Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs

Music-obsessed academic Coviello (Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America) writes episodically about music and his failing marriage while living in a small college town in Maine. The book’s structure and the author’s love of 1990s indie bands can’t help evoking Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mixtape, though Coviello’s is a more sprawling, tempestuous affair, hurtling through the giddy peaks and darkened valleys of the bar-crawling years following his divorce. Coviello has a lot to say about music, ranging from the pocket epiphanies that occur to him while listening to the Wedding Present’s song “Dalliance” while wandering Madrid in a heartbroken trance (the band’s music is for those who “like arguments made mostly of enormous distorted sound”) to the regenerative joys of listening to sublimely smooth pop like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” with one of his ex-stepdaughters. But this is a book also about love, and Coviello flings himself into a search for some kind of reassurance that, even without it, his life is not over. The chronicle of overeager romances on his postdivorce travels have all the shimmering choruses and gloomy in-between patches of the songs he listens to. It’s an exhausting trip to take, but it’s also memorably passionate. (June)