Get It While You Can

by Nick Jaina

When his beloved guitar is stolen, Nick Jaina finds himself untethered from the dream he’s pursued since he was sixteen. No matter how many albums he’s released or tours he’s led, he still can’t shake the feeling that he has failed at life. So the critically acclaimed, endlessly heartbroken singer-songwriter checks himself into a ten-day silent retreat. As those silent days unfold, Jaina attempts to rewire his own brain in a burst of unpredictable digressions and unsent love letters, musings on the miracles of science and the fallen heroes of popular music. Get It While You Can is a late-night ode to the pursuit of sanity.

Genres: Memoir

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2015

Reviews

[Kate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I experienced the author, Nick Jaina, reading some sections of the book as well as playing music as a performance. The reading/music was an excellent pitch. I bought the book on the spot. "Get It While You Can" is a satisfying hybrid of memoir, prose, and essay. It has a story arch, but can be read in fits and spurts. I have not read another book like it. If you are looking for something modern, accessibly existential, and deep, I would recommend this book.

[Nick Santaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe musicians are geniuses. But rather than their “genius craft” is solving proofs with derivations, organizing the periodic table, or designing a tesla, instead, they create art that resonates with the complexities of human emotion. This books expresses what it’s like to be in the mind of this type of genius. If you love books and love music read this book.

[Skyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love everything about this memoir. My copy is full of bookmarks for passages that spoke to me. 25 stars!! He is performing at the Sou'wester Lodge the Sunday eve after this review.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. Clearly trying hard to say something meaningful, but then actually does so

[Marty Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Years ago I had an open house in San Jose, California, showing off my artwork in my giant 5 car garage studio space. It had a large couch in the middle with the walls covered with my drawings, paintings, and studies. A good friend of mine was sitting on the couch during the open house, sitting perfectly still while people talked and moved around him. I went over and sat down next to him and asked him what he was thinking. He said, "I just realized this is what it is like roaming around inside your mind." I loved that response.
This book is very much the same. It reads at first like a series of disconnected essays, stories, letters that don't immediately make sense. But little by little you start to see, not just a story develop (a memoir of Nick's life) but a set of smudged, partial and whole fingerprints defining who he is in the worlds of music, love, religion, spirituality, intellect, self-awareness and humor.
The emphasis stays on the set of fingerprints, something you have to discern, not the cut and dried story that you only have to read through. What I ended up with was feeling like I knew him pretty darn well. And I liked him.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a very, very long time. I found myself dog-earring so many passages to revisit that I started reading with a highlighter in hand.

Jaina is able to describe little pieces of life and love in a way that is very relatable and just the right amount of philosophical so that his writing is still accessible.

[Janelle Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

36: Get it While You Can by Nick Jaina...which I bought from Nick and had signed two weeks ago when he visited the high school I taught at and performed with Stelth Ulvang in an intimate concert that was wonderful. As Nick inscribed in my copy of his book, "Dear Janelle, This is a book about wry things.<3 Nick" and it is, and I love it. Nick spends the entire book of his own non-fiction story, at a no-communication meditation retreat, writing love letters that he may or may not send, thinking about his music and the music of many who have gone before him, and telling us readers other important things. And it's all just plain beautiful in its honesty and humility, in its learning and struggling, and in...primarily...Nick being Nick. The book includes references to Shakespeare and other literature and songs that I know, but even more of the references are to things I don't know and now want to learn. And reading the book has caused me to look up and listen to a number of Nick Jaina's songs as well...which has certainly enhanced the whole experience in powerful ways. For my AP Language-teaching friends, every piece of this could be excerpted and valued...discussed...in class as model. This is a wonderful start-of-summer (or whenever you get to it!) read! :)

[Norrin2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You could write a song with fifty-nine chords that says nothing. On the other hand, you could write a song that is one chord, a melody that is one note, lyrics that are one word, and if you do so with genuine intent and sincere emotion, you could say everything."

Ostensibly this book is about Nick Jaina's time at a silent meditation retreat. Not much action other than trying not to be distracted by the fidgeter or the farter. But while Jaina's body is sitting silently, his mind is soaring all over -- back in time to old girlfriends and unforgettable people he has met. To regrets and missed opportunities. He tries to figure out why the Beatles decided on the track orders they used on the White Album. He makes lists -- the 18 different kinds of sadness, words for things that have no words. He expresses all of this beautifully. I wore out my highlighter capturing things he said that I want to remember.

[Ted Prokash · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was enjoyable, though on a weird inter-referential level. I met Jaina at a book festival earlier this year and he struck me as being a cool person and on an admirable path creatively. So I went into this book biased in his favor. It's basically a lot of soul searching, self discovery, that kind of crap. Fellow artists beating their own heads against the wall of American indifference will find it easy to relate. A humbling memoir or a memoir of a humbling. Take a break from beating yourself up to laugh at one of your peers. Cheers indeed to pitiful commiseration.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir's not really my thing, unless it's funny, like David Sedaris, or gorgeously written, like Amos Oz. Nick Jaina's Get It While You Can was original and well written enough to hold my interest.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love stories told through a series of vignettes, and this one did not disappoint. For a first book by a person who's not even really an "author" by trade, there are some surprisingly weighty insights in the bricolage Jaina assembles here. Reflections on love, mortality, sadness, and music (clearly his true love), these brief, mundane, quotidian tales stacked one upon the other end up amounting to something quite profound.

[Sam Fann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it.

[Acaciabee Blackwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I really appreciated about this book is the way that Jaina’s background in music emerges through the intricate lyricism of the prose. This book is something of a mixed media project, and, having seen Nick Jaina read material from this work, it makes perfect sense that his musical background would have such a strong influence on his writing. Jaina’s readings always incorporate some musical element, which seems to perfectly dovetail with the musical sensibility of the book’s structure and lyrical style.

At the reading I attended, Jaina played a riff on his guitar, looped it, and allowed it to play on repeat as an accompaniment to his reading. He acknowledged that this was a sort of “cheating” which got a laugh, but it made me think about the limitations of language and the lecture that Kwame Dawes gave at my last MFA residency. When a student in the audience asked what Kwame meant by these limitations, his response was “well, how do you compete with music?”

The answer for Jaina is, he doesn’t, but instead incorporates his musicality into every aspect of his writing, both in content and in style. Told in a series of lyrical essays, unsent love letters to an unnamed and unrequited love, and anecdotes from a 10-day vippassana meditation retreat, Get It While You Can is a love song to the art of writing love songs.

[Michael Heald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This statement should be taken with a grain of salt, as I am the publisher of this book, but with the publication of Get It While You Can, Nick Jaina joins Patti Smith, Keith Richards, and Dean Wareham atop the list of songwriters turned memoirists. Hilarious, heartfelt, and full of wonder...

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick weaves together unsent love letters, descriptions of famous live performances, stories of touring with his band, and stories of slowly realizing he's not going to make it in the music industry. Heartbreaking, funny, and insightful.

[Charlene Xiaolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the poetic imagery when I heard the author read several letters from this book between his songs at a show and bought the book there. It is a wonderful read especially on the recent raining days in the Bay area.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the persistent suspicion that Nick was speaking for me in this book, but doing a better job of it than I would have.

[Steven West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant writer and poetic narrator of abstracts, especially multi-valent emotions like nostalgia, loneliness. Beautiful meandering daydream through bizarre human life, travel, art.