Product Description

McSweeney's is excited to release Songbook \226 a brand-new collection of short, personal essays by Nick Hornby on 31 of his favorite songs and songwriters. This hardcover book has 4-color illustrations by Marcel Dzama throughout and comes complete with a CD featuring 11 songs discussed within.

Proceeds from Songbook will benefit TreeHouse and 826 Valencia.

The TreeHouse Trust is a U.K. charity based in central London, established in 1997 to provide an educational Centre of Excellence for children with autism and related communication disorders.

826 Valencia is a nonprofit learning center in the Mission District of San Francisco, providing free writing-based tutoring and workshops for students throughout the Bay Area. Students can drop in for individual one-on-one tutoring, register for workshops, or attend field trips through local schools and community organizations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #608260 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 147 pages

Download Description
"From the New York Times bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How to be Good ""All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do"" -Nick Hornby What interests Nick Hornby? Songs, songwriters, everything, compulsively, passionately. Here is his ultimate list of 31 all-time favorite songs. And here are his smart, funny, and very personal essays about them, written with all the love and care of a perfectly mastered mixed tape..."

Amazon.com
The personal essays in Nick Hornby's Songbook pop off the page with the immediacy and passion of an artfully arranged mix-tape. But then, who better to riff on 31 of his favorite songs than the author of that literary music-lover's delight, High Fidelity?

"And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do," writes Hornby. More than his humble disclaimer, he captures "the narcotic need" for repeat plays of Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird," and testifies that "you can hear God" in Rufus Wainwright's coy reinterpretation of his father Loudon's "One Man Guy" ("given a neat little twist by Wainwright Junior's sexual orientation..."). Especially poignant is his reaction to "A Minor Incident," a Badly Drawn Boy song written for the soundtrack of the film version of Hornby's book About a Boy. While Hornby was writing the book, his young son was diagnosed with autism--a fact that adds greater resonance to the seemingly unrelated song he hears much later: "I write a book that isn't about my kid, and then someone writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did." Meandering asides and observations like this linger in your mind (just like a fantastic song) long after you've flipped past the final page.

The 11-song CD that accompanies the book is a great touch, but it's too bad it doesn't contain all of the featured songs--most likely the unfortunate result of licensing difficulties. Overall, Hornby's pitch-perfect prose, the quirky illustrations from Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, and a good cause--proceeds benefit TreeHouse, a U.K. charity for children with autism, and 826 Valencia, the nonprofit Bay Area learning center--add up to make Songbook a hit. Solid gold. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Download Description
"From the New York Times bestselling author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How to be Good ""All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do"" -Nick Hornby What interests Nick Hornby? Songs, songwriters, everything, compulsively, passionately. Here is his ultimate list of 31 all-time favorite songs. And here are his smart, funny, and very personal essays about them, written with all the love and care of a perfectly mastered mixed tape..."

Customer Reviews

Worth reading even if, no, _especially_ if you aren't already familiar with the songs
If you liked Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, chances are that you'll also enjoy Songbook, his collection of essays on specific songs, originally written when he was a pop music critic for The New Yorker. Like Rob, the protagonist of High Fidelity, Hornby himself is a music fan who links particular songs to different events and stages of his life. His enthusiasm is genuine, and rather contagious, and his observations are thoughtful and funny. Furthermore, Hornby's taste in music is excellent, though, as he admits, he leans towards the contemplative, lyrical side of pop. I will be forever grateful to him for introducing me to the music of Rufus Wainwright.

Songbook was originally released with a cd from McSweeney's Book, and that edition is long out of print, however, in this age of iTunes and downloadable music, you should have no problem compiling your own copy of what is, essentially, Hornby's mix tape for you, the reader.

This paperback edition also has new material at the back, including Hornby's hilarious account of his attempt to broaden and update his taste by listening to Billboard's Top Ten Albums.

Passion and straightforwardness
I've recently missed my plane in Denver - this having been the last flight of the evening, I was sentenced to spend the night at the airport. Scouting the airport bookstore I bumped into the Songbook and snapped it from the shelf. It was a great choice.

This book is about Hornby's passion for music. Sitting there, at the airport, reading about his son and music, I could feel my heart beat, my throat getting tighter, a little pressure in the back of my eye. It was sad and also strangely inspiring. Yet he also knows how to make you laugh. "Would it be possible to make love to the tune of 'Let's Get It On'?", he asks.

I am genuinely grateful to Nick for singling several songs/bands I did not appreciate before - especially Aimee Mann and R. Wainwright.

Some things I don't get. 'Thunder Road, for example. Rod Stewart. The J. Geils Band. Marah (cool but mediocre). A. Di Franco (another pissed off woman). Zimmerman, for all his poetic brilliance.... yet even in our disagreements, I find Hornby's affection for these artists and his passion for their creations, inspiring. Unlike me, the man knows how to always find something positive to say, and I liked this as well.

For all his populism Hornby can be elegant when he so chooses. This is what he writes about Nick Cave's "No More Shall We Part: "[this album]..., like so much of Nick Cave's work, is sometimes as unwilling to please and as demanding of your attention as a small child. And yet this may explain why it is such a relief to enter its airless, occasionally overwrought world. In a time when even the angriest, most intimidating hip-hop or heavy metal seems designed to sell us something - a movie or a wrestling match or a lifestyle - Cave's music doesn't seem remotely interested in selling anything. That is to say, it's music made by an artist, in the old-fashioned, twentieth-century sense of the word."

Can this be said more elegantly? More generously? With more respect? I don;t think so. Thanks, Nick.

by a kind and decent person
In the introduction (and the essay "about" Your Love is The Place Where I Come from), Nick Hornby assured me that "what [I] have in [my] hand is the actual (i.e., natural, unforced, unpadded) shape of this particular book; it is.. an organic book, raised without force-feeding or the assistance of steroids" (or extra words to make the essays "regulation-length"). Had Nick kept his promise throughout Songbook, this would be a five-star review. But he hadn't. All but one of the Albums essays (the last one) feel a little padded; a little repetitive. Which is ironic since the cover of my copy of Songbook proudly proclaims "with 5 more essays!" Oh well.

But despite this minor flaw (for even the slightly padded essays are very wonderful and brilliant and personal) this book is well worth buying whether or not you are a pop music fan. First of all, there is the quality of the writing itself. It is not often that you encounter a passage such as "...but I know Dylan fanatics, and they would not recognize me as one of them. (I have a friend who stays logged on to the Dylan Web site most of the day at work--as if the Web site were CNN and Dylan's career were the Middle East...)" or who describes England (or its absence) by asking us "Where's the larger-fuelled violence? Where's the lip or the self-deprecation, or the lethargy, or the irreverence? Where are the jokes? Where's the curry?" (Nick Hornby also has a few words to say about anti-Americanism: "'I'm so bored with the U.S.A', the Clash was singing .. every night.. and though we sang along with them, it wasn't true, not really. We were only bored with our obsession, and that's a different thing entirely.")

And these examples bring me to the reason why someone who is not a pop fan should read this book. Because it is a book at least as much about our life (and because it is written in Nick Hornby's ever-personal prose it really does feel as though this is our life as opposed to his life) as it is about the music. Which is not to say that the music is not there. It is. Indeed, it is ever-present in these pages. After all, it is music that makes life bearable.

But most of all, I recommend this book because Nick Hornby sounds like a very kind and decent human being--and it isn't often that you read a book that is so obviously written by such a person either.