As someone who usually has a difficult time trying to do two things at once in life, it seems pretty counter-intuitive to attempt to deal with multiple media intakes, both of which can demand full attention.  While I’m rarely able to pull this off with any success while reading non-fiction, creating a playlist to accompany certain novels can bring out the best qualities of both music and books.

I’ve recently been deep into the novels of Dennis Lehane, starting with Shutter Island and moving straight through the fantastic five-book “Kenzie & Gennaro” series of Boston detective stories.  Patrick Kenzie, the private eye/narrator, has a well-defined musical sensibility that occasionally clashes with that of his partner, and the blue-collar, ethnic, northeastern setting suggests more than a few soundtrack possibilities.

Kenzie loves the Rolling Stones and Nirvana, while his partner is way more into “mopey 80s alternative bands” like The Smiths and Depeche Mode.  In one scene, a character almost gets capped in a bar by Kenzie’s loveable psychopath pal Bubba for mistakenly playing The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” on the jukebox.  While I was reading the series I also saw an interview with Lehane where he mentioned his love for Bruce Springsteen, whose sensibilities are often a close match with the themes and settings of the novels.  

With all of this in mind, my great enjoyment of Lehane’s books has been increased by strapping on a pair of headphones and blasting a series of Stones, Nirvana, Springsteen, and U2 CDs while reading.  Maybe novels like these have a built in cinematic quality (or maybe I’ve just seen too many Scorsese movies), but the addition of a tune like “Gimme Shelter” to any of Lehane’s tense, riveting passages just cranks the drama up to 11.

Nick Hornby’s books are also steeped in knowing pop culture nods and opinionated musical references.  My reading of his great first novel High Fidelity several years ago was constantly interrupted while I hopped over to the CD player to change out a disc in order to keep up with his web of musical allusions.  I eventually settled into a rotation of obscure Motown and Stax tunes leavened with English post-punk discs by The Jam and Elvis Costello that seemed to perfectly suit the novel’s tone.

Hornby’s next novel, About a Boy, centered on references to Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, whose music lends a reading of the book an extra layer of intensity and sadness.  In How to Be Good, two of Hornby’s misanthropic characters even compile a list of people they consider “talentless, overrated, or simply wankers” that includes James Taylor, Paul McCartney, and Jim Morrison (along with Homer, Shakespeare, and the Pope).  Among the only figures they consider properly rated, along with Graham Greene and Quentin Tarantino, is Bob Dylan, whose music makes a great soundtrack to Hornby’s novel.          

One of the only successful pairings of non-fiction reading with music came while I read Shelby Foote’s massive Civil War trilogy.  By the time I reached the final volume, the weight of sadness and national near-self-destruction made every page seem like a ten-pound sheet of lead.  During the final chapters I was already hearing in my head one of the saddest classical pieces I know, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which I repeated on a continuous loop in my CD player as Foote’s elegy described the final battles and surrenders and the assassination of President Lincoln.