Cassette From My Ex

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves (St. Martin's Griffin, 2009).


I had a really good feeling that I'd like this book. Jason Bitner used to run - or perhaps "curate" is a better word - a blog at cassettefrommyex.com, but it's been down for quite some time now. There, he got submissions from all over the map from people who'd held onto old mix tapes from old flames, and sent in photos and stories about them.

I wish that I had seen the blog before it vanished, but happily, the project did net Bitner a book deal. While the hardcover collection is out of print, it's easily obtained and definitely worth a look. It's just so fun, touching on all of these wonderful shared experiences with other people from the 1980s and 1990s who somehow knew all the same "rules" for making mixtapes as I did.

The last time I made a mix tape was the last day of 1999. It was kind of bitter. I made a second copy for myself and rediscovered it this past summer, cleaning out the basement of my childhood home. I have no way to play it any longer, which is probably for the best, because that is one mean, hurtful, heartbroken, dagger of a tape. They were always more than the sum of their parts, weren't they?

The book is full of essays and track lists, with lots of photos of the surviving tapes, track lists that double as love notes, and all sorts of heartbreak and blissful memories. Most of the writers were not known to me, but Claudia Gonson of the Magnetic Fields contributed a great story, as did - kind of unsurprisingly - Rob Sheffield, who's probably more responsible than anybody else for keeping memories of mix tapes alive all these years after we quit making them.

It's very fun, although probably not a book that you can expect to read in one sitting. It's fun to linger over, a couple of stories a night, while reading something a little heavier on the side. Recommended for readers who made these.

Turn Around Bright Eyes

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Turn Around Bright Eyes (It, 2013).


I really enjoyed one of Rob Sheffield's earlier books, Love is a Mix Tape. I like the style of his books, which blend memoir drenched in music with biographical essays about the business. Somehow he turns the very disparate parts into a cohesive story that makes sense, encourages you to laugh, and occasionally breaks your heart. From time to time, his taste in tunes makes me raise an eyebrow, but he always delivers the payoff.

So, if you've been following Sheffield's stories through magazines and articles, or from his previous books, you'll deduce that this story will be set a few years after his first wife's tragic, early death. So, now a widower in New York City, he starts looking for a social life again, and finds that karaoke, of all things, makes him happier than just about anything else, and gives him a great experience to share when he eventually falls in love again. My own experience with karaoke is all wrapped around a girl as well. The difference is that I never really enjoyed it all that much, have an even worse singing voice than Sheffield, and quit doing it after we split up. I might have done a mean version of "The Look of Love" by ABC before the end, mind.

Other topics in the book include a story about a rock 'n roll fantasy camp, featuring a cameo appearance by Micky Dolenz or somebody, and the stranger-than-you-think career of Rod Stewart. I admire the way that Sheffield makes these magazine stories (unpublished, in the case of the camp) seem like part of the narrative of his love story. It's a heck of a good tale, and it keeps me wanting to read more and more from him as we await some new memoir down the line. The happiness and optimism that fills this book keeps it from being the heartbreaker that Mix Tape was, but I like shiny, happy songs as well. Recommended.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran (Plume, 2011).

I came into this book with elevated expectations and was mostly let down, but expectations are an unpleasant thing, and the fault of the reader. It isn't right to blame the author for them, but at the same time it is hard to fairly judge a book for what it actually brings when it steadfastly refused to provide what you wanted.

Rob Sheffield's previous book, Love is a Mix Tape, was a brutal, gut-wrenching memoir about the death of his first wife and all the music that they enjoyed together. This time, the approach is so much more scattershot. The chapters are a series of essays built around various pop songs of the 1980s, when Sheffield was in high school and college. In some cases, the musical selection bears just the slightest relevance to what he's discussing, and in others, like the aiming-for-legendary essay about one-hit wonders Haysi Fantayzee, Sheffield goes into full-throttle investigative journalism mode to learn what the heck it was we were listening to at the time.

Briefly, then, Love is a Mix Tape is a book that I might always own. It's that haunting and affecting of a work. This is like popcorn. I enjoyed it while I read it, but whacking great chunks of it are already lost to me, after just about two weeks. The chapter about driving an ice cream truck was funny, and so was the chapter about never, ever winning a match as a wrestler in high school but... well, I guess that one of these days, I would like to read a book about talking to girls about Duran Duran. That still sounds like it could be a blast, while this is just a curiosity that amused but did not resonate. Recommended as a library check-out.

Love is a Mix Tape

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Love is a Mix Tape (Three Rivers Press, 2007).


What an absolute heartbreaker of a book! It's probably not possible for a sap like me to talk about it without evoking Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, so I'll get that out of the way. Hornby proved, to thousands of us, that we were not alone in obsessing over music and hoping to bond with some girl over it. Rob Sheffield was one of those who successfully pulled it off, and married a firebrand named Renee thanks to a shared interest in Big Star bringing them together.

Five years later, however, Renee was dead, killed almost instantly by a pulmonary embolism. So yeah, this book gets a little heavier than Hornby.

It's an absolutely engrossing memoir, and I love the way that Sheffield tells it, bouncing around his unlucky past and up through his mostly happy marriage, filled with fights about money and pets and his admiration for everything that Renee does. The circumstances of her tragic death will knock readers on the head as thoroughly as it must have been for him; he tells the story of her funeral that well.

Somehow, the story remains otherwise upbeat, geeky and silly despite the dark incident at the book's core. Sheffield's self-deprecating humor and his and Renee's love of music on cassette keeps the story invigorating and fun. He provides fodder for a hundred arguments among record collecting types - I'm with Renee on XTC, and Sheffield's just flat out wrong about the R.E.M. LP Document - and the feeling of optimism and hope in the book's final sections just made my day. Absolutely readable and compelling, although possibly not for people who never made mix tapes.