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When someone loves something with a passion, it is often infectious. You simply can’t help but share in the love, even if it’s something you may not love yourself. I’m not a fan of baseball, but one can clearly see the love of the game in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball�� or Philip Roth’s “The Great American Novel��. I’m not an astrophysicist, but it’s clear to see the passion that Cixin Liu has for the stars and planets in his novel “The Dark Forest��. I could care less about MTV’s The Real World, but Chuck Klosterman’s love for the show is strangely contagious in “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs��.

Likewise, Quentin Tarantino’s obvious love for movies jumps off the page and into your heart in his latest (and first nonfiction) book “Cinema Speculation��. It is, I’ll admit, not a book that I expected to love so much, and I daresay that it is my favorite nonfiction book of the past year.

Part memoir, part film criticism, “Cinema Speculation�� is an all-out gushing love-fest for movies. At least, a very specific era and genre of movies.

The era is the 1970s. Tarantino was 6 when his mother took him to see a double feature. These weren’t kid’s films, either. The first film of the double feature was a film called “Joe��, starring Peter Boyle as a disgruntled blue collar worker who goes on a murderous rampage in a hippy commune. It was basically a Trumper wet dream, long before the Trumpers. It was controversial, even for 1970. And Tarantino saw it at age six.

His childhood abounded with a plethora of excellent, fantastic, totally age-inappropriate films: “Bullitt��, “Rolling Thunder��, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice��, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre��, “The Getaway��, “Sisters��, “Hardcore��, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song��, “Deliverance, “The Outfit��, “Paradise Alley��, “Halloween��, “Mean Streets��, and “Taxi Driver��.

Tarantino brilliantly and lovingly dissects the films of his childhood, pointing out the things he loved about them, what he hated about them, how they influenced his own filmography, and his checkered history with cinematic violence. It’s a very reflective, intelligent, fun, and energetic examination of the Grindhouse film era as only Tarantino can tell it.