I had such high expectations of this book and although it was exactly what I expected, it did not deliver. I love books about books but so many of them are poorly written. I will admit that I laughed at a lot of passages but for the most part, the essays on books were somehow really boring? I want to read a book exactly like this but better. If anyone knows any, let me know.

Love him, loved this. I added a slew of books to my personal TBR, as usz. Nobody writes about the reading life like he does.

A collection of Nick Hornby's columns that appeared in the Believer between 2003 and 2006, focusing on the books read each month. With each piece only a few pages long the book reviews are necessarily brief, yet Hornby consistently manages to cover the material in a meaningful way. His humor and insights go beyond the books themselves to exploring how and why we read. I enjoyed finding out about many titles that I would not have the opportunity (or, in the case of the many thrillers, the desire) to read, as well as being provided with an entertaining glimpse into Hornby's reading life.

This was a fun read--for each month you get a list of the books the author bought and another of the books he actually read. Lots of great justification for buying books that you may never read. A genius named Gabriel Zaid wrote that "the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more." Couldn't have said it better myself. Anyway, the book is a quick light read, and proceeds go to charity. Also, Chekhov's criteria for civilized people, listed at the end of the book, should be widely disseminated.

Nick Hornby is very charming. He tears into books, picks them apart, and yet still has you wanting to read them all by the end of each paragraph. The thing that makes these reviews so good is that Hornby injects his personal life into every element of his writing; he reminds us not to be so stuffy or so unrealistic about our reading lives. We're people, after all. Hilarious.

I am surprised by the high ratings and great reviews. I found it to be verbose and felt an elitist tone from Hornby that was hard for me to shake.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book -- Hornby is a voracious, if haphazard, reader and approaches his commentary with humor and honesty, occasionally pointed but never vicious. Each month's essay lists the books he's bought and the books he's read, and then he discusses the books he's read, often in no particular order and sometimes with nothing much to connect them. Ive long thought that one measure of a good book is the number of passages you feel compelled to read aloud to whoever else is in the room (or the car, as the case may be) -- and I read a bunch out of this book. (Also, I've added several books to the Pile.)

A collection of Hornby's columns from the Believer magazine. He starts with a plea for eliminating dullness in books:

'It is set in stone, apparently: books must be hard work, otherwise they're a waste of time. And so we grind our way through serious, and sometimes seriously dull, novels, or enormous biographies of political figures, and every time we do so, books come to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive.'

And then:

'If' you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV programme.'

I read on eagerly waiting for lists of brilliant, readable, funny, informative books. Very exciting. I have been looking for these my whole life and finally somebody was going to tell me all their names!

Each chapter lists books that Hornby has bought, and (much shorter) lists that he has read. I know it's a cliché to say it, but I really did laugh at his tales of buying more books than he can ever read, being unable to pass a book shop without purchasing, agonising over what he 'ought' to read.

However his lists aren't as promosing as I had hoped. Of those that I've read, aside from Dickens, none are as entertaining as his own work. He even recommends dreary Ian McEwan. Then he backtracks and raves about Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, saying 'I have always prized the accessible over the obscure, but after reading Housekeeping I can see that in some ways the easy accessible novel is working at a disadvantage.' So what was all that stuff about giving up if it makes you sweat?

He gets very excited about John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? He says 'while reading it, you become increasingly amazed at the muddle that apparently intelligent people have got themselves into when they attempt to define the importance of - and the superiority of - high culture.' I was going to order it until I found a review by Jeanette Winterson, which completely trashes it. I may order it anyway.

And here's what he has to say about reviewing:

'At the beginning of my writing career I reviewed a lot of fiction, but I had to pretend, as reviewers do, that I had read the books outside of space, time and self - in other words I had to pretend that I hadn't read them when I was tired and grumpy, or drunk, that I wasn't envious of the author, that I had no agenda, no personal aesthetic or personal taste or personal problems, that I hadn't read other reviews of the same book already , that I didn't know who the author's friends and enemies were, that I wasn't trying to place a book with the same publisher, that I hadn't been bought lunch by the book's doe-eyed publicist. Most of all I hadn't to pretend that I hadn't written the review because I was urgently in need of a quick couple of hundred quid. Being paid to read a book and then write about it creates a dynamic which compromises the reviewer in all kinds of ways, very few of them helpful.'

