Bleah. I wish I'd realized that this was more of a ~memoir. I'd read Almond's Candy Freak and enjoyed it enough to seek out his other books. I was expecting something like that. Oops! Apparently women who like music are all sex-starved groupies and men who like music are the 'true' fans. Taste in music is realized through older brothers and if you don't have one, you're SOL. Only teenage boys can be the genuine arbiters of which sorts of music are "good." In the few chapters I managed to get thr...

Apparently all my contemporaries are writing right now. I just found out, for example, that Carrie Bradshaw (and, one assumes, Candace Bushnell) is/are just about exactly my age. In her book "The Carrie Diaries," she references Jimmy Carter and the Gremlin.But Carrie Bradshaw listens to Aztec Two-Step, and right then and there I knew she could never be my friend.Steve Almond knows what I'm saying here. Steve Almond gave up on a woman after a weekend of bananas sex because she listened to Air Sup...

This is one of those memoir/critical collections that a lot of rock fans like to write. Almond talks about the obsessive and transformative role music has played throughout his life, and unlike many rock fans, Almond has been able to make a career of it and even meet some of his musical heroes. It's like Chuck Klostermann without all of the animal cruelty asides, and the fact that Almond doesn't seem to feel the need to shock and appall readers with this sort of content already makes me like him...

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Which, for the sake of brevity, shall be henceforth referred to here as RRWSYL) is Steve Almonds' highly personal account of being a musical "drooling fanatic" - a person to whom the soundtrack of life is so important that life itself often has to pause until the right tune is found. What makes RRWSYL so much better than merely a passionate, heartfelt examination of the power of music is that Almond examines his feelings with such exactitude and honesty that he...

Here is a letter I recently sent to the publisher of a book called Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life:Hi, I just finished reading your book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life and I’d like to review it for my blog: Rockism101. Before I write my review I’d like to share some of my thoughts about your book with you and give you a chance to comment on these thoughts. For the first 100 plus pages or so I had a hard time trying to figure out what the point of this book was. Maybe I was confused by the t...

This book was amazing.

Another book review in which I don’t review the book. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond, whose prose I’ve declared my love for in numerous forums. Why do I love Steve Almond’s writing so much? There are a few possibilities:•It’s a Jewish thing. Latent, undisclosed issues. This guy is Jewish.•He and his wife joked about naming their first child Peanut Almond. •I’m sexually-obsessed (see previous blog).•His narration incorporates my favorite things: strong first-person voice with s...

At times he lost me, with his over-caffeinated rambunctious prose full of geekiness and horniness and self-deprecation and dorky obsessions. Maybe it was the rage of Caliban at seeing his face in the glass, I don't know. But he won me over with the exuberant and subtly precisely worded portraits of his friends and lovers and musical idols. And I really liked the fact that he kept enthusing about musicians I'd never heard of. I'm one of those people who can't rest until I've heard all the music

If you're going to use a promise as your title, you'd better deliver. In his sixth book, " Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (With Bitchin' Soundtrack)," Steve Almond presents a memoir wrapped in a collection of observations about music and packaged as a source of salvation. The book is a rock fan bildungsroman in which Almond offers personal anecdotes related to his lifelong love of music. His story is interwoven with some cultural analysis of what it me...

Almond is a disarming narrator in these essays, very self-effacing, and exaggerating (I hope!) to humorous effect his super fandom for (mostly) obscure, moderately-successful musicians. I share his exaltation of songs and bands for expressing emotions I couldn't articulate, particularly as a teen and young adult. (And, frankly, a single woman in her 30s into her 40s). In my journal, I wrote out many paragraphs where he describes how music makes us feel, the purpose it serves, and what makes it s...

It's hard for me to be objective about this book because I love so much about Steve Almond. For me it's a 5 because everything that I thought maybe didn't exactly work, I forgave due to his fanaticism, which is what the book is about so how do you judge him for that?Unlike My Life in Heavy Metal (his first and probably forever my favorite book)I wasn't grabbing for an underlining pencil but I was saying a sometimes silent and frequently loud "yes!" to page after page. I was reminiscing and giggl...

A gorgeously honest coming-of-(middle)age for Generation X. Yes, it's a book about music, but more than that it is a love story--a love of lyrics and emotion and a love of those the people who share the love of certain songs with us. Simply put: a great read.

This started off so well...Almond writes hilariously in defining the Drooling Fanatic, the obsessive rock music nut. He breaks down the lyrics of famous songs like Toto's Africa and Air Supply's All Out of Love, showing their stunning silliness. I loved the section where he talks about being moved by songs that you know are tripe. I loved his chronology of the different music formats and how they have affected the DF. I loved the section about music that you love one day, hate later. The early l...

I know guys like Steve Almond. They kind of wear me out. These guys go to concerts on weeknights and read Pitchfork every morning. I do not, under any circumstances, want to engage in conversation with Steve Almond and his brethren about anything but especially not about music. I’d rather read the book he wrote about the topic and enjoy the freedom to hit the pause button whenever I want rather than pretend I have to pee when his beery breakdown of why Captain Beefheart is more important than Pe...

Steve Almond is a good writer. He chooses his words and his images carefully. And I wouldn't care about it one bit if he hadn't also managed to squeeze such truthy truth into this book. It's a pretty introspective book. Even though the title says save your life, the examples he uses are highly personal. A lot of the bands and musicians he name-checks are people who never reached the type of fame that would make them accessible as examples. For that reason, the online soundtrack is an excellent a...

“This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise.” Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life is a book that targets the fanatical love each person has inside them, regardless of whether the love is for music, like Almond’s, or for movies, knitting, cooking, or anything really. Tied together with humorous, e...

By now, many of you know that one of my favorite books is "Candy Freak" by Steve Almond (he visits independent candy makers throughout the United States). A must read, especially if you like candy.This book does not disappoint. Much of Almond's young adulthood and adulthood has revolved around candy and music. He is a self-described "Drooling Fanatic" when it comes to certain bands. He's DJ'd, written for many music mags, gone on the road with bands, and so on. Many of the bands he loves and fol...

Given what I do for a living, I should probably dislike this book for no reason other than Almond's early insistence that rock criticism is impossible and useless. I see his point, though I disagree -- but more importantly, the rest of the book is full of funny, touching stories about Almond's life as a so-called Drooling Fanatic, including passionate essays about some of his favorite musicians (many of whom are on my own list).Bottom line -- if you love music, Steve Almond comes across as the k...

I'm stuck (again) between three and four stars: on the one hand, I'd give four stars for the writer's funny self-deprecating voice, which he employs at the same time as writing some very beautiful, literary descriptions (he's also an accomplished fiction writer); for the subject matter itself (because I, too, am the kind of Drooling Fanatic he describes in the book); and for the painfully hilarious relatability of certain specific sections (such as the Chapter 4, which details the span of musica...

Wow, this was actually painful. I'm not quite sure who this book is for. My estimation is that it's for people who don't particularly care much about rock and roll or writing. Imagine if the particular part of Chuck Klosterman's brain responsible for his musical taste, pop culture sensibilities, and knack for weaving both into an engaging narrative, was somehow lobotomized. Or, pretend the passion and heartfelt connection to tunes, no matter how (arguably) cheesy, that make Rob Sheffield's books...