33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 2 (33 1/3)

I am a giant fan of the 33 1/3 books. You have to check them out if you love classic, masterpiece rock albums. This is a great collection of them. Git it.

I like these books because it allows me to break out certain albums and give them another look. If they could get the labels to offer a download of the album or a CD they could make a killing of the serious music listener.

When a musician builds up a body of work, it makes sense to put out a Greatest Hits/Best Of career retrospective aimed at those looking for just the highlights. Although that concept doesn’t really lend itself to books, it does make a certain amount of sense for the 33 1/3 series, since each volume is dedicated to a single album, and a sampler could be useful for someone new to the series, which is now more than fifty books deep. The second volume of “hits” collects twenty passages on albums as seemingly different as Kick Out The Jams, Paul’s Boutique, Loveless and Born In The USA, to name but a few, with the common thread being that each is widely hailed as a classic. Jumping from one story fragment to another every 10-25 pages is jarring, but it gives you just enough to decide if you want to seek out individual volumes – and isn’t that exactly what any good sampler should do?

The price is right as the individual books are $16+ each. However, this book is not fancy, there are typos and misalignment and other signs of cheap production. However, those drawbacks do not prevent me reading the text and enjoying the book overall.