Here is your book playlist: Listen to all the songs before or throughout reading the book. I listened to these songs as I made my way through each section.

Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From - Teenage Fanclub
Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen
I'm Like a Bird - Nelly Furtado
Heartbreaker - Led Zeppelin
One Man Guy - Rufus Wainwright
Samba Pa Ti - Santana
Mama You've Been on My Mind - Rod Stewart
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window - Bob Dylan
Rain - The Beatles
You Had Time - Ani DiFranco
I've Had It - Aimee Mann
Born for Me - Paul Westerberg
Frankie Teardrop - Suicide
Ain't That Enough - Teenage Fanclub
First I Look at the Purse - J Geils Band
Smoke - Ben Folds Five
A Minor Incident - Badly Drawn Boy
Glorybound - The Bible
Caravan - Van Morrison
So I'll Run - Butch Hancock and Marce Lacouture
Puff the Magic Dragon - Gregory Isaacs
Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3 - Ian Dury and the Blockheads
The Calvary Cross - Richard and Linda Thompson
Late for the Sky - Jackson Browne
Hey Self Defeater - Mark Mulcahy
Needle in a Haystack - The Velvelettes
Let's Straighten It Out - O. V. Wright
Röyksopp's Night Out - Röyksopp
Frontier Psychiatrist - The Avalanches
No Fun/Push It - Soulwax
Pissing in a River - Patti Smith Group


This is an interesting piece of essays. I think this would be great for someone who is a big fan of Hornby. It gives you a lot of preservative into his life and interests. You don't see that too much in other pieces. I think this is also a good book to see another side to music. I am always looking for people to sit down and debate issues like this with me. I always have something to say about music.

The most important thing that Hornby makes here is that songs create memories and they also help us relive things. Like a first love, or the time your wrecked your car, or whatever. It's something we all universally connect to. It's subjective and objective in many ways. All of these songs mean something totally different from what he explained in this book. Listen to what other have to say and you can learn something from it.

I find discussing music difficult - how do you articulate *why* you like some piece of music or a band, *why* it is good? And music is so important to me; it is the essence of happiness. Grandma used to make us mixed tapes (we'd send her a list of songs); I used to make mixed tapes for my closest friends. This is something we no longer do in this era of streaming music; this book is nostalgic in that way as it reads like the liner notes of a mixed tape.

Hornby discusses:
--The association of memories with songs (and the fact that people who say their favorite song is based on a memory in fact love the memory more than the song). Most of my memory-association song connections are songs that I still love that remind me of college - I still listen to this music (Coldplay, Beck, Elliot Smith). To Hornby's point, there are few (like Sheryl Crow's "A Change Will Do You Good") that remind me of changing diapers and Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass" and Bette Midler's "From a Distance" that remind me of teenage basement dance parties - for these, the memory is more powerful than the song.
--How a song (or a book) can feel like an expression of self, this feeling of "this song is *so* me", or "this is what I feel on the inside". We play music we love and hope/wonder whether others like it, too, which becomes some strange judgement of our selves. "He has something in him that he wants others to articulate" - and Hornby thinks this could be the best, richest, strangest part of us.
--The relevance of pop music. Does all music need to change the world? Is pop music uniquely disposable? Should the lyrics look good written down? Unlike the sixties, no one today believes that music is changing the world; thus pop can be easily written off as trivial, transient, not important. Should music be complicated, intelligent? Is music that is somehow better? Pop generally isn't - and does this make it less? Less that what? Classical music? Hornby argues no. He wants his music to make him feel, and pop certain does this for most.
--Bob Dylan
--Lyrics vs tune; how the best songs are love songs

The enduring truth about Hornby is that he is such a likeable guy, and this book reinforces that - I want to be his friend, I want to hang out at barbecues and have discussions about life, music, getting older, dreams, etc. He is incredibly egalitarian in his life views and music taste - all he asks is that is sound good. Ultimately, however, this feeling will likely be all that lingers in the memory of this book. Maybe part of the problem is that it feels a little dated - as it discusses music from the year 2003?

I'm having trouble choosing between four and five stars for this one. Parts of it are fantastic, but it's a little uneven. Granted, I went into it with really high expectations based on my music geekiness and my love of Nick Hornby. High Fidelity is one of my favorite books ever, and I love non-fiction and music criticism. For some reason, it took me years to get around to this, but that still did not diminish my sky-high expectations.
It's a fun and breezy read, and I appreciate that each chapter can be read in about the length of the song being discussed. Also, it's a great book for the streaming age. Thanks to the previous readers who created Songbook playlists for me on Google Play.
Songbook is really affecting where Hornby intersects the personal and the musical, as when he describes the way a Badly Drawn Boy song connected with him on a deeper level than his own book regarding his autistic son.
I also greatly appreciate the way he really elevates and glorifies some under-appreciated gems, such as Ani DiFranco's "You Had Time" while also cutting some overrated tracks such as "Thunder Road." To be sure, I am a huge fan of Springsteen and (early) DiFranco, but both tracks are nothing more or less than great pop songs. Ironically, in writing a short chapter about each song, he manages to cut back the undue praise for the former and bestow it deservingly on the latter.

Nick Hornby wrote what I consider to be my favorite book, High Fidelity, in which a music-obsessed man makes lists of his favorite songs and ponders his past romantic relationships. Considering Songbook is essentially a Hornby biography, as told through his favorite songs, I'm actually surprised I hadn't read it before.

I love hearing Hornby talk about the songs that he's passionate about. That's a huge part of why I love High Fidelity. Even if I don't know the music, I admire the love for this music. It's similar to how I feel about the writing of Chuck Klosterman. What makes Songbook so interesting to me is that I'm not familiar with most of these songs as it is, so I decided to listen to each of these songs - most for the first time - as I read about them. I think I was only familiar with about a fifth of them, and I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that I found myself more engaged with the chapters about the songs I already knew, as opposed to the ones I was going ignorant about.

Yet as I think about this book a few days after I finished it, I can't help but wishing Songbook had been one thing or the other. It's sort of hard to write about why some of your favorite songs are your favorite songs, without explaining their importance in your life, but I almost wish Hornby had been allowed to either go into more depth about the songs, or more in depth about his life and how it relates to these songs. Each chapter is incredibly short, and I wanted Hornby to dig a big deeper. I almost felt like right as I was learning so much about Hornby's favorite local record store, his autistic son, or the importance of Jackson Browne to him dealing with his divorce, the chapter would end and a whole new story would begin.

But it's always wonderful to have an opportunity to read Hornby on entertainment that means something to him, and Songbook is a great primer into the music that made him. I just wish there was more of it.