By Nick Hornby
Book review by Katrina T. Rivere
Music will always be my first love. I still remember the pile of cassette tapes I accumulated back in the '80s, and how tears welled up in my eyes when one Christmas morning I found under the tree my very own personal CD player. Enter the digital music craze and my PC is filled to the brim with MP3s. The formats continue to change through the years but my love for music remains. Up to this day, I continue to buy album after album of music that makes me want to bop my head and sing out loud.
Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, is a self-confessed music lover, and in his book 31 Songs he writes about - you guessed it - 31 songs that make up the soundtrack of his life so far.
Browsing the contents page, 31 Songs reads like a weird compilation album, which frankly is how all our "favorite songs" list would probably read. The eclectic list includes artists such as The Beatles, Rod Stewart, Santana, and Nelly Furtado to the likes of Van Morrison and Ani DiFranco. The 31 songs in question are the soundtrack to Hornby's life, but they never actually take part during a particular event in his life, with the exception of Teenage Fanclub's Your Love Is the Place Where I Come From. The music he has chosen to write about are tracks that he loves simply because of the emotions they stir within him. He tells the reader straight away that his book is not an in-depth examination of each song (he admits that he is no music critic), but songs he simply felt that he had to write about. "This book isn't predicated on you and me sharing the ability to hear exactly the same things. In other words, it isn't music criticism. All I'm hoping here is that you have equivalents, that you spend a lot of time listening to music and seeing faces in its fire." Before I started reading 31 Songs, I thought it would be a good idea to download the songs that I was going to read about. But as soon as I started reading it, I realized there wasn't any need for that. The journey you take while reading the book is in Hornby's hands and he takes you for a ride you won't soon forget.
Hornby tells us that "if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use." Hornby associates the lyrics or even just the melody of a certain song to a period in his life - from when he was a struggling writer to when he was waiting for the movie version of About a Boy to be released.
Hornby also connects the music to certain beliefs (Rufus Wainwright's One Man Guy had this atheist do a "double-take"). He also writes about music having the ability to tie him to those around him, as he recalls a time when he was outside the doctor's office and a group of young girls began singing a song that he knew: "I liked that we had something in common, temporarily; I felt as though we all lived in the same world." As you read on, each song reveals a little bit more of this author's life, whether it be a humorous retelling of how awkward he felt dancing as a teenager or the more serious explanation of how music has played a major part in his autistic son's life.
31 Songs is essentially about Hornby's life as much as it is about music. It's about the associations between certain songs and his emotions and memories - associations that can be as enlightening and touching as they can be entertaining and frank.
31 Songs will allow younger readers to discover music before their time, and older readers will rediscover favorites that have been forgotten over time. Nick Hornby could have packaged the book with a CD but that would defeat his message. This is his life's soundtrack; it's up to us to make our own.
