I want you to read a book.

I know that’s asking a lot.  You’ve got to buy it, you’ve got to dedicate time, and I’m not even sure you’ll be riveted.

But you will be stunned.  Because you’ll see yourself in it.

"Juliet, Naked" is the latest Nick Hornby novel.  Yes, the guy who wrote "High Fidelity".  Please, please, please don’t confuse the book with the movie.  As much as I love Jack Black, and I do, he does not accurately represent the shop clerks in the book.  Record store clerks are pissed off.  And that’s why they treat you so badly.  Because in an alternative universe they should be kings, but instead they’re locked up in this musty room telling idiots like you what to buy.

Music is a passion, a belief, a creed.  And Duncan’s one of us.  Intricately analyzing the work of Tucker Crowe, who went into a bathroom in Minneapolis twenty years previous and came out retired, never to make music again.  But his one great album, about Juliet, it was even nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys, didn’t win, but for a moment everybody knew who he was, now only a few do.  But those few…they live for him.

It’s like Alex Chilton scaled down.  No matter how long you’ve been gone, you’re never forgotten.  And to certain fans, you’re everything.

Duncan and his girlfriend Annie travel to America from their dismal coastline city in England to visit the bathroom in Minneapolis, other Tucker Crowe sites.  Just like I came to L.A. and had to ferret out all the locations on the Frank Zappa records.

Too many novels are written in a timeless era.  But in "Juliet, Naked", they listen to iPods, they send e-mail, they live in that ever-smaller world we inhabit, where no one has anonymity and the girl you sat next to in second grade, who you haven’t seen since, friends you on Facebook.

What’s it like to live in a world where we’re all connected, where everything you own is communal, where you’ve got no privacy.

That’s where we are today.  And although we like being networked, we yearn to retreat, to a world we can own.

That’s what a book provides.  Brian Wilson’s room.

And in this book, Duncan and Annie and the far-flung people inhabiting the message board live for their private universe, of music.

You can read "Rolling Stone", you can watch YouTube clips, you can meander the mainstream and you’re never going to find a description of fandom, of what it means to live for music, like you will in "Juliet, Naked".  Suddenly, you won’t feel so alone.  You’ll know that there’s someone out there, just like you, who believes music can save your life.