“Recommendation: When using this product, actually listening to the record is strongly indicated. I don’t mean just on those crappy little speakers built into your computer, either. And turn it up, for fuck’s sake.” Those are the instructions that greet the reader of Jonathan Lethem’s Fear of Music , a book about the Talking Heads album for the excellent 33 1/3 series, which comes out the 26th. Judging by the lengthy excerpt from the beginning of the volume that publisher Continuum has made available, it’s an excellent suggestion. As Lethem’s readers already know, music plays a big part in his work — his 2007 novel You Don’t Love Me Yet even tells the story of an indie-rock band. But unlike some other 33 1/3 books (most notably John Darnielle’s take on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality), this isn’t fiction. It appears to be a song-by-song analysis, preceded by “preludes” about Lethem’s first encounter with encounter with the album and its unusual, ridged cover. Intrigued? Read the first 23 pages of Fear of Music here. [via Slicing Up Eyeballs]