First of all, this is an odd book. After reading Nick Hornby's book about football and Arsenal FC, here I am reading about what he was reading. Sounds boring? Well, it somehow isn't - his combination of direct writing, witty commentary and British humour make this a very engaging read. More than anything, this book made me eager to write more and better reviews. They look fun to write and read, so it's a win-win, right?

Anyway, as for the content itself, I liked that Nick didn't spoil the books too much. A thing to point out is that he basically only gives positive reviews and omits the bad ones due to explicit instructions from the magazine he originally wrote these for. It was a pity that our reading habits and collections had basically zero overlap, as it would have been very interesting to find out how our thoughts compared. Moreover, he looks like a fun person to discuss literature (and soccer, and life!) with. Many of his rants about book blurbs and the gatekeeping attitude in reading resonated with me.

Quotes: (there were way too many good ones...)

"In Britain, more than 12 million adults have a reading age of thirteen or under, and yet some clever dick journalist still insists on telling us that unless we’re reading something proper, then we might as well not bother at all."

"I want to know what it's like to be him or her, to live there or then. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough."

"If you pick up the Penguin Classics edition, however, don't read the blurb on the back. It more or less blows the first (fantastic) plot twist on the grounds that it's 'revealed early on' - but 'early on' turns out to be page ninety-six, not, say, page eight. Note to publishers: some people read 19th century novels for fun, and a lot of them were written to be read that way too."

"Even if you love movies and music as much as you do books, it’s still, in any given four week period, way, way more likely you’ll find a great book that you haven’t read than a great movie you haven’t seen, or a great album you haven’t heard: the assiduous consumer will eventually exhaust movies and music… the feeling everyone has with literature: that we can’t get through the good novels published in the last six months, let alone those published since publishing began.”

"Any novelist, even a great one, has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke and entertain a reader."

"And I think a decent lawyer could have gotten her off, in the unfortunate event of a shooting. She spends 10 years writing a book, and a reviewer in a national newspaper doesn't even notice what it's about."

"Reading reviews and interviews with him over the last few weeks, one is reminded that there's nothing critics like less than a writer producing something that he hasn't done before - apart, that is, from a writer producing more of the same."

"Poetry (at any rate in my case) is like trying to remember a tune you've forgotten. All corrections are attempts to get nearer to the forgotten tune. A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision - lasting one second or less - and he attempts to express the whole of which the vision is about."

this series of four books are worth getting if you're seriously interested in what a funny bald guy thinks about his pile of books to read.

The writing is uneven and goes from lousy to great, and i would ONLY pick up one of his books, to look at what he thinks of the book.....

....after i read it

If you're not expecting much, you'll be pleased, sorta...
if you're expecting a lot, oh boy, i hope you adore his sense of humor

Written in good humour and picked up a few book recommendations. But ultimately, it’s an entertaining magazine article.

I quite enjoyed this collection of columns in which Hornby analyses his reading (and book-buying) habits.

The story of a man who buys many more books than he reads. The story of my life in 140-odd pages. The problem with Nick Hornby is that he buys books that sound terribly boring. Also, many of them are rated below 4 on Goodreads. I trust the wisdom of the crowd and so am more discerning than he is. What I don't have is time.
I did have the time to read this book from start to finish in one sitting, though.

This book is a collection of the author's articles written for a literary magazine. Each one starts with a list of the books he has bought and the books he has read that month. He always buys many more than he reads - a familiar problem. I love Nick Hornby's sense of humour and laughed out loud many times while reading, plus I shared the best bits with anyone who would listen and they unfailingly laughed too. I enjoyed this book much more than I expected to. A really good read.

I've never been draw to the clever white boy clique at the Believer, and this book caused me no second thoughts. The cover hook of "one man's struggle with the monthly tide of the books he's bought and the books he's been meaning to read" was too enticing for me to resist, but content-wise the book itself is pretty light. It consists of fourteen of Hornby's previously published Believer columns, and a few excerpts of random stuff he's been reading. Hornby's a self-appointed champion of the middle-brow over capital "L" Literature, and he succeeds admirably in this regard: the book is chummy pub talk, and if Hornby is ever at risk of having an insight, he hastens to undermine it immediately.

So, I have this Dunkin Donuts receipt that I was using for a place-mark for this book. It’s from March 14th and it’s for 3 iced coffees… and now it’s torn and there’s a gaping hole right over the total, it looks like it got wet at some point. There are numbers written all over it, some circled, some underlined, some with exclamation points. There’s something sticky on the edge. I was number 750.

I sort of feel like that right now. It did a really good job holding my spot (twss) and it didn’t complain or get lost or anything. I ran out of space to write on it so I had to switch to a cleaner note pad piece of paper and yet it stuck with me because it knew that I would need it someday.

Let’s start at the first number… 25:

“I reread Stop-Time because Frank Conroy is so eloquent and moving about books and their power at the end of Stone Reader. I don’t reread books very often; I’m too conscious of both my ignorance and my mortality. …But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy’s Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of say fifteen and forty, I haven’t even read the books I think I’ve read. I can’t tell you how depressing this is. What’s the fucking point?”

