BOOKS BOUGHT:
- A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg—John Guy
- Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark—Brian Kellow
- Ready Player One—Ernest Cline
- Skylark—Dezsö Kosztolányi
- Townie—Andre Dubus III
- Pulphead—John Jeremiah Sullivan
BOOKS READ:
- The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss—Nick Coleman
- You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup—Peter Doggett
- Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark—Brian Kellow
- A Daughter’s Love: Thomas More and His Dearest Meg—John Guy
I have known Nick Coleman for something like thirty years. He is one of the few people in my life that ticks every single one of my conversational boxes. (For the record, the conversational boxes are: books, family and relationships, football, music, writing, films, television, and the health of the psyche, although not necessarily in that order.) I value what he has to say on any subject he chooses to address, but when he turns his attention to music, I am likely to make mental and sometimes even actual notes, because, even now—and the qualification is not an insult, as I’ll explain later—Nick has fantastic ears. He loves all the people a serious popular-music critic is supposed to love, Marvin and Miles Davis and the Stones and Tom Waits and so on; but he listens without prejudice, too—he is so unwilling to judge, in fact, that he can even take pleasure from English folk music, a form that can create almost irrepressible homicidal urges in less-forgiving souls—and as a result, he is able to find gold in the most unpromising terrain. It was Nick who told me about Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a Tanita Tikaram album that I still love to this day, at a time when everyone, me included, had made up their minds about Tanita Tikaram, in my case without having heard her. (And it was only years later, after Revolutionary Road had been republished in the U.K., that I realized she’d taken the title from a Richard Yates collection. That should have told me something, but I needed to be as well read as she was in order to understand it.) It was Nick who insisted that I gave Sade’s achingly beautiful and bottomlessly soulful Lovers Rock album a chance, at a time when everyone, me included, had decided that Sade was best heard in a Body Shop in an earlier decade. You may already have come to your own conclusions about these two records, and as a result feel that you have Nick’s number; well, you’re wrong on both counts—unless, that is, you...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
