High Fidelity

The actor John Cusack brought me to this movie, and I read the book after the movie and loved it. One of the key differences between the movie and the book is that the movie is set in Chicago, and the book in North London. As someone who grew up in the ’80s, I started with Cusack as the nerdy sidekick in Sixteen Candles and became obsessed with his Lloyd Dobler character in Say Anything; you know, the guy who dressed in a trench coat and held a boom box over his head outside a girl’s window.

The narrator… show more.

If there is anything I can relate to and appreciate, it’s how music informs every aspect of life. All the big and small moments–there is a song, a soundtrack for that. Nick Hornby is certainly one of “my people” who totally gets it.

Though our music preferences may not have a tight Venn Diagram collision–I can understand how his song and band choices help to tell the story and add to the reader's sensory experience of that certain feeling for that certain someone–heart-pumping adrenaline/soul-wrenching heartbreak. Music nerds like us–we appreciate this shorthand, playing in the background at 33 rpm. The… show more.

This isn’t a particularly party-hearty (hardly?) novel, seeing as the music nerds satirized (and glorified) are mostly just f’ed up on wax, not honey oil or absinthe or something.  It will indeed make you laugh and give others a contact high of hilarity if they’re in the same room with you.

This was the book that made me believe I could someday write a novel about a person whose life revolved around music. No, I’ll never write as well or prolifically as Nick Hornby, but after attending one of Hornby’s readings during his High Fidelity tour, I realized I wasn’t as odd as I’d once considered myself. Hornby’s protagonist—a male record store owner—embarks on a personal quest to understand why all his relationships with women have ended in breakups. Music finds its way into almost every situation in this novel, which, in many ways, is a romantic comedy. However, long after… show more.

I was undecided between High Fidelity and another of Nick Hornby's novels on the same theme and picked High Fidelity because in this novel the depressed main character turns around his life on his own. High Fidelity is about the self-realisation that only you can help yourself out of depression.

Narrated with warmth and humour, the story of Rob Fleming, a depressed music record store owner is anything but depressing. Rob’s juvenile attitude to life and the realisation that he had been sleepwalking through it is brought out as he ruminates on his many relationships to find the reason behind… show more.