High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, is a classic coming-of-age novel that follows record store owner Rob as he experiences a quarter-life crisis while struggling to come to terms with the things that really matter in life.
Key Learnings:
• Explores themes of relationships and love, growing up, and self-discovery
• Examines the relevance of nostalgia and the power of music to affect nostalgia
• Offers a thoughtful insight into how to navigate life at a crossroads
Why UX Designers should read this book:
High Fidelity provides a thoughtful exploration of how people develop their identities and how those identities often tie into memories, nostalgia and music. As UX designers, this book can help us gain insight into human behavior and how to better understand the inner workings of our users.
Other Books Connected to UX Designers:
• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
• The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero
• Sprint by Jake Knapp
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
✏️ Highlights
I started going out with one of them…no, that’s not right, because I had absolutely no input into the decision-making process. And I can’t say that she started going out with me, either: it’s that phrase “going out with” that’s the problem, because it suggests some sort of parity and equality.
halfway through our first kiss, my first kiss, I can recall feeling utterly bewildered, totally unable to explain how Alison Ashworth and I had become so intimate.
it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex—they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.
men—those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on—are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in “foreplay” they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can’t help feeling, are kind of ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren’t interested. They didn’t want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried.
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don’t, to something that women want and men can’t be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay—mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.)
hand, I was quite unable to show the enthusiasm I felt she needed, so I decided to have her name tattooed down my right arm. I don’t know. Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me.
have never been entirely sure what it is women like about me, but I know that ardor helps (even I know how difficult it is to resist someone who finds you irresistible), and I was certainly ardent:
when one of Charlie’s friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn’t do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest.
She talked a lot, so that you didn’t have those terrible, strained silences that seemed to characterize most of my sixth-form dates, and when she talked she said remarkably interesting things—about her course, about my course, about music, about films and books and politics.
I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became convinced that she was going to go off with one of them. She went off with one of them.
I hung around Charlie’s hall of residence until some friends of hers caught me and threatened to give me a good kicking.
I never really got over Charlie. That was when the important stuff, the stuff that defines me, went on.
“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Neil Young;
“Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me” by the Smiths; “Call Me” by Aretha Franklin; “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” by anybody. And then there’s “Love Hurts” and “When Love Breaks Down” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and “She’s Gone”
commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because
(And, like James Stewart in Vertigo, I had developed a “type”: cropped blond hair, arty, dizzy, garrulous, which led to some disastrous mistakes.)
(She’ll have nowhere to go when they split! She’ll really have nowhere
They are together still, for all I know, and, as of today, I am unattached again.
my all-time top five favorite books are The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Gural-nick, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and, I don’t know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vonnegut.
I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.
Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.
Sarah and I matched. Sarah was average-attractive (smallish, slim, nice big brown eyes, crooked teeth, shoulder-length dark hair that always seemed to need a cut no matter how often she went to the hairdresser’s), and she wore clothes that were the same as mine, more or less. All-time top five favorite recording artists: Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley.
And she was sad, in the original sense of the word. She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.) He was her moment, just as Charlie was mine, and when they split, Sarah had sworn off men for a while, just as I had sworn off women.
But his conversation is simply enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too.
Within seconds the shop is shaking to the bass line of “Walking on Sunshine,” by Katrina and the Waves. It’s February. It’s cold. It’s wet. Laura has gone. I don’t want to hear “Walking on Sunshine.”
like a lifeboat captain in a gale.
The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalle’s version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way.”
I find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.
cross-eyed American way—she looks like a slightly plumper,
sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.
We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment. Tonight, it really doesn’t matter either
We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
and doing all the other things that a modern chap
had no basis in reality at all. For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing miserably—to recapture the quiet
sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don’t know why.
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women—or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners.
I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can’t remember anything good about him at all.
I started going out with one of them…no, that’s not right, because I had absolutely no input into the decision-making process. And I can’t say that she started going out with me, either: it’s that phrase “going out with” that’s the problem, because it suggests some sort of parity and equality.
halfway through our first kiss, my first kiss, I can recall feeling utterly bewildered, totally unable to explain how Alison Ashworth and I had become so intimate.
it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex—they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.
men—those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on—are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in “foreplay” they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can’t help feeling, are kind of ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren’t interested. They didn’t want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried.
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don’t, to something that women want and men can’t be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay—mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.)
hand, I was quite unable to show the enthusiasm I felt she needed, so I decided to have her name tattooed down my right arm. I don’t know. Scarring myself for life seemed much easier than having to tell Jackie that it had all been a grotesque mistake, that I’d just been messing about; if I could show her the tattoo, my peculiar logic ran, I wouldn’t have to bother straining after words that were beyond me.
have never been entirely sure what it is women like about me, but I know that ardor helps (even I know how difficult it is to resist someone who finds you irresistible), and I was certainly ardent:
when one of Charlie’s friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn’t do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest.
She talked a lot, so that you didn’t have those terrible, strained silences that seemed to characterize most of my sixth-form dates, and when she talked she said remarkably interesting things—about her course, about my course, about music, about films and books and politics.
I was intimidated by the other men in her design course, and became convinced that she was going to go off with one of them. She went off with one of them.
I hung around Charlie’s hall of residence until some friends of hers caught me and threatened to give me a good kicking.
I never really got over Charlie. That was when the important stuff, the stuff that defines me, went on.
“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Neil Young;
“Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me” by the Smiths; “Call Me” by Aretha Franklin; “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” by anybody. And then there’s “Love Hurts” and “When Love Breaks Down” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and “She’s Gone”
commemorated as a dice player? Sometimes I look at my shop (because
(And, like James Stewart in Vertigo, I had developed a “type”: cropped blond hair, arty, dizzy, garrulous, which led to some disastrous mistakes.)
(She’ll have nowhere to go when they split! She’ll really have nowhere
They are together still, for all I know, and, as of today, I am unattached again.
my all-time top five favorite books are The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, Sweet Soul Music by Peter Gural-nick, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and, I don’t know, something by William Gibson, or Kurt Vonnegut.
I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen.
Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.
Sarah and I matched. Sarah was average-attractive (smallish, slim, nice big brown eyes, crooked teeth, shoulder-length dark hair that always seemed to need a cut no matter how often she went to the hairdresser’s), and she wore clothes that were the same as mine, more or less. All-time top five favorite recording artists: Madness, Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley.
And she was sad, in the original sense of the word. She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.) He was her moment, just as Charlie was mine, and when they split, Sarah had sworn off men for a while, just as I had sworn off women.
But his conversation is simply enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too.
Within seconds the shop is shaking to the bass line of “Walking on Sunshine,” by Katrina and the Waves. It’s February. It’s cold. It’s wet. Laura has gone. I don’t want to hear “Walking on Sunshine.”
like a lifeboat captain in a gale.
The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalle’s version of Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way.”
I find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.
cross-eyed American way—she looks like a slightly plumper,
sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.
We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment. Tonight, it really doesn’t matter either
We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn’t be listening to pop music at the moment.
and doing all the other things that a modern chap
had no basis in reality at all. For all I know, Marco and Charlie never even consummated their relationship and Charlie has spent the intervening decade trying—but failing miserably—to recapture the quiet
sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don’t know why.
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women—or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners.
I’m starting to remember things now: his dungarees; his music (African, Latin, Bulgarian, whatever fucking world music fad was trendy that week); his hysterical, nervous, nerve-jangling laugh; the terrible cooking smells that used to pollute the stairway; the visitors that used to stay too late and drink too much and leave too noisily. I can’t remember anything good about him at all.
