Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Nick Hornby
Penguin 2007
One way that certain books appeal is through the reader's identification with what the author is saying. I found it happening a lot when I was reading this very funny book by Nick Hornby. Like me, Nick (you see, we’re on first name terms already) reads a lot. Like me, he jots down his views on what he reads. Like me he buys far too many books and doesn’t read them all. Like me, he’s got a special shelf for books on the waiting list. Like me, he read William Cooper’s Scenes From Provincial Life in the early eighties and remembers thinking it good, though now he can’t quite remember why. Like me he was given a distressingly open and honest account of the groupies, drugs and booze lifestyle of an American hard rock band (in his case Motley Crue, in mine Guns N Roses) for Christmas. Like me he’s not quite sure why. There, regrettably, the similarities end though. Nick’s a big footie fan. Nick’s a hugely talented and successful writer. Nick’s very rich. Nick’s reviews are published in a magazine, read by loads of people, then republished in a book and read by even more; mine are read by three people: my mate Nick (not that Nick, if you see what I mean), the wife, and, gratifyingly, the author of Cardiff’s Vanished Docklands. But still, you get the picture. Indeed, one of the attractions of Hornby’s books for me has always been his informal, funny, way of writing about serious stuff, and the way it suggests that if you met you’d have a lot in common – and in that way this collection of articles he wrote for the American magazine The Believer does not disappoint. His approach to reading is refreshing: he worries if the language gets more important than the content or obscures meaning; he’s critical of the elitist thinking which sneers at the books people actually read for enjoyment; he likes Patrick Hamilton and Richard Yates and is very suspicious of writers writing novels about writers. He identifies as the “Fuck it” moment the point you reach when you have no choice but to fling to one side a hopelessly obscure bit of modern poetry you realise you will never understand, and his own prose, as always, is admirably clear and expressive. All this means that I take his recommendations very seriously, and don’t doubt that some of the books he reviews favourably here will be cropping up on this site too, before long. In the end, there were only two problems with this book. Firstly the American editors of the magazine (the people he calls the Polysyllabic Spree) wanted, in a very positive American way, not to allow critical reviews. Therefore we just hear about the books he likes; the ones he doesn’t are not identified by name or betrayed by specific detail which is, from my very negative English perspective, a shame. Secondly, because this was originally an American publication, there are some superfluous explanations of football and the like (superfluous even for me). Overall though, I liked this book very much indeed, not least because it was pleasing to discover that there is at least one other sad forty-something bloke who has seriously considered producing a family tree like diagram showing the links between all the books he’s read. Like I said before, this chap is on my wavelength – and not in a good way.
5th February 2008
http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/nickhornby/index.html
See also: Juliet, Naked; 31 Songs; Slam
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