31 Songs
Sven-S. Porst reviews Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs, which seems to be the U.K. version of Songbook.
Writing about music in an engaging or thought provoking way is hard—I mostly fail to do so and so do many writers in music magazines. While Nick Hornby may have the back-catalogue of knowledge, I don’t think he’s terribly good at writing about music. Furthermore, reading the book made clear to me that I appreciate Nick Hornby as a novelist and that I hardly care about anecdotes of his life.
For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed High Fidelity and About a Boy. The movies are good, too, but different. How to Be Good started out well, but then it got heavy handed and went nowhere.
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I love both of those books (and the movies). I read "High Fidelity" on a flight from Frankfurt to Denver once, and have had a soft spot for Hornby ever since. I'm *really* anxiously awaiting his film adaptation of Dave Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."
I've *got* to get the book for High Fidelity. I get completely sucked into the movie whenever its on and I read the original.
High Fidelity is a great airplane book. Another good one is David Benioff's The 25th Hour, although I don't recommend it if you've seen the movie because it's almost exactly the same.
I was a big fan of 25th Hour the movie (never read the book). I seem to be unique among almost all of my acquaintances in that respect, though. If I may say this without sounding too pretentious, it's treatment of Sept. 11 reminded me a lot of James Joyce's treatment of the "Irish troubles" in Dubliners--that is, it's not really about Sept. 11 per-se, but that subject is always lurking in the background.