Nick Hornby has always been an interesting figure to me, at a remote intersection between the laddish and the literary. His defining affections are football (the English kind), rock music, and pub culture. At the same time, he reads lots of books – and some of them are serious. Maybe such a subspecies is less rare in England, but where I’m from they’re scarce. Of course, as a writer it’s not so surprising that he’s a reader, too. It’s the kind of books he reads, though, and his criterion for choosing them that makes Polysyllabic Spree worthwhile to read. It’s a short compilation of columns he wrote for Dave Eggers’ magazine The Believer where he discussed his monthly book purchases and gave short reviews of the ones he actually read (with the former list always longer than the latter). He also included a few excerpts, among them works by Dickens, Chekhov and Patrick Hamilton.

Hornby’s well-stropped wit, where the jokes are often at his own expense, complements his entertaining take on things from the Every Man point of view. Joe Sixpack was the old appellation around these parts, but I’m not sure what the English equivalent might be – something involving pints and pies I would guess. Anyway, he’s not the type to be taken in by anything pretentious and “littrary” . At the same time, he can enjoy good writing; even classics and critically acclaimed stuff. Maybe I’m making too much of this, but if his other interests really do seem at odds with his taste for the writerly arts, the apparent anomalies somehow make his declarations more affecting. Maybe it’s like the extra attention you might pay to a hipster extolling the virtues of one Jane Austen novel over another, or a guy in a hoodie holding court on which cozy mysteries are best. A fresh perspective can be good, especially from a fish who cares enough to come out of the water to give it. Beyond that, Hornby himself writes very well. Despite his incongruities (or maybe because of them), to my mind he’s credible. He sold me on a good half-dozen titles from his list.

My laptop croaked the other day. I turned it on and was greeted by an image of a file folder with a question mark blinking inside it. I walked in to the living room shoving the monitor in my boyfriend's face and started to cry. What will I do without my computer? How will I work? The writer's block I've suffered the past three months was suddenly gone and I was filled with Great Ideas™ and now I had to hand over my laptop to a slim man wearing a fake badge clipped to his beltloop at the Geek Squad desk inside a Best Buy. I'm writing this from a tiny bluetooth keyboard hitched to my iPad (which needs a guy with a fake badge to replace its screen, but that's another story.)

So, you understand how I ended up at a used bookstore with a basket full of books even though I have piles of books at home from trips just like this one for other reasons. I love to buy books as much as I love to read them. Maybe a little more. The hunt is better than the kill, right? When I found my boyfriend sitting at a little table in the children's section reading the one book he was buying--a little mass market paperback of some sort (he hates when I call them that; he thinks I'm being snobbish), I tried to hide my basket. He was horrified.

I realize I've made this review all about me, but this was the first book I read from this stack--appropriately, a book about buying too many books and reading only some of them while also trying to do things like have a life. I love reading books about reading books. I only gave this three stars because I have to save some room for the other twenty or so books I bought and will read during the difficult separation from my laptop to be even better. Incidentally, during the reading of Nick Hornby's book, I purchased three more books to arrive to my home next week and added several more to my wish list. Do not read this if you are trying to quit reading. Otherwise, I hope you are armed with a Amazon Prime membership and some empty shelf space.

Worthless tripe cobbled together by my normally worthwhile friends at the Believer.

Oh, Nick Hornsby. You are a clever, clever man. Now I'm going to have to suck it up and read some of your novels.

He talks about books, and how he keeps buying books, but not necessarily reading them. And then he decides that a person's collection of books - the ones they bought rather than the ones they've read - is the best way to define them. And then I considered proposing.

I think I would have given it a five if I had read more of the books he talked about. Or heard of, even. But I still enjoyed him, and his mocking of the Polysyllabic Spree.