31 Songs by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby shows Lavinia Greenlaw how to be good at making a list into a thrilling musical journey

At least once a week I listen to Earth, Wind & Fire's "That's the Way of the World", often in the car. I sing along, moved every time by the falsetto crescendo: "Plant your flowers and they GROW!" and gripped by a single guitar note which comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere and ought to add nothing but upon which everything depends.

It's the mark of a good song that such lyrics carry themselves off as pure rather than plain silly, oxygen rather than helium. It's also important that I cannot explain how that note works. On this front, Hornby cites Dave Eggers, whose theory is that we listen to songs until we've figured them out.

Nick Hornby's modestly presented collection of short essays about songs includes a number of other insights. For instance, that if we go on listening to a song, it loses its associations, its first place. I was struck by how true this is, except in the case of Earth, Wind & Fire who still take me back to a flat over a shop in Essex and a white shag-pile carpet. If that sounds a bit sordid, I'll have you know that, like the foursome who stand around listening to Otis Redding in Jim Cartwright's Road, the unforgettable fact is that nothing happened, we just listened.

In 31 Songs, Hornby does something far more interesting than bang on about his greatest hits; this is not Top of the Pops plus one. Without shying away from personal associations, he seems to have chosen each to make a point about pop.

One is that a song like Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" can know how an Englishman who has neither porch nor screen-door nor convertible, feels. Hornby calculates that he has listened to this track 1,500 times: "just over once a week for twenty-five years, which sounds about right, if one takes into account the repeat plays in the first couple of years". It's as if he has allowed the song to choose him in the same way that, as he says here, it was Anne Tyler rather than Kerouac or DeLillo who really spoke to him when he began to write.

Hornby is not afraid of the word "perfect". He recognises the sensation and does not discriminate. He knows how songs seep into our consciousness, here Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird", which he pre-empts by saying that of course a lot of pop is inane but sometimes you hear something and it drives you "pleasurably potty". This made me think of Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You", which I can't stop humming now, and want a copy of, even if it does have what sound like budgerigars on backing vocals.

The adventure of music lies in not knowing where it might lead. Rod Stewart led Hornby to Bobby Bland who took him on to BB King and the Chess label – a music buff's three steps to heaven. The conversation that one song has with many others is part of the joy of music, as it is of any art form, and Hornby makes the astute observation that a bad band has often not been listening: after all, Yes and Genesis only referred back as far as Pink Floyd.

Hornby doesn't listen to a lot of classical music or jazz. It is pop, broadly defined, about which he is passionate and which he explains so well. He is relaxed enough to allude to Andrew Wyeth, Walter Pater, Gramsci and even God – whom he imagines as "a divine Willie Nelson". Why, then, after making a compelling case for never again listening to Suicide's wall of noise, does he have to snarl at those who still might: "don't try to make me feel morally or intellectually inferior"?

Once or twice, Hornby over-extends an irony or pushes the metaphorical boat out, when he is good enough not to need to. His analysis of how music constructs its effects is as seductive as it is sharp. On "Thunder Road": "the first few bars, on wheezy harmonica and achingly pretty piano, actually sound like they refer to something that has already happened ..."

31 Songs makes heroic sport of hapless accumulation. Hornby is not a Bob Dylan fan but somehow owns more CDs by him than by anyone else. He knows what a real Dylan fan is and knows too that "All this Dylan devotion is somehow anti-music". He lists the random things he knows about the man, misspelling Dylan's first wife Sara's name. There seems to have been no true child of Bob at Penguin to amend this error; or is this a bluff – proof that Hornby hasn't succumbed?

Hornby is against the notion that Dylan is any sort of poet, as anyone with any respect for pop lyrics would agree. Lyrics leave room for music, can get away with a lot and provoke your parents. Most of us will recognise the moment when Hornby's mother walked in on him watching Marc Bolan: "What does that mean then? Get it on/Bang a gong ..." In the end, though, pop is a pretty conservative medium. It is "songs about love that endure the best. Songs about work are good. Also songs about rivers, or parents, or roads".

This book is so encouraging. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes because the whole point is to still be capable of getting hooked all over again. And that terrible gig you paid so much money to go to? Guess what, you can walk out! Hornby has a position but leaves room for yours. He must receive a lot of mail from those who beg to differ: Rod Stewart's version of "Bring It On Home To Me" over Sam Cooke's maybe, but if it is raucousness and swing you are after, Mr Hornby, what about Eddie Floyd's?

Don't be put off by the casual mention of things like an "out-takes bootleg". Hornby's continuing excitement, his willingness to go where the music takes him and to be proved foolish or wrong, make this a pleasure for anyone to read. He puts forward a passionate case for Ian Dury's England, tells us to go shop in his local record store Wood in Islington, and alerts us to the existence of Reggae for Kids on which Gregory Isaacs performs "Puff the Magic Dragon". He is a man who listens to the Velvelettes and who can admit that a friend's band turned out to be quite good.

He can't resist squeezing in more songs. Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" receives its due as the best pop song ever written and he rightly raves about the violin solo on Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Body's In Trouble". The book ends with his favourite tracks of 2002, which range from Ms Dynamite to Linda Thompson, showing that unlike most of ours, his record collection keeps on growing. If anything will convince you that pop music can make life worth living it is this book and Nick Hornby's straightforward rapture: "I can hear things that aren't there, see and feel things I can't normally see and feel".

Lavinia Greenlaw's novel 'Mary George of Allnorthover' is published by Flamingo