MOG

The combination of some vacation time and not being a television critic anymore has led me back to an old pursuit: reading books.

You know -- offline, paper between two covers, that kind of thing. You remember. In a previous post I talked about the beginning of Perfect from Now On, about the bit with the iTunes counter and how it reflected your musical tastes, like it or not (though, as others pointed out, there are reasons why this might not be 100 percent true). In the meantime I finished the book and enjoyed it, especially because it involved a brief journalistic quandry - John Sellers, the author, wound up drinking beer with Robert Pollard, his hero, and in the eyes of some betraying him because he wrote about it. (The resolution isn't as interesting as the problem itself.)

Then, at a trip to the beach, my mom was reading Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, in which author Rob Sheffield chornicles his life by way of mix tapes, as you perhaps guessed from the title. It may not seem like the most likely choice for a 78-year-old woman to read, but there was a reason: the woman Sheffield was married to until her sudden death was one of my mom's piano students way back when.

So when she was done, I read that. It's the better book, probably, but obviously a much more serious affair. Highly recommended, both of them.

So I figured, this is cool - I'll devote my spare time to reading rock books. Perhaps I'll become an obsessive (both Sellers and Sheffield fit the description). Maybe this will be the ticket to my long-held dream: writing a bestselling biography of Mitch Easter, or his band Let's Active, or Southern jangle pop from the '80s. Though on further reflection: possibly limited audience.

And then I picked up Christopher Moore's You Suck: A Love Story, which, at least so far, isn't about music at all. (I'm a sucker for a good vampire story, pun intended, I suppose.)

But I'm still in the market for a good rock book, something in the vein of Nick Hornby's great High Fidelity: A Novel. If anybody's got suggestions, I'm all ears.

Again with the puns. Man.