Wholehearted recommendations are a funny thing. Yesterday I wrote about the anonymous man who steered me toward track three of a Tom Petty album. Today I’ll talk about a recommendation by a person I’ve never met but whose opinion I value greatly.

Nick Hornby, author of the best book about music and fandom I’ve ever read (High Fidelity) and one of my very favorite writers of any sort, released a few years ago a collection of columns he’d written for literary magazine The Believer. The column is about books (each month he lists the books he bought and the books he read the previous month, with the lists seldom overlapping) but, as he is Nick Hornby, he writes a lot about music as well.

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