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    Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
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    Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
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    Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
    Audiobook5 hours

    Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

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    About this audiobook

    What Is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question throughout the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to Western philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them. But the answer is simple: Love is a mix tape.

    In the 1990s, when "alternative" was suddenly mainstream, bands like Pearl Jam and Pavement, Nirvana and R.E.M.-bands that a year before would have been too weird for MTV- were MTV. It was the decade of Kurt Cobain and Shania Twain and Taylor Dayne, a time that ended all too soon. The boundaries of American culture were exploding, and music was leading the way.

    It was also when a shy music geek named Rob Sheffield met a hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl named Renée, who was way too cool for him but fell in love with him anyway. He was tall. She was short. He was shy. She was a social butterfly. She was the only one who laughed at his jokes when they were so bad, and they were always bad. They had nothing in common except that they both loved music. Music brought them together and kept them together. And it was music that would help Rob through a sudden, unfathomable loss.

    In Love Is a Mix Tape, Rob, now a writer for Rolling Stone, uses the songs on fifteen mix tapes to tell the story of his brief time with Renée. From Elvis to Missy Elliott, the Rolling Stones to Yo La Tengo, the songs on these tapes make up the soundtrack to their lives.

    Rob Sheffield isn't a musician, he's a writer, and Love Is a Mix Tape isn't a love song- but it might as well be. This is Rob's tribute to music, to the decade that shaped him, but most of all to one unforgettable woman.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 2, 2007
    ISBN9780739333532
    Unavailable
    Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

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    Reviews for Love is a Mix Tape

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    • 5/5
      When author Rob Sheffield met his wife Renee, they had nothing in common, except they both loved music. A certain song came on, and each noticed the other perk up to listen; and they were the only two people in that bar who were excited to hear the song. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl talk about music. Boy offers to make girl a mix tape. And so it begins.Love Is a Mix Tape is part memoir, part music history, and part love letter from a heartsick man to his late wife. Sheffield's love for his wife and his struggle to accept a future without her are powerfully palpable and ever-present. His grasp of the ways in which love and music change us and shape our lives is quite beautiful, and though you feel Sheffield's sorrow and sadness, you also feel the joy and comfort and sense of place and permanence he has found in music. If you took the perfection that is Joan Didion's [The Year of Magical Thinking] and replaced all of the place memories with music memories, you'd get [Love Is a Mix Tape].It's virtually impossible not to be affected by this book. Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog .
    • 4/5
      I read these books out of order, but I previously enjoyed Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, his memoir of life growing up in the 1980s and 1990s told through the music of that era.  This book is similar with several mix tapes providing the frame from which each chapter is built and is filled with observations about music not from a dispassionate critic, but from a fan who sees music intersecting with every aspect of human life.  I particularly like his insight into the last recordings of Kurt Cobain displaying the worries of being a husband and father.  But the central point of this book is Sheffield's relationship with Renee, his first wife who died of an embolism in 1997.  The book marinates in honesty as Sheffield details the sometimes tempestuous nature of their relationship and later the overwhelming grief at finding himself a young widower.  Sheffield is a talented writer and the fact that this book actually made me laugh more than I cried is a testament to his skill.Favorite Passages:“I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my new favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”“It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.”
    • 5/5
      You gotta love a book with a built in soundtrack! Sheffield, a Rolling Stone music critic, goes over some of his mix tapes and how they relate to his love life. We listen along as he meets his future wife, dates her, marries her and spends married life in her shadow. We witness his wife's sudden death and Sheffield's attempts at getting on with his life. Sheffield sprinkles music criticism and stories of being a rock journalist into the story. I can't think of another book that has made me laugh incredibly hard in one paragraph then have me tearing up in the next.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely heartbreaking! It made me pull out my tiny collection of mixtapes and fly back in time, tears still in my eyes. Tops.
    • 4/5
      My father is a musician and my grandfather was, so I totally digged the musical aspect of this book. Mr. Sheffield's love of music, and his incredible knowledge of it in general, is both inspirational and charming.

