I read a book! Forgive me...it's been a while. And I never made it through any of the political books stacked by my bed. But I did get through Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran (Dutton, $25.95), a memoir disguised as a American Top 40 (or vice versa).

Sheffield, best known for his gig at Rolling Stone and for his previous work Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, tells his personal coming-of-age story using 25 diverse pop songs, starting with "Our Lips are Sealed" by The Go-Go's and ending with the titular band's "All She Wants Is." It's such a clever construct, one I'd love to nick as I suspect waxing nostalgic about Exposé and Debbie Harry and, yes, Madonna would pull a lot of memories out of me. It (mostly) works.

The way to a woman's heart is Duran Duran

Sheffield's unselfconsciously goofy prose is most fun and most endearing to breeze through when his stories have real depth. By far, the best chapter is the one set in 1982 and set to OMD's "Enola Gay". Sheffield's recollections of being a dorky New Wave wannabe in a student exchange program in Madrid would demand empathy from any reader; it hardly mattered to me that he was straight and wanted nothing more than to be accepted by girls as opposed to gay and wanting nothing more than to discover how to attract boys. The wall between childhood and adolescence, between love and lust, is perfectly recreated and torn apart by Sheffield as he attempts to impress the European girls he hangs with at discos (socialist ones, not fascist). When he returns home and escorts his little sister to see E.T., it's art.

His story set in 1985 and set to Madonna's "Crazy for You" offers a sample of Sheffield's musical mindset:

"At nineteen, I had never had a girlfriend, and I knew for a fact that this was somebody's fault, though not mine. So I decided it was Madonna's. I had pretty strict ideas about how I thought the world should be, and my plan for getting a girlfriend was to make the world rearrange itself to conform to my conditions. I thought that was a fair set of demands. Madonna kept reminding me, over and over, how full of shit I was. So I resented her bitterly and prayed for her not to be famous anymore."

Never read such an exact explanation for why at least a percentage of Madonna's straight male detractors exist. (He later warmed to Madonna before cooling again, but all a fan can ask is for her to mean something—and he wouldn't argue that she didn't.)

What I like about Sheffield is his utter lack of shame in embracing things that others might find totally unserious—Human League, for example. His kiddish enthusiasm for music that moves him is delightful and is something I've always championed, right back to when I would fight with classmates about how Madonna really was more than just a throwaway disco dolly, but that if she were nothing more than that, that would also be extremely important.

I did feel, though, that many of these stories were unfocused and thin. I should go back and see if my own appreciation or lack thereof for particular songs had any correlation to my reaction to the chapters associated with them. But definitely there were stretches that felt as if he were simply filling out a high-concept book with low-impact verbal aerobics. (His chapter set in 1981 and set to Ray Parker Jr.'s "A Woman Needs Love" is an annoying list that amounts to less than even that crappy song would suggest.)

I recommend the book, though; I think if you're excited by '80s nostalgia, you'll cream your jeans over Sheffield's unsubtle array of references to songs, styles, cliques, clichés, movies, TV and sayings. You'll want to run out and burn a bunch of rap albums or write something really mean about reality television.