Out of all the great Hornbys, it's my very fave, this one.

Probably because it's exactly what I spend most of my waking hours thinking about: what is "good" or perhaps, what is "correct"? What are the limits and limitations of morality and ethics (or altruism)? Is a "my family first" (or country or religion or whatever) attitude legit or egotistical in the extreme? How does one act appropriately in all situations?

There are no easy, or maybe even right, answers to any of that. Especially not in the self-referential, spiritually barren (but all to familiar) modern society Hornby holds a mirror up to through the characters of the Carr family.

And he gets in some really great scenes, too. Esp the one towards the end that takes place at a C of E Sunday service. Religion, or belief of any kind, being viewed as a public embarrassment and the only decent thing a vicar could do is apologise profusely and hide their face in shame for their job in today's England.

"Pfffftttt....God," sayeth the modern Englishman.

La trama, a mio avviso, presenta qualche forzatura e i personaggi sono ​a volte ​definiti in modo eccessivamente stravagante, tuttavia i temi di fondo del romanzo vengono ​sviluppati con sensibilità, equilibrio e competenza. ​
Anche in un contesto decisamente meno riuscito rispetto ai lavori precedenti, lo stile narrativo, venato di intelligente ironia, rivela lo scrittore di razza; e sotto i suoi fendenti si sgretola la maschera di ipocrisia e di cinismo dietro la quale oggigiorno ci si nasconde nell'illusione di essere "buoni".
​In particolare, ​ho apprezzato il modo in cui Hornby ha saputo calarsi nell'ottica della protagonista narrante, riproducendo con sorprendente precisione i meccanismi della psicologia femminile nei confronti del matrimonio, della vita familiare e dei rapporti interpersonali.​
Bello anche il finale "sospeso", perché a certi interrogativi, nati da certi presupposti ed alimentati da certe situazioni, non si può mai dare una risposta​ inequivocabile e risolutiva.

This is hands down the funniest thing I’ve ever read.
I flew through it.
It is really my kind of humor.

The main character is a middle class woman on her 40s who is struggling at her marriage. Her husband is very rude and she is trying to be good, she is a doctor and has 2 kids, but she ends up having an affair. Something happens and her husband becomes the opposite of rude, a good samaritan. But that is not easy for her either (not much spoiling here, the back of the book actually tells much more, I am glad I haven’t read it and went in blind).

I’ve loved that it is a female main character. I really liked “High Fidelity” but I could relate to this one more.

It is brave in tackling difficult issues face on, like divorce, adultery and poverty, but the writing is so witty that I was laughing on every other page. Belly-hurting funny.

“Come diventare buoni” è un libro triste. È triste perché non vuole raccontarti bugie, non cerca di confortarti o di mentirti ma rimane coerente con se stesso fino alla fine. Ti chiude porte in faccia, ti mostra come le persone, talvolta, non siano altro che un ammasso di rimpianti, autocompiacimento e pensieri repressi. Mi sono identificata con la protagonista, a volte stupendomi di me stessa, e ho provato il brivido degli eterni dubbi etici che sono alla base delle riflessioni del testo. Lo consiglio molto, soprattutto per la buona tecnica di narrazione

How to be Good by Nick Hornby

I picked up this book as part of my “I am going to read people who aren't dead” series. I can see Hornby's appeal. He is a good writer. And if I were the kind of kid who was to wear really tight black jeans, over-sized white tee-shirts, and knit caps with brims and spend my time riding my one gear bike through the mission looking for cheap Mexican food, Hornby would be my man. He epitomizes “Gen Y” (God I love those “Gen” labels). If you are apathetic, directionless, like to analyze your emotions until they are beaten to ground, and struggling with the fact that secular humanism means death (and therefore to a certain degree life) are pointless, then this is a book for you. It is about some upper middle class British wankers. They are horrible. He is a columnist who is the “angriest man in London” and she is a doctor who cheats on him. For the first third of the book they treat each other and their kids like shit (by page 100 I almost gave up on the book in disgust). Then the husband literally meets the GoodNews (a “Gen-whatever-is-after-Y) kid who has Jesus like healing hands. Through GoodNews the husband has a spiritual conversion. The story is the first person account of the wife's affair and then reaction to her husband's conversion and finally her own “realistic” version of the same conversion. Like I said, Hornby isn't a bad writer and there are certain truths of his criticism of secular humanism and the boredom that is everyday life. That's what kept me reading. And the husband is an interesting character. For example, he and GoodNews figure that on their rich ass street that there are at least a dozen houses with spare bedrooms that just aren't being used. After figuring that out, they plot to fill each of those bedrooms with a homeless kid (their plot to be good). The book does a good job of making this successful for some kids and a total failure for others. In addition, I can't argue with the characters. It's a good idea and there is really nothing keeping people from doing something like that other than themselves. The wife/narrator becomes the voice of “reason.” She argues that they need their houses and consumer goods to take care of themselves first—they must conqueror their boredom and the difficulty that is life in general. Like I said very Gen-Y. My biggest criticism of the book and the reason it gets two rather than three stars is that the narrator doesn't sound like an authentic woman. I paraphrase and exaggerate but at one point she winds up summing up her life something like this: “God, all I need out of life is a big dick, a doughnut, the ability to evacuate my bowels, and bunch of video games to keep me occupied.” I can see a woman feeling and saying this, but I couldn't imagine a married woman with kids summing up her entire existence as such. That's the sense the narrator espouses and I feel it to be a very masculine mid-life crisis sentiment rather than a feminine. Its my sense of the character and I feel it lacks authenticity. In sum, Hornby is a good writer and this is a book with interesting points. And at the same time his spiritualism is idiotic and his narrator is lacking. I can image another book and topic, such High Fidelity, being executed much better. I could say I admire his bravery to write a woman and take on a social topic, but I don't really. He winds up embodying the very things he is critiquing. (I know it's a bit harsh of a review, but that's the blow back you get for preaching at me poorly.)