      This book is about Sheffield's early life, his marriage to an amazing woman, and the abrupt, tragic death of his spouse at 31. Using the above as a backdrop, Sheffield mixes in his love of music in general, and his love of mix tapes in particular, to show how much he loved his wife, and later, to show how music was a coping mechanism for him.

      Both he and his wife were crazy about music. When they first started to court they made mix tapes for each other. Music helped reinforce their love for each other. I found that the common love they shared through music beautiful and powerful.

      There are some quotable gems in this book where Sheffield uses music to highlight a memory, or a feeling, or a way of looking at the world that is utterly profound. Some of these gems I put in the updates for the book. These alone make this book worthwhile. To top it off, Sheffield is a very talented writer.

      For all of that, I did find it a bit uneven. Sheffield knows A LOT of popular culture besides music, and I found some of his metaphors and examples confusing. I do think this book may of been therapeutic for him, so there is some license for tangents.

      Overall, a very beautiful book. It is a sad book, which didn't bother me, and there is great insight here, even in it's unevenness.

      Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This book will bring back your own memories of the nineties, especially if you were heavily into music at the time. It made me think of the all the different times I made mix tapes, like the time I taped the radio right before I went to Spain, just so I could hear american radio while I was away.

      The author's story about the love between him and his wife and his sorrow at her death is heartbreaking but truthful. He is able to clearly explain how he felt about not being able to share new things with her in a way that is heart wrenching. And the whole thing is tied to music.

      If someone wasn't into the music of the time, I am not sure that they would be able to get into this book. Since everything the author writes he relates to the music, the reader may not get all of the parallels and they would be missing out on a big part of the story.
    • 5/5
      Rarely have I enjoyed a book as much as this one. The last time I could remember being in such rapture over ingenious narrative and musical passion was actually the author's followup to this debut book. Sheffield loses his wife, but never gets maudlin. He grows from it. And he loves music, and has a masterful way of expressing it, but he never projects as psychotic or crazily obsessive. The man is a fantastic, fantastic writer. I just can't enough, ooh, I just can't get enough.
    • 4/5
      Have you ever made a mix tape? I've made several - labored over them, thought carefully about which songs to include, obsessed about getting the order just right. The author Rob Sheffield is a writer for Rolling Stone and obviously is familiar with a wide range of music genres, artists and their catalogs. He speaks lovingly of the tapes he and his wife have made, and the meaning of the songs to their lives separately and together. It's a touching story and one that I am glad to have read.
    • 4/5
      In a true-High Fidelity fashion, music loving fashion, this book kinda spoke to my soul. First of all, it recognizes the HUGE impact that music has on our life. There are definitely songs that, when I hear them, bring me to another state--another place. I am whisked away to other times/places to be with people I haven't seen in a long time. Such is the power of music.

      For Rob Sheffield, this is true as well. But what do you do when you lose the person with whom you've shared so much of that music with? When every new song you hear on the radio makes you think, "Damn, he/she would've LOVED this song?!"

      Simple: You get very, very depressed.

      And that's the story of this book. This is a book of loss and love. When Rob feels any emotion, he makes a mixed tape (even if it's a CD or playlist on the iPod, he still calls it a mixed tape). This helps him to express the feelings he can't otherwise get out. Looking over my own iTunes...I see MANY playlists that speak to many different emotions. "Upbeat" "Emo" etc.

      Each chapter starts with a playlist of songs from a tape that Rob made (or someone in his life), and he tells his story. Quick read, well worth it.

