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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
I dare you to try and not like this book. I guarantee you'll fail. This book is a beautifully crafted mix of everything. It's about music, yeah. There's talk of some pretty sweet tunes in there and anyone who grew up in the 80's and 90's knows the significance of the mix tape. The book is also one of the greatest unconventional love stories I've ever read.
Reading Love Is a Mix Tape is like listening in on the soundtrack to Rob Sheffield's life. He takes you through the music of his youth, failed first loves, and then "The One." He meets and marries Renee, and writes about the whole process in such a way that the reader falls in love with her too. This book is also, finally, about grief. After five years of marriage, Renee dies without warning and Rob is left to try and remember how to do things without her.
This book made me nostalgic, it made me laugh, and it made me sad. A book that can toy that thoroughly with your emotions is definitely worth reading.
Reading Love Is a Mix Tape is like listening in on the soundtrack to Rob Sheffield's life. He takes you through the music of his youth, failed first loves, and then "The One." He meets and marries Renee, and writes about the whole process in such a way that the reader falls in love with her too. This book is also, finally, about grief. After five years of marriage, Renee dies without warning and Rob is left to try and remember how to do things without her.
This book made me nostalgic, it made me laugh, and it made me sad. A book that can toy that thoroughly with your emotions is definitely worth reading.
read this book in a day. it is short but it feels like you have been in their world forever. it is so hard to read about losing someone like he did suddenly, especially if you have been recently married. he speaks about his grief with so much brutal honesty, it is tragic and beautiful. what an original book.
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Not as good as the hype laid on my by me mates, but I admired Sheffield's lack of pretension and honesty. At times, I found it simpy. But Sheffield's loss brought real tears to my eyes, being also married to a music maniac and having no kids (though I have 15 years on him at the time of his loss). He makes a neat case for shitty '80s music, too.
If anyone ever says to you “kids today will never know the beauty of making a mix tape”, tell them to give this book to said kids. And maybe also tell them to stop saying condescending things like that. Not only does this memoir capture the fun, and care, that went into your own TDK original, it shows how much music can inform the time periods of our lives.
This is a beautiful love story. To love itself, to the music that brings two souls together, and to the songs that help us heal.
A friend from high school gifted this book to me more than a decade ago. It was so special rereading it now, the pages filled with teenage me’s annotations. The words that stuck out then resonate even more with me now.
“We’re going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”
A friend from high school gifted this book to me more than a decade ago. It was so special rereading it now, the pages filled with teenage me’s annotations. The words that stuck out then resonate even more with me now.
“We’re going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”
This was one of those those books I hated to finish. The deeper you get into into it the more personal it becomes. It gets comparisons to High Fidelity, which is fair enough -- how does music parallel, affect and is chronicle our lives? But, that is where the comparison should end -- this is a story of companionship, love and loss. Normally I would run as fast as I could from that, but Rob's story is so genuine and heartfelt it was impossible to put this book away, and I am glad he shared this story, it must have been an extremely hard book to write.
A beautifully written memoir about the soundtrack of my generation. If you've every given or received a mix-tape, you know what he means.
I feel like it's not easy to write about grief and bereavement. I know I avoid memoirs that revolve around the someone significant in the author's life dying because I don't want to spend 4 pages on how the author smelled his/her cologne and was then too depressed to eat for a month. That's why I avoided reading this book for so long, even though I am a fan of both mix tapes and Sheffield's music journalism. Sheffield, though, does it right. Hell yeah it's depressing as hell to read about a young wife dropping dead just a few years into a marriage, but we don't feel for Sheffield, we feel with him. In the first 3/4 of the book, Sheffield discusses his two loves - music and Renee - and the last 1/4 is the aftermath of Renee's sudden death. It was a good balance that helped the book from veering off to being too melancholy. Also, Sheffield and I have the same favorite Sleater-Kinney song.