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“A collection of music-as-metaphor essays…like a diary in mix-tape form.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A joyful meditation on 31 of Hornby’s favorite pop songs…Hornby is excellent at dissecting what makes a song tick, and doing so in an accessible way. [An] embracing, even life-affirming approach to music criticism. Songbook will send readers not only to his favorite songs, but back to their own with fresh ears.”
—The Capital Times (Madison)

“The writing isn’t music criticism: Hornby isn’t all that interested in trends in music…He is interested in—no, taken by—songs.”
—The New York Times

“You’d hope that listening to a song 1,500 times would give someone as sharp as Hornby some insights into it, and you’d be right.”
—The Oregonian

“Hornby is, as ever, the poet of the annotated list.”
—Financial Times

“Strange, but at year’s end, what reminded me of how much I love rock and pop was a book about rock and pop: Nick Hornby’s Songbook…a sort of musical autobiography.”
—Dallas Observer

“[A] unique combination of book and sonic compilation.”
—Saturday Post

“One of the frustrating things about writing about music is that you’re essentially using one form of communication to talk about another. Writer Nick Hornby has dealt with the problem rather cleverly with his new collection of essays…Each of the 31 essays concerns one of Hornby’s favorite songs, from Bob Dylan’s ‘Can You Crawl Out Your Window?’ to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ to Aimee Mann’s ‘I’ve Had It’ to Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘A Minor Incident.’”
—Wisconsin State Journal