      Not that I was keeping track or anything, but Green Day was mentioned (in it's amazing-ness) twice, once on a page that also mentioned Johnny Depp. There was no way this book was not headed for greatness.
    • 3/5
      A remarkable memoir of Rob Sheffield on finding his wife-his true love, feeling real happiness, and dealing with a broken heart on the loss on his wife, Renee, through the mixes they both shared and compiled. A beautiful, sad and moving story on dealing with the death of a partner in the midst of the height of happiness in marriage. Rob’s difficult journey truly is heart-wrenching.
    • 4/5
      Searing memoir of love and loss with a soundtrack. Sheffield's got a sure hand with prose, never descending into bathos though one would forgive him if he did. Very worth reading.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing and heartfelt book. I could not put it down and thus finished it in less then a day. The story was very moving and Sheffield's use of music was something that I could connect with, even if I did not have a connection to most of the music he had on the mix tapes. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Finished this one just now. It is a wonderful read. Sheffield is so sweet and geeky and romantic, it's hard not to end up with a crush on him! My favorite chapters were actually the ones about his teen years - they were very funny. He has another book out that focuses more on that part of his life; I've added it to my wish list, of course :)Another favorite section for me was his discussion of the kindness he experienced after his wife's death: You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness...Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world...How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't.Of course, the love of music pervades the story, and I appreciate the author's eclectic taste in music. We are the same age and I have to admit to being totally ignorant of a large number of the bands he mentions, but even if I had not heard of any of them this would still have been a good book, because music does bring people together and it doesn't really matter which music - I can still identify with that excitement over finding someone with similar tastes, the thrill of discovering a new song or performer. Some might say shared music is a shallow thing on which to build a relationship, but I say it probably works better than a lot of other types of attraction. It is easy to mistake lust for love, sexual compatibility with more general compatibility. At least if you enjoy the same music, there is another dimension to your attraction...
    • 4/5
      I was blown away by the tone and style of this book. It's all about the author's love for his wife, his love for music, his grief at losing his wife, and the way her death has affected the music they both loved. It sounds like a heart-wrenching horror of a story, and it is. But this is where it gets interesting: the book isn't depressing, and the author never once tries to manipulate your emotions.He writes very frankly and openly about the music he loves (and his affection is intoxicating), and writes about how awesome his wife was. It's almost like he's a new friend who's telling you about this song you've just got to hear, and this girl he knows who you should meet because she's just that cool. And how she died, and it wrecked his life for awhile, but she's still the coolest person he ever knew. And that the biggest suck of all is that he can't introduce you, because you would have really liked each other. And she would have really dug that song.It's a sad story, but it isn't self-indulgent which makes it all the more affecting, I think. Really beautiful.
    • 3/5
      You might expect a memoir about a young husband losing his young wife unexpectedly would require a few tissues. Perhaps even an entire box. Yet I remained oddly dry-eyed through this book. After all, Rob and his wife Renée seem to be passionately in love and destined to be together forever. Their shared love of music and his devotion and love for her is evident and obvious. This memoir—Rob’s tribute to Renée and his account of their marriage, her sudden death at age 31, and his subsequent struggle as a widower—should be incredibly moving and a tearjerker … and yet it isn’t.I think much of the problem has to do with the theme of the book that Sheffield chose: love is a mix tape. Each chapter starts with a play list from a mix tape taken from some part of his relationship with Renée or his coping with her loss. It makes sense that this is the “angle” on which the author has approached the book. Both Rob and Renée are passionate about music. (Rob is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has been working as a rock critic and pop culture journalist for 15 years. Renée also wrote for music magazines. It is obvious that music was one of the foundations of their lives.) Yet if you don’t share the knowledge of the songs and bands he is writing about, much of the book’s nuances and emotion are lost. For example, Rob writes several times about the band Pavement—a group with which I have no familiarity—and the band’s importance to him and Renée. Yet all these sections left me cold as I don’t have ANY relationship with Pavement with which to supplement my reading experience. About halfway through the book, it occurred to me that this book would be much more effective if it came packaged with the mix tapes