Back in 2009, I sorta finally became aware of all of these 33⅓ books, and I went “ooh, I want that one, and that one, and that one”, and before you knew it, I had a whole stack of them. And then I started reading.
Some of them are really good. Drew Daniel’s book on Throbbing Gristle’s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats is brilliant — it’s not just about that single album, but also encompasses the whole transgressive art thing. And Jonathan Lethem’s book of Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music explained so much, while opening up lots of avenues of interpretation at the same time.
And then there were the rest. Many of them seemed to be written by neurotic nerds with an overwhelming need to pin things down. “No! This song is about one thing only! It’s about that time the vocalist fainted in the bathroom!” Which may or may not be true, but it doesn’t make for interesting reading, and makes the album you’re reading about seem less interesting than you thought it was to begin with.
So I rapidly lost my enthusiasm for these books, and I haven’t bought any since. But I’ve still got more than half a dozen left unread, so why not give one of them a go?
OK, I’m putting the album on the stereo, and here we go…
And this book turns out to be fiction, and not about the album by The Smiths at ll. Well, that’s OK, but it’s not actually very good.
The protagonist listens to Smiths albums, I guess, and perhaps there’s more of a connection later in the book. But even if this is a very short book, I found the prose so uninspiring that I rapidly found myself growing impatient, and after 25 pages I thought “well, I don’t care” and so I ditched it.
What does Goodreads say?
Heh heh.
Meat Is Murder (2003) by Joe Pernice (buy used, 3.41 on Goodreads)