One of the key elements that makes up the personality of Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby's 1996 bestseller High Fidelity, is the character's obsession with pop music. He doesn't just collect records -- they're an active force in his life, at times the only one. Rob approaches pop music in a manner that most of us have forgotten. He believes in its power to provide a glimmer of pleasure in dim world and its ability to capture emotions and influence them at the same time. Although Rob probably isn't a perfectly autobiographic representation of Hornby (considering that Hornby has never owned a record store or DJ-ed professionally), the author makes it clear in his latest work, Songbook, that Rob's affection for pop is something they both share.

Songbook, a collection of 31 essays on Hornby's favorite songs and another five on his favorite albums, has kept a rather low-profile in the United States, considering its author has already penned two novels that have been made into fairly successful movies (High Fidelity and About a Boy). But if Songbook's publisher, Riverhead Books, hasn't been killing itself to promote it, it's hard to blame them. After all, when was the last time a nonpolitical or non-religious collection of essays went anywhere on the book charts? It's hard enough to sell short fiction compilations.

But if you can track down Songbook -- and that should be pretty easy to do now, since the paperback was released recently -- it's a worthy read, especially for writers and those who need music to get through their daily lives. Hornby obviously fits into the first of these two categories, and makes it clear in the text that he epitomizes the second. The tracks he discusses, which include Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," Rufus Wainwright's "One Man Guy," and Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird," all clearly mean something to him -- something personal, beyond their catchiness.

Thankfully, Songbook is not a book of music criticism. Hornby wisely avoids the minutia of music, focussing on the experience of listening, rather than the technicalities of chord progressions and saxophone solos. The biggest obstacle that stands between this book popularity with an audience that hasn't heard of the more obscure bands Hornby discusses (Royksopp, anyone?) is the question "why would I want to read about someone talking about songs they like?" Hornby answers this by keeping in mind that the personal context we attach to songs is often what really matters when we're putting together our ultimate mix tapes. He relates a children's reggae version of "Puff the Magic Dragon" to the experience of getting his autistic son to try new forms of music and the Ben Folds Five song "Smoke" to the collapse of his own marriage. The essays become about pop music's ability to console, to elevate, and to act as a reminder that someone else feels some approximation of what we feel. His chapter on "Thunder Road," in which he discusses what the song meant to him as a fledgling author, is a good example of this aspect of the text.

"[I]f you have dreams of becoming a writer, then there are murky, mucky visions of fame attached to these dreams, too; "Thunder Road" was my answer to every rejection letter I received, and every doubt expressed by my friends or relatives. They lived in towns for losers, I told myself, and I, like Bruce, was pulling out of there to win. (These towns, incidentally, were Cambridge -- full of loser doctors and lawyers and academics -- and London -- full of loser successes of every description -- but never mind. This was the material I had to work with, and work with it I did.)"

Another interesting aspect of the book is Hornby's wonderfully broad definition of "pop." Music that might be categorized as "Motown" or "hip-hop" or "emo" or "alt-rock" all gets lumped into the pop category with him. While those who love to break music into as many categories as possible and the snippy "pop sucks" portion of listeners might rebel at this notion, it's actually very freeing. For one thing, it knocks down just about any pretension Hornby might have. While he does take shots at Britney, the Spice Girls and other throwaway boy- and girl-bands, his naked enthusiasm for any sort of music short of jazz and classical makes it hard to consider him a music snob, even when he describes himself as such.

One side note -- I bought the paperback of Songbook for this review, but gave a friend the hard-to-find hardcover as a birthday present. After finishing the paperback, I'm almost wishing I ordered a copy of the hardcover for myself, because of the bonus CD that comes packaged with it. The CD contains a few of the tracks discussed in the book, which would have been a handy reading companion. After all, while it's nice to read Hornby's thoughts about songs that I haven't yet heard, it would be even nicer to be able to listen to them as I read. The paperback tries to make up for this deficiency by tossing in five extra essays, but it's small comfort.

Songbook is thoughtful, poignant and personal. If it has one flaw, it's the long, parenthetical passages that occasionally break up Hornby's essays, but it's hard to fault the author for indulging himself in this fashion, since it adds to Songbook's stream-of-consciousness feel. The book sets out to have a conversation with its readers about what pop music can do, and its succeeds in a quietly brilliant way.