to listen to when reading.In addition to losing a reader’s interest and emotional investment by repeated references to song and artists that the reader may be unfamiliar with, I think the “love is a mix tape” theme kept the author from really exploring the emotions he was experiencing. Rather than paint a picture with words that communicates the depth of loss he was feeling, he mentions songs that he played. This tends to break down when the reader either doesn’t know the song or has different associations with it. When he mentions listening to Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” when brooding late at night, I immediately flashed to the first time I heard it when driving in my car on a sunny day while doing to the mall and that freaky video of Missy wearing that big garbage bag-like outfit. By bringing my own mental associations to the song (which is very hard not to do), I was immediately taken out of Rob’s story and into my own.The one real emotional moment I had while reading the book came when I read this passage: The coroner later told me that she died instantly, that pulmonary embolisms kill in less than a minute, that even if it had happened in a hospital, the doctors would have been powerless to save her.The reason this passage resonated so much with me was that a pulmonary embolism is what caused my mom’s death in December. Reading that line—which echoed exactly what the doctors told my brothers and I—was comforting in an odd way. It told me that both Renée and my mom died quickly and probably without any pain. They most likely never knew what happened.Finally, a word about mix tapes. If you are of a certain age, you probably had some experience making mix tapes. I know I spent many laborious hours constructing mix tapes using a variety of methods: recording records, attempting to catch songs when they played on the radio, and doing tape to tape transfers. Creating a mix tape really is an act of love as it requires a considerable amount of time and energy on the part of the creator. (It isn’t like today’s “click a few buttons and you have an iPod play list” method. It required some serious dedication and patience.) Back in college, I made a mix tape that was so good, several people asked me to duplicate it for them. I used to have mix tapes for almost every occasion, with titles such as “Mellow Mix,” “Happy Day Songs,” “Break-Up Help,” and “Cleaning.”Of course, mix tapes were often a way of communicating with someone you liked without being overt about it. I remember agonizing over a mix tape I was making for a boy that I wanted to simultaneously impress and “seduce.” (It didn’t work… except he said I had “good taste” in music.) And I remember being on the receiving end of mix tapes and listening to each track to find out how the boy who gave it to me really felt about me. (All too often, I came to the conclusion that the boy was just sharing some good jams and wasn’t really all that into me. On the plus side, I discovered quite a few of my favorite artists via mix tapes. I’m quite sure I would have never become a fan of Tom Waits or Prefab Sprout if I’d not been exposed to their music on a mix tape.)As I’ve written these last two paragraphs, I realize that the power of mix tapes lies in listening to the music and the relationship between the giver and the recipient. I’m sure that the mix tapes that defined Rob and Renée’s relationship were excellent, but they lost their power when relegated to the page. And that ends up being the fatal flaw of this book.My Final RecommendationUnless you are a die-hard music buff who would seriously get off on seeing the various mix tape play lists that begin each chapter, I’m not sure I would recommend this book. Although there is nothing really wrong with it, I just didn’t connect emotionally with it and I think that this type of story should evoke some sort of emotional reaction. A memoir of a man losing his beloved wife at a young age is tragic. I needed to feel that tragedy when reading and, sadly, I didn’t.
    • 4/5
      I cried at the Co Op while reading this book.
    • 3/5
      The greiving process is in the spotlight here but this is also an encyclopedia of rock of the last 50 years.
    • 5/5
      At the risk of being summarily dismissed by the literary snobs amongst you (you know who you are), I'm giving this my rare 5 star rating. Discount this little gem of a pop culture romance/tragedy if you must, but know this: It will be YOUR loss. Sheffield's written a beautiful testimony to the timeless power of true love as well as great American music and I recommend it to anybody who has ever experienced (or longed for) either one. Isn't that just about everyone? The only real question is how long you'll be able to resist looking for his playlists after you're done with the book. A DEFINITE recommend.
    • 4/5
      If you've ever made a mix tape for someone or spent hours working on one to get it just right or remember taping your favorite songs off the radio, this book will make you smile. (Possible extra smiles if you were born around the late '60s and get a little giddy when anyone remembers bands like Scritti Politti.) But even if none of the above describes you, there's a lot to love in this true True Love story of an introverted music geek and a spitfire of a woman who likes all the right songs, and of his grief when he loses her.I got this (BookMooched) book in the mail, and started flipping through it, just reading some of the track listings for his mix tapes that start each chapter. I had no intention of reading it right away, but I ended up not putting it down until it was done.I thought the narrative was a little scattered and unfocused in places, but it's so engaging it doesn't really matter. It's a sweet, sad, funny, honest book, and such a lovely tribute to Rob Sheffield's wife Renee that you'll fall in love with her too. And you'll really, really want to make someone a mix tape.
