems wounded and defensive when expressing his opinions. He offers qualifiers that don’t so much communicate humility or clarification, but of anxiety. Reading 31 consecutive chapters leaves me with the feeling that they serve to provide him with a protective shield for his opinions more than they serve to communicate any real joy or inspiration that these 31 songs ostensibly bring him. Unfortunately, the result is that it’s kind of a drag reading him.

What, exactly, is he trying to protect? I believe he is trying to establish that it is okay for him to like pop music. And what thesis could be more banal and pointless than that? While Songbook would ostensibly be for a popular audience, I get the undeniable impression that his writing is aimed at an audience that is not popular, but rather fellow critics, writers, intellectuals, literati. Clearly, it must be, because, as a lover of pop music, he has, by definition, most of the world on his side! He doesn’t need to convince the masses to love a song that is already loved by the masses, right? It’s the literati who are apparently against him (although this is only ever implied. He never actually shares any evidence of persecution by his peers [or by the masses, for that matter]). Tellingly, the last sentence in his chapter on Suicide’s Frankie Teardrop (it is the one glaring exception to the other 30 pop songs that he uses as a counterpoint), he writes “don’t try to make me feel morally or intellectually inferior” for not wanting to listen to music like Suicide (64). Who could he be addressing other than his critic peers? Surely no one who shares his love of Rod Stewart, Ben Folds Five, Jackson Browne, Rufus Wainwright, etc. (ie: popular audiences). Of course, there’s an irony here. For all of his allegiance to pop music, his book skips over popular audiences in order to reach and react to his critic peers.

In his attempts to convince his peers of the merits of say, Nelly Furtado, it’s a little comical and a little sad, because he is in a constant state of defending the status quo, the people in charge, the music companies, the radio conglomerates, the logarithms, the victors of history, if you will. And this is where Hornby’s true anxiety lies: he is trying to establish his right to both remain a member of the literati AND enjoy the radio. It’s unfair, it’s true, that his peers won’t let him (if indeed they won’t), but I’m not sure if the reader should give a shit.

The other reason why Hornby is not really writing to a popular audience, but rather his literary peers is that he is not so much defending pop music, but the Idea of Pop Music; of pop music as an institution, if you will. His very brief chapters on songs are riddled with extrapolations about the song as a stand-in for the Institution of Pop. Lauding or defending a song feels like a proxy fight for defending Pop Music itself. Again, this causes for slightly stressful, and certainly not joyous, reading.

Where is the thrill that should accompany a book ostensibly about 31 thrilling songs?

Hornby defends pop not in its own right, but in opposition to other genres, including jazz, classical, and most rap. For example, being a jazz fan is automatically a stand-in for being a snob or an inauthentic posturer. But remarkably, Hornby is not even defending ALL pop music, but only pop music of a narrow scope. After all, he has to write off SOME pop music to justify his status as a critic and not just any ordinary music listener. So even within the institution of pop, not all pop is allowed: he distances himself from anything that rocks “too hard,” and while acknowledging the greatness of critics’ choice canonical pop works (Pet Sounds), he claims that no one really listens to those anymore (Really? It’s okay to like pop, but not the Beach Boys?!). It’s not that there’s anything wrong with liking adult-oriented pop and soft rock (to use a broad stroke to characterize the 31 songs contained within his list). It’s that his trustworthiness as a music guide become questionable when that is virtually the only sound that he finds worth writing about. Frankly, what use is a critic if their ears only capable of listening to a fraction of the popular music spectrum?

The most telling (and wickedly amusing) part of the book is how Hornby resolves the dilemma of finding himself loving a Patti Smith live set, consisting of poetry with musical accompaniment (dangerously non-pop) by assuring us that a poet walked out of the performance, as if to tell us, “Don’t worry—it wasn’t that artsy—a poet walked out!” And he literally ends the last sentence of the chapter, and of the main section of the book, by trying to reassure himself, that it’s okay, that Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River,” is actually just a pop song:

“I’m a little ambivalent about it [ending the book with recounting Patti Smith’s live performance of the song]: maybe it’s a little too High Culture, what with Woolf and Blacke and Ackroyd [who Smith references in her performance] and the chapel and all. Maybe I should close with “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” or “Surfin’ Bird” or “I Hate You So Much Right Now.” On the other hand, the song was called “Pissing in a River,” and it was played on guitars, and it lasted four or five minutes, and its emotional effects depended entirely on its chords and its chorus and its attitude. It’s a pop song, in other words, and like a lot of other pop songs, it’s capable of just about anything” (153).

In this passage it is remarkable how concerned he is about being a critic that likes a pop song that others would readily identify as being a bit “edgy.” After erecting walls around himself to distance himself from those other, snobbier critics, what is he to do when he can’t help but fall in love with pop of an artsy variety? What’s remarkable here is not Hornby’s claim that the song is pop—it seems pretty straightforward that it is—but rather that Hornby is so concerned about liking something that fits within the boundaries of pop music.

Hornby’s inherent critique of fellow critics (“metacriticism?”) is that they don’t give pop a fair shake. This book feels like a reactionary over-correction by his almost masochistic denial of pleasure for himself if it is drawn from music that strays to far off the middle of the road.

Nick Hornby has the capacity of writing these things that make me think, "well anyone could have done this", but when you see most people trying to do it, they fail miserably. Kieron Gillen had to break out magicians and banging art to be able to give me similar "old british guy talks about music" feelings!

In 26 essays Hornby covers 31 songs and, in particular, which elements of each emotionally resonate with him. The song choice is fantastic, ranging from tunes by Springsteen, to Royksöpp, to Nelly Furtardo, and all the way back to Patti Smith. My edition also includes 5 additional essays, covering 14 albums, written for the New Yorker.

Here Hornby truly captures what makes us love pop music. Written in his usual provocative yet free-flowing style, I can't say I agreed with every take, but it was enough to make me laugh and think. It's fun to listen to songs before and after each essay, they really do push you to re-evaluate your opinions. It turned me on to a few new favourites, namely "Born For Me" by Paul Westerberg. Truth be told, whilst I love the Replacements his solo material had never encapsulated me. I didn't even like the song much when I first listened to it before reading the essay; however, on my succeeding listen my doubts were soothed. The extra essays, whilst intriguing, are nowhere near as convicting as the rest of the book. Perhaps that's what happens when writing for the New Yorker. With that being said, Hornby's writing on Aimee Mann and Steve Earle are worthwhile.

All in all, as with the rest of Hornby's work, I can't recommend this enough to any intelligent individual obsessed with pop culture and, most importantly, music.

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”

A nice excursus onto Hornby’s fine taste for music. Light and enjoyable.

This was written in 2002 and it shows.

I picked this up hoping it was a music equivalent of Hornby's delightful books column for The Believer, the point of which was always that reading begets more reading, so tangents and anecdotes were part of the deal. So too in this collection of essays, except it turns out, with only a few exceptions, it's hard to care about the music Hornby writes about. In only two cases did I become interested enough that I might check out the recordings (Steve Earle and Nick Cave.)

I still and always like Hornby's style, he is companionable and relatable. But for essays, I would stick to reading one of his other collections.