So you know when a book's description hits every single one of your "must haves" or connects to the topics that are nearest and dearest to your heart and you think "There's no way I won't love this?"... Only to not quite get there and be so sad you can't quite get through the book?

I love memoirs and music, and use both to relate to every person and scenario in my life, so I fully anticipated absolutely falling in love with Peter Coviello's LONG PLAYERS. Maybe it's in part because of how personalized connection to music is but I didn't particularly find him relatable and I really struggled to connect with the book. It wasn't that the book itself wasn't well written because it was I just couldn't quite make the connection I need to make to give it more than three stars. I have tried on and off for the last 4 years to actually read the book in it's entirety and I'm only now just giving up on it.

This may be the best book about Generation X that isn't actually titled Generation X. Mainly, it's a break-up story about a young academic looking back on his marriage as he moves through divorce, but along the way, Coviello unpacks how and why his (my) generation spent so many hours creating and obsessing over our most sacred artifact: the mix tape..

I enjoyed it. It’s out of the genre that I usually read but it sounded interesting so I wanted to read it. It did not disappoint.

I received a free Kindle copy of Long Players by Peter Coviello courtesy of Net Galley  and Penquin Books, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book as I was looking for something different. This is the first book by Peter Coviello that I have read.

To put it briefly - this book is an utter waste of time. The author wallows in self pity throughout the book to the point that you want to throw it in the trash and never look at it again. The subtitle is alo misleading.

That said, some other reviewers (perhaps friends and family) found the book so fascinating that they gave it five stars. I feel like I wasted fours of my life on a piece of trash.

This is a very melancholy book about one man's love of music. It's full of a know it all attitude, and self loathing that I hate from most music fans. Great, I'm really happy that that band meant so much to you, that doesn't mean I can't like just one song from them.

It's like going to a concert and someone asking 'when' you got into a band. What difference does it make?

I wanted to love this, the way that I love "Love is a Mixtape' or "Talking to Girls about Duran Duran" - Basically I need to read about Rob Sheffield book instead of this book of sadness.

2.5 stars.

For the first 30% of this book, I thought this was the most pretentious thing I had ever read.

From 30%-50%, I thought it was stunningly beautiful.

From 50%-the end, I just couldn't wait for it to be over.

There's a lot to appreciate about this book. It's beautifully written. It's deep and sad and mournful in a really lovely way. And it is so honest.

But honesty and deepness get old after a while. After one hundred pages, discussing your sorrow at length stops being deep and just turns into whining. By 200 pages, it's nearly unbearable. Won't there be a happy moment somewhere? Or is this man's whole life just ridiculously tragic?

From reading this, the author felt like a dark and brooding hero from classic lit. And I long ago stopped falling in love with men like that and started favoring something a little more genuine and realistic.

There were some places where I could really identify with the author. He talked endlessly about the mixes that he made people and the songs that mattered to him. And that's something I could really understand and connect with - I feel the same way about music. I spend hours making people mixes they aren't that excited about. I get it. In fact, I picked up this book hoping for a connection on music and praying for music suggestions from someone who could understand my love of pop music. And even on that front, this book disappointed. While the author definitely shares a LOT of music, most of it wasn't interesting or special to me. Since my entire motivation for reading this book was to learn more music and connect with someone on a musical level, I feel like I wasted some time. Why didn't he just make a Spotify playlist with a long description? This book was too much and far too redundant.

People who loves slow, long, drawn-out discourses on the human condition will really enjoy this book. Lovers of underground indie rock will rejoice in his musical choices. But for me, this book was a waste of time.

Long Players is a love story in 18 songs. This book was not at all what I was expecting it to be and in fact I didn't quite finish it.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

I was so excited to read this, however, I just couldn't get into. I was hoping for something like Rob Sheffield's Love is A Mixtape but sadly this wasn't what I got. I couldn't connect with the writing and I found it kind of boring. This just didn't live up to what I was hoping for.

There are very few things I believe in as strongly as the power of music. I would 100% agree with the statement that my life has a soundtrack. There are songs I can return to over and over again and remember exact moments of my life so clearly it's as if I'm still there in that moment. Nostalgia and music are powerful partners. As such, I was supremely excited to dig into this book. Love, heartbreak and pop songs? What more could this musicophile ask for? Unfortunately, I just could not find my footing with this story. I felt out of my depth, unable to connect from almost the very first page. Maybe it was the formatting and progression of the stories, maybe it was the author's appreciated but verbose writing style, or maybe it was just the fact that the most of these songs weren't ones I knew well but I just couldn't get into it. I wanted to feel like I was sitting across from a friend, discussing out favorite music, acknowledging the impact said music had on our lives and finding a connection in the universal truth of music. Sadly, I couldn't get there.

I could NOT get into this - despite really wanting to and loving the idea. I am a firm believer that music is a great way to deal with emotions that we often have trouble expressing/understanding/working through, and loved the concept. But the author's writing style was just not for me. I appreciate that he has a great vocabulary, but I don't need to be reminded of that fact in every sentence... It made the writing feel stilted and took away from the emotion and human connection that I expected to experience. Here's an example: "Inside the normative frame of daily life, this is a happy enough microevent" - I expected a memoir about life, love, and music, not a clinical exegesis on psychoemotional wellness... The formality of the writing style just didn't work for me, given the topic, and I am afraid I couldn't read it through.