    • 5/5
      Love is a Mix Tape is a love story, told tape by tape. Rob Sheffield is a music writer for Rolling Stone and various other music mags. He has interviewed various stars throughout his career... indeed Rob knows his music. This book chronicles Rob's life with Renee through the early 90's... his first real love and young wife. Renee added color, excitement, love and flavor to Rob's life. She was the lead singer while he played back up. They married young and shared a torrid affair with music. Several years after their marriage, however, Renee died suddenly and Rob found himself alone, clinging to musical memories and trying to make sense of their limited time together. Rob's poetic and trademark writing style illuminates his great passions for Renee and music with words that surprise you with humor and despair. I thought this book was brilliant and it made me more fully appreciate my own experiences of love for my husband and our shared passion for music.
    • 5/5
      NOTE: Here be spoilers. If you don't want to know what happens in this book, you might not want to read this review."Unlike me, Renee was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did." ~excerpt from Love is a Mix TapeAfter I finished reading Love is a Mix Tape, I totally wanted to make Rob Sheffield a mix tape. A real one, on one of the few remaining blank cassette tapes I've held onto. Each song would convey just how much I loved reading this book, how it made me laugh and cry and think and remember living through the 1990s.The title of the book neatly sums up exactly what it's about: through the medium of music and mix tapes, Sheffield details the life he had with his wife Renee and what his life was like after her unexpected death.As I read the book, I kept thinking about how I probably would have really gotten along with Renee. It was confirmed when I read of her deep love of the movie The Cutting Edge. "For Renee, this flick was liquid Vicodin. We watched it several thousand times. I can still recite the whole thing from memory." Liquid Vicodin! YES. Each chapter begins with a label with track listings of a specific mix tape. I loved checking out the songs on the mixes; as someone not much younger than Sheffield, I grew up making mix tapes myself in the same era as he and Renee, and it was interesting to see what songs they chose, in what order they appeared on the tape, and why they were chosen.In the same way in which he examines falling in love with Renee, what she was like and what their life together was like, Sheffield doesn't shy away from the intense reality of Renee's death; he describes what happened and how he reacted to it in detail, but it never gets too overwrought or clinical. His writing style is enjoyable and sure. The book is about life and joy, loss and death, and while reading about this wonderful woman's tragically early death isn't easy, overall, the book is really wonderful. The only thing I was kind of disappointed by was the ending. As I read about the aftermath of Renee's death, I wondered: will he be able to find love again? How will he be able to let someone into his life again after such an immense loss? What would this woman be like? He does find love again (he is now married again, actually), but after such detail about his life with Renee, he brushes lightly on their meeting and subsequent relationship. I don't know, maybe that was deliberate, to keep the focus on Renee, or because it didn't matter in the context of the book. I also was curious to know how he came to write the book in the first place. How did he decide to write this book? What was it like, revisiting those memories deeply enough to write about them? That was never really talked about either. It's not a big deal, really, in light of how much I otherwise enjoyed the book, but it would have been cool.I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone who lived through the 1990s, anyone who has loved someone, who has lost someone, who loves music and mix tapes and good writing.
    • 5/5
      Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape is a memoir of the short span of time he spent with his wife Renee, before she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. A music critic and contributing editor at Rolling Stone Magazine, Rob tells his story through a selection of 22 of the many mix tapes he and Renee made together and for each other during the decade of Nirvana. Sheffield builds a beautiful love story line-by-line and song-by-song, between a "shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston" and a "real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl." I'm having a hard time with this review - nothing I am writing seems to do justice to the book. As a teen in the 90's, I was a girl of many mix tapes. I remember most of the music with a great deal of nostalgic fondness - even if I didn't appreciate certain songs at the time. From Love is a Mix Tape: "There's a lot I miss about the nineties. It was