There’s still a little bit of summer left and if you’re looking for some good literature to close out your beach season, I’ve got a couple of recommendations of books that I read this year.
Love is a Mixtape by Rob Sheffield
Rob Sheffield writes about music the way poets write about romance. He dissects every melody line and lyric and examines each emotion evoked in order to fully understand the impact of a musician’s work on our souls. Love is a Mixtape is a story about a relationship with a woman named Reneé as told through music and mixtapes. Each chapter starts out with a list of tracks that defined a period in their relationship, and how each lyric or each artist’s work spoke to a specific time in his and Reneé’s life. Sheffield talks about how Nevermind was such a complete revolution for mainstream rock, and how a relationship is about taking your time and hurring up, and why Hey Jude can take a sad day and made it better, better, better. When his wife Reneé dies suddenly and without warning, Leonard Cohen, Frank Sinatra, and Pavement kept him company on those late nights spent smoking in the backyard and processing life. Rob explains that music is what helped him understand Reneé, and music is what helps him understand losing Reneé.
Sheffield sees music in an incredibly intimate and personal way, his writing is clever, witty, and every line is packed with a strategic thoughtfulness that makes this book stand above all other commentaries on music. It’s heart-wrenching and hilarious at the same time, and you’ll find yourself seeing Stephen Malkmus in a completely different light.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
When a young Oskar Schell suddenly loses his father in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, he finds himself tossed immediately into a world of turmoil and emotion as he tries to understand life without his father. He unexpectedly finds a key in his father’s closet labeled “Black” and he vows to find the lock that the key opens because whatever is behind that lock will help him to understand even just a little bit more of who his father was.
Foer’s writing is an insightful glimpse into the mind of a young child who has just lost a parent, and it is mesmerizing to see the Oskar try to put together the scattered clues of a puzzle with too many pieces. Foer paints the picture of a picture of a young boy who, even in his confusion, sees things much more clearly than many adults do, and despite his inability to cope with his father’s death, is able to express himself and his feelings truthfully, the way we wish we could.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a portrait of a boy becoming a man overnight and Foer’s intelligent writing puts flesh and bone onto an intricate character in such a way that you can’t help but laugh with him, cry with him, wonder with him, and dream with him.
Bonus Pro Tip: If you’re looking for something a little more classic, I suggest you pick up The Old Man and the Sea again. Hemingway is my favorite prose author, and I just finished re-reading this old favorite the other night. It’s a great story about perseverance and willpower that is always a good reminder that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”