Nick Hornby’s Songbook is a collection of essays on 31 songs and 15 albums. It is not typical music criticism. This novelist does not get into the historical relevance or excessive emphasis on the musical miracles that coincided to create great pop music. He “wanted to write about what it was in these songs that made [him] love them, not what [he] brought to the songs.”
This form of musical appreciation makes the book much more personal that some that Greil Marcus or even Lester Bangs would write. These essays show how “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen has continued to makes its way onto Hornby’s mix tapes for 30 years; how owning 20 albums by and knowing more historical facts about Bob Dylan than William Shakespeare does not make him a “Dylan fanatic”; and how Patti Smith leaves him “wanting to read, or write, or paint, or go to a gallery, or run fast…” As Hornby declares, “That kind of inspiration is rare, in any area of the arts.”


















