31 SONGS by Nick Hornby (Penguin Books, 2003)
Everyone has their own personal soundtrack but few have the opportunity or desire to share them with the public at large. Why indeed would anybody else be interested in what is essentially a private relationship with the music you have encountered?
Nick Hornby makes no presumption that we will find his own favorite songs innately fascinating but they are just the same. These 26 essays are interesting for what they tell us about Hornby the man and writer. I have no idea why he hit upon 31 as a number but I’m sure he had his reasons.
Having become a little bored with the increasingly contrived plots of Hornby’s novels I appreciated the chatty, unpretentious style he adopts here. In my view he has never topped Fever Pitch, his first published work, and 31 Songs is in the same down to earth spirit.
It is about music in the same way that Fever Pitch was about soccer; in other words, the topic serves as a useful way to contextualize subjective observations about life and popular culture. There are plenty of sharp insights on how our tastes change as we get older and particularly touching are the essays in which he talks about the pain and pleasures of fathering an autistic son. Continue reading
From the writer-director team that brought us Juno, Young Adult is an intelligent comedy of sexual manners; a lively and humorous movie with a darker subtext.