The last sentence of this book made me feel daft. I think I pretty much comprehended the majority of the book: the mild, slightly frantic despair that the main character feels over a marriage that is mutually dissatisfactory; the duplicitious and hypocritical nature of trying too hard to do good things when your own life is in shambles and you can't have fulfilling relationships with people that you actually know; the ambiguity that someone can feel when no option is without unacceptable costs.

In fact, I think the most interesting thing about the book is how Hornby illustrats the protagonist's focus on herself and her constant rationalization of her poor choices. She teeters on the edge of actually taking responsibility for her mistakes, but never quite realizes that her choices are what lead her to unhappiness. Rather, she blames her husband for her choices. Instead of making the real life changes that would come from taking responsibility and trying to fix things a bit by being less selfish, she eventually decides that finding some time for herself to read and listen to music may enable her to limp along for the next fifteen years in moderately acute displeasure and unhappiness.

I'm not saying that taking time for yourself to read and listen to music is bad. Quite the opposite. I think everyone should find things that they like to do for themselves so they can relax and rejuvinate, feel accomplished. I just don't think that doing so is a valid replacement for owning up to your mistakes properly and making the hard personality changes to start treating others better. This, the protagonist obtusely refuses to do.

Other than the last line, my issues with the book focus more on the story than the writting. Up until the complete change in personality of the husband, which is just not realistic at all, Hornby does an incredible job at describing the horror of a rotten marriage and the selfishness of someone who cannot see their contribution to the mire. Then the whole random mystic healing thing leads to the complete personality change, and suddenly the husband is not only no longer angry, but can not longer even recognize sarcasm or humor. That just wouldn't happen. It's a big pill to swallow. I suspended my disbelief to finish the story and see what Hornby has to say, but I think he could have gotten to the same place in the story without resorting to the outrageous and unbelievable. Eventually, it works itself out, but not completely. So the story is a bit tough to buy, but it can be done.

But that last line of the book is just a gargantuan puzzler. The entire book was clearly written, except the last line. Hornby suddenly, abruptly, uncharacteristically, violently jumps tracks into an affected symbolism that contrasts glaringly with the rest of the writting in the book. It's really quite ugly and ungainly. If I could only change one thing about the book, I would probably choose to change that last few words, even over the whole husband's personality change thing. I would change it to say, "...I wonder if I can keep it alive indefinitely." I figure that's what Hornby was trying to say anyway.

The idea of the book sounded so great when I read it. A husband that is angry all the time with a marriage failing because of it turns into a good person. The idea had the potential to be a really good, interesting story. Intead it turned out to be about, not just being a "good" person, but being better than everyone else. Giving money away to the poor, inviting the homeless to live with you. Becoming best friends and eventual roommates with GoodNews. The ideas were rather absurd.

The reviews on the cover state that the book is hilarious. And it's true, that I did laugh out loud a few times, but that still didn't change my view of the book. It took me over a month to get through this book because I was so uninterested in it that when I had the opportunity to read, I chose not to. When I did choose to read, I'd read only a few pages and put the book down. Only towards the end did I become interested in the book and I ended up reading pages at a time because I wanted to see how the book would turn out. And still - the book disappointed. There were so many ways to take the ending. Yet I feel the author took the "safe" way. *Spoiler*: Staying in the marriage for the kids and because it's too hard to imagine life outside of the marriage is ridiculous. Of course people do it everyday. It is reality, but they do it in normal marriages - not in marriages to a completely different, abnormal, person. I don't see how Katie and David's marriage will ever find a way back to being a good marriage, so in the end they have destined themselves to being unhappy for the rest of their lives because they were too afraid to find true happiness. If I never read another Nick Hornby book, that'll be fine by me. On every page he had the potential to turn the story around and take it someplace good and I feel he failed every time.

Varem on Hornby mulle meeldinud, aga see oli väga igav; sel ajal, kui raamat pooleli oli, vaatasin meelelahutuse nimel nelja filmi, kus mängisid The Rock ja/või Vin Diesel.

I think "How to be Good" certainly divided fans of Hornby who were used to his musical themes in High Fidelity and 31 Songs and his style in About a Boy. He was given a lot of criticism for writing the book from the perspective of a middle aged female but this did not bother me in the slightest. In fact I thought the book was witty and well written. I found myself identifying with Katie, despite her whiny repetitive moments. I loved her inner voice - I found things written on the page that I have never heard expressed before and believed only existed in the deepest recesses of peoples supressed innner life. I think Hornby is a master at capturing these secret inner lives we lead. The book was not predictable or trite or a simple comedy of manners and it dealt with a subject I have been very interested in, and have been reevaluating of late. So in short - I loved it.

Nick Hornby--WTF? How to Be Good marks a low point for one of the very best writers working today. Boring, shallow, and stupid. The main characters are irritating beyond belief.

Years ago I received a rejection letter from the legendary Dore Schary. It began, "I wanted to like this more than I did." Wow, what a classy way to send someone packing. No wonder he survived the grueling game of Hollywood as long as he did. Anyhow, that's how I feel about this book of Nick's. I am a fan and I wanted and expected to like it more than I did.

Maybe it's me. I found it more pathetic than funny. And more serious than I wanted to get.

Told in first person from the viewpoint of the female main character, it reminded me of an Anne Tyler novel (I'm a big fan of hers, too.) Except in her books, I end up loving all the characters for their quirks and even for their sins.

Nick's characters in this one mostly piss me off.

witty. and really human???? i enjoyed its honesty. the last sentence made me want to pull my hair out.