Hornby's soundtrack

His books have made single fathers sexy, helped middleclass people understand football and traced relationships in song. Now Nick Hornby has revealed the soundtrack to his own life in a new book that gives a revealing insight into one of Britain's most popular writers.

Like Rob Fleming, the emotionally retarded hero of his book High Fidelity who makes lists of everything from old girlfriends to old songs, Hornby has compiled the songs that mean most to him in a book of essays.

Fans of his writing will be surprised and intrigued by the electic choices that appear in 31 Songs. They range from big names such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart to obscurities such as Suicide, The Velvelettes and Ben Folds Five.

His all-time favourite song, he reveals, is Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road. "There are no other contenders," he writes, calculating that he must have played it around 1,500 times in 25 years.

He also reveals the music he was listening to when he lost his virginity: "The second side of Rod Stewart's Smiler, my favourite record at that time" - but he includes Stewart singing Mama You Been On My Mind from Never A Dull Moment on the list.

For equally personal reasons, he selects reggae great Gregory Isaacs' idiosyncratic version of Puff The Magic Dragon because of the impression it has made on his autistic son Danny and says he would like Van Morrison's live version of Caravan to be played at his own funeral.

The J Geils Band are chosen because they remind him of his first trip to America in the mid-Seventies, whereas fresher memories provoked the selection of Nelly Furtado's hit I'm Like A Bird - a "disposable" record which, for now, he "has to hear 10 to 15 times a day" - and the cutand-paste stylings of The Avalanches and Soulwax.

Hornby writes - amusingly, as ever - about how certain songs remind him of particular times and places. "I wanted mostly to write about what it was in these songs that made me love them,"

he states, "not what I brought to the songs. Mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do".

He describes Suicide's dark epic Frankie Teardrop as "10 and a half minutes of genuinely terrifying industrial noise . . . full of blood curdling shrieks and clangs" and confesses that, although he loved it in his twenties, he has not played it for years - not even for the purpose of writing about it.