an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent. It seemed inconceivable that things would ever go back to the way they were in the eighties, when monsters were running the country and women were only allowed to play bass in indie-rock bands. The nineties moment has been stomped over so completely, it's hard to imagine it ever happened, much less lasted five, six, seven years. Remember Brittany Murphy, the funny, frizzy-haired, Mentos-loving dork in Clueless? By 2002, she was the hood ornament in 8 Mile, just another skinny starlet, an index of everything we've lost in that time."Rob Sheffield is an amazing writer, deftly blending pop culture references into his story with each new page, leaving the reader breathlessly trying to keep up. His writing is fresh and witty, his journey of healing through music, extremely personal. I really enjoyed following the soundtrack of his life, and I'd like to share a few of the MANY excellent quotes that had me laughing-out-loud:"Renee was my hero. Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire then drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That's what Renee was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal. It didn't take long for us to get all tangled up in each other's hair.""I realize it's frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me.""We were looking forward to drawing up a prenuptial agreement, but unfortunately, we found out you can't get one unless you own something."Read this book: if you've ever been in love. Read this book: if you've ever given or received a mix tape. Read this book: for fun and nostalgia or for a wonderful story of love and devotion. Just read this book.
    • 3/5
      Nicely written novel about how music brings people together and how certain songs or albums will make you recall a certain person or time in your life. The part that almost had me in tears was when he explains how Sleater Kinney's "One More Hour" perfectly described the pain he was going through at one pinnacle moment in the novel. He also had a nostalgic description about how woman centered the early and mind 90's music and culture were and how it's sad that we probably won't see that for a while ""The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl- that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way- hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do." I remember and miss those days.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It was funny, poignant - a love story without being too mushy or sappy.
    • 4/5
      I've been a fan of Rob Sheffield's work in Rolling Stone magazine for years, and Love is a Mix Tape did not disappoint me. It's funny, sad, and will make you think of the memories we associate with certain songs. It's the true story of Sheffield's first wife, Renee. Although the two are total opposites--she's an outgoing, free-spirited Southern girl, while he's a nebbish, socially-awkward Irish-Catholic--the two share the same passion for music (specifically Big Star and Pavement). The book uses mix tapes to tell the story of their five-year marriage, which ends tragically when Renee dies of pulmonary embolism. The book reminds me of a scene in the movie The Crow where Brandon Lee's character, Eric Draven, reflects on his fiancee. "Little things," Draven says, "used to mean so much to Shelly. I thought that they were quite trivial, myself. Believe me, nothing is trivial." And that's what I think Sheffield is saying in this book. The reader might think that the little annecdotes about Renee's love for making her own clothes, for example, might seem trivial at first. But after her death, when Rob finds unused pieces of fabric in their house, nothing is trivial. Love is a Mix Tape is a great book about love and music, two things that never die
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It was cleverly presented...is it a memoir...is it a biography...is it a commentary on music? I think it is a bit of all the best parts of all of those genres! The "characters" were outrageous and believable at the same time.
    • 4/5
      This book was well written and I could sympathize with the narrator. His grief was palpable and his love of music endearing, even though I'm not a big fan of 90s music. I read almost the entire book in one sitting.
    • 5/5
      An amazing memoir about music, love, and loss by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield. Each chapter is headed by a mix tape, beginning with a disastrous tape he made for an 8th grade dance. He writes briefly about growing up but the focus of the memoir is about falling in love with and marrying his sassy Appalachian punk-rock girl, Renee. They forge a life together and he confronts the terror of being a young and unprepared husband to a woman with a giant heart and personality. After five years of marriage, Rob slips into the kitchen to make Renee a snack one day and he comes back to see her stand up, then collapse and die almost instantly, the victim of a pulmonary aneurism. He is even more unprepared to become a widower and struggles to make sense of the loss. An amazing portait of love from a man's point of view.One of my favorites of 2007.
    • 4/5
      It was pretty good. Not extraordinarily well written, but a quick and entertaining read. Dark subject, obviously. Kind of hard to recommend.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure what I expected from this book. Started it, then dropped it.