Well said, Nick. This is why we are soul mates. You may not know that right now. You may sit in your flat in London listening to music and reading emails and such, drinking tea and watching your children play. Maybe you should close your drapes in case someone is watching? You are oblivious that I am the one for you. I am the Annie Wilkes to your Paul Sheldon. (You dirty dirty bird.)

Nick used to write a column for something called The Believer. It sounds like a magazine or something, I don’t care. He writes about books that he’s purchased and books that he’s read each month. Hmmm… sounds somewhat familiar. (except, like, he gets paid for it) How many reviews have I read over my 3 ½ years here on GR? What did I do before GR? Scan the NYTBR? Not really. Okay, sometimes… but, this--- this beautiful community has expanded my vistas… I have 409 books on my to-read shelf. How awesome is that? I know that GR gets a lot of flack, mainly from within… too many vote whores, too many silly reviews that have nothing to do with the book, too many pictures, too many cliques, yadda yadda yadda… As Steppenwolf once sang “Nothing is like it used to be.” So what? It is what it is (Lifehouse) and I like it. I am guilty of many of the aforementioned grumblings and I don’t care. And I really like that Nick Hornby likes to do it (heh) too. (Oh forgive me Paul for prattling away and making everything all oogy )

I recently wrote a review for Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater--a collection of short stories. I stammered and driveled throughout it. Nick read it too and this little summary: "Orringer writes about things that everyone writes about--youth, friendship, death, grief, etc.---but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So, while her themes are as solid and recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before.” BAM! (God, I love you.)

This, by the way, is the only book he reviews that I’ve read. I’m such a lacking stalker.

Next number: 58

“One of the reasons I wanted to write this column, I think, is that because I assumed that the cultural highlight of my month would arrive in book form, and that’s true, for probably eleven months of the year. Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then book would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “ The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it.”

(MISERY IS ALIVE!! MISERY IS ALIVE!!! Oh, this whole house is going to be full of romance! Oooooh! I’M GOING TO GO PUT ON MY LIBERACE RECORDS!)

Don’t fight it, Nick. It’s like the fates have spoken, my love.

97

“I am, I think, a relatively passive reader, when it comes to fiction. If a novelist tells me that something happened, then I tend to believe him, as a rule. In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis recalls his father, Kingley, saying that he found Virginia Woolf’s fictional world “wholly contrived: when reading her he found that he kept interpolating hostile negatives, murmuring ‘Oh no she didn’t’ or Oh no he hadn’t’ or ‘Oh no it wasn’t’ after each and every authorial proposition”; I only do that when I’m reading something laughably bad.”


Ok, there’s a difference between passive and passion. I only passionately throw books against walls and yell at characters who do stupid things. It’s because I CARE. This is why I love this site, because people write with enthusiasm and it’s not all textbooky and crap. This is what I love about this collection. The ranting about football and why finishing David Copperfield left you feeling bereft. There’s always MORE to the story because we are self centered narcissists. And that’s okay.

125

“I don’t have the wall space or the money for all the art I would want, and my house is a shabby mess, ruined by children…But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Maybe that’s not worth the thirty-odd quid I blew on those collections of letters, admittedly, but it’s got to be worth something, right?”


I don’t feel so guilty that I have a whole bookcase of un-read books or that I haven’t read Dickens yet or that I still go to the library every week and I still look forward to sharing my thoughts with this wacky ass community on GR. Wow, this was as rewarding as a shrink session. The weight has been lifted, Nick! Grumblers grumble on. I’ve been vindicated, time to get another iced coffee.

Thanks to Jamie for recommending this book- it was a laugh-out-loud account of the author's attempt to emerge from his seemingly unending spree of book buying and reading attempts. Definitely recommended if you're feeling bad about not being able to read enough books in this lifetime!

This book has convinced me I have to read How to Breathe Underwater, Meat is Murder, We're in Trouble, and True Notebook.

Hornby is interesting and fun he makes fun of the believe staff and does his best to not make fun of books, he fails miserably. I'll be off buying the next two volumes while you are all out buying this one.

It reminds me of Umberto Eco when he talks about how important it is to own books that you don't read and how stupid people are who ask if you have read them all.

There is a problem with Hornby's book. As a result of reading it, my TBR list has increased.

I don't think I have ever read a Hornby book. However, I was familiar with his work. When I spotted this in my local independent bookstore (https://www.barbedwirebooks.org/), I was intrigued to read how an author viewed the work of other authors.

Hornby's writing is brisk and goes beyond just the books he cites (classified as 'bought' and 'read'). His commentary covers his life, the literary life, and soccer.

This is a quick read and an entertaining book for book lovers.

Hornby's monthly column for the Believer is amusing but also more true to the experience of being a reader than the usual review. I enjoy following the lists of what he's acquired, and what he's actually read, and seeing when he gets to things. As well, he reveals just a bit about his normal life, and how it gets in the way of his reading. Finally, there's the really interesting aspect of how all this combines, at what sort of reading continuity and bizarre juxtapositions come up.

Library copy