Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield

Music geeks who came of age during the 1990s will find fraternity in Sheffield's tales of his relationship, marriage and widowhood. Despite the subject of grief, this is an often-funny book with touchstones for even those who haven't experience his kind of loss.

You remember mix tapes, right? Finding, combining, and recording music in a perfect combination to express a mood or emotion is an artform lost in today's playlist-and-shuffle world. Rob and Renee created tapes to help with dishwashing and going to sleep along with the more common dance and exercise compilations. 

It's easy to understand how Sheffield's connections to music shift after Renee's sudden death. There are songs he'll never listen to the same way again - some for better, some for worse. And this book will make you dust off those old mixtapes from your own life and also run to iTunes for some new finds.

The audiobook version is read by the author, which brings a new layer of meaning to the tough and terrible times he experiences after Renee. He does a commendable job getting through it - I'm not sure I'd have been so strong.