Hornby Done Told Me

So, Trott suggested that I post a primer for people who haven't read any Nick Hornby. Please note that Hornby is no Philip Roth or Don DeLillo and doesn't pretend to be. You can read any one of these books in a few days. And you probably will, because you won't be able to put them down until you're done. Here goes:

Novels
For novels, start with High Fidelity.

My friend Phil and I both read this book when it came out in the late '90s and I think he summed up its fascination very well when he said, "It hits a little too close to home."

High Fidelity tells the story of Rob Fleming, a used record store owner in his mid 30s, as he goes through a re-evaluation of his life following a romantic breakup. Rob and his employees sit around the shop all day making Top 5 lists (I'd guess this is where the SF Indie List's "Friday Five" tradition comes from), and putting lots and lots of thought into mix tapes they record for cute girls. Rob obsesses, hilariously and poignantly, over his girlfriend and what went wrong with all the previous romantic relationships he's had. If, like me and Phil, you're a music geek who has held onto some of his adolescent behaviors too long, you may identify strongly with Rob. That can be an uncomfortable feeling, but you won't be sorry.

The movie's pretty good, too. The setting is moved from London to Chicago and there are a few changes and omitted scenes (including some of my favorites), but it gets the point across well.

About a Boy is good too. It's similar to High Fidelity in that both are concerned with pop culture-obsessed overgrown adolescent men. About a Boy is more ambitious, with more characters and more going on.

The movie version of that one is pretty good, too, although it has some big differences from the book. For instance, the book is set in 1994 and Kurt Cobain's suicide plays a role in the story lines involving some of the kids. But the movie makers set the film in the present (2001 or whatever it was) and drop the Nirvana angle.

As noted in a previous post, A Long Way Down is very good too. Some people might like it better than these other two. How to be Good struck me as tedious.

Other books
I really like Songbook, which is so gentle and positive that it seems wrong to call it a book of music criticism. It's more a book of essays about pop songs and what it means to be a lover of pop songs. I thought it was touching and inspiring. The beautifully illustrated hardcover version of the book comes packaged with a CD of some of the songs Hornby writes about, and though you may not like some of them, you'll see why he likes them. You may even be persuaded by some you didn't expect.

The Polysyllabic Spree is a book of essays about books, compiled from a column Hornby wrote for the Believer magazine. The Believer editors discourage snarkiness, and Hornby sometimes chafes in a friendly way against their restrictions, but it's clearly not all that hard for him to play nice. It's charming and fun. Originally, I was going to model this blog on Hornby's book, beginning each post with a list of what I had bought and what I had been reading.