Pop Music Makes You Sad 

‘High Fidelity’ By Nick Hornby

★★★/5

What are your top-five, all-time favourite music records? You may not know what to answer directly, but Rob does. He’s been preparing for this moment his entire life. High Fidelity is a story that delves into the life of Rob Fleming, a middle-aged man who owns an unsuccessful record store in Chicago, and who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. As music rhythms his life, he starts asking himself the big questions – why did his life turn out the way it did, and how exactly is he going to organise his record collection, alphabetically or in order of purchase? 

I loved this book because it is written with dynamic, diary-like dialogues and scraps of life. The narrator is quite unreliable and unapologetically honest, sometimes even harsh, as he navigates the hardships of heartbreak. It brings insight into the way men truly think, and unnerves the reader until they want to throw the book out the window. Nick Hornby did an amazing job of creating a character that was both endearing and irritating in a book that could very well become a modern classic. 

“The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”