High Fidelity

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.