I imagined this book - a book about books - would be pretty good fun, and it was in places and not just when it referred to books I knew and hated or books I knew and enjoyed; but overall it boils down to a collection of book reviews and I didn't work out the circumstances under which it would be interesting to read them. So I ended up just belting through them and stopping to read the occasional paragraph. I also never worked out if the Believer and the Polysyllabic Spree were real, and, if they were, what they really were, and, if they weren't, what they might represent; so I found the constant references to them frustrating.

I've not read any Nick Hornby apart from this, and I'm pleased to say it hasn't put me off wanting to give him a go. Clearly it would be unfair to judge a novelist simply by his reviews of other people's books. His style in The Polysyllabic Spree is engagingly colloquial and medium-dryly ironic: I enjoyed them. And I enjoyed also his words of wisdom - well, plain good sense, really - about not finishing a book if you didn't like it, so he will, perhaps, excuse me having skim-read quite a lot of this one.

There were two gems in it for me, however. One was his having read A Man Without a Country. So have I, and I was under the illusion that no one else would have, so I was glad to see that the pleasure I derive from reading Vonnegut is one that is not so rare after all. Vonnegut does not always hit the nail on the head for me, in the same was as another of my favourite authors, George Mackay Brown, doesn't either: but I still find their ways of looking at the world ones that chime with me.

The other gem was his quoting an Amazon review of The Diary of a Country Priest by a reader who had loathed it and whose life had been changed by it as it resulted in an A Level grade that was too low for him (?) to study French at university and forced him (?) to take a course in business studies 'thus changing the course of my life' (presumably in a way that has been deeply resented for years). I was given a copy of this revered novel by my best friend (along with a copy of The Sponger by Jules Renard). I eventually read the former last year and found it unutterably dull. If I wanted Catholic angst, I would have found someone suffering from agonising about suffering, I guess: I had no idea what the narrator was talking about as the theology was beyond me and consequently of no interest. For the same reason, I find Sartre's plays dull dull dull: if I watch a play, I want something at least to happen, I don't want to watch a philosophical discussion. (For the same reason, swathes of Troilus and Cressida are lost to me - fine if you are declaiming them to yourself as they sound terrific, but pretty dull to listen to unless you have a cracker of an actor and director.) So: I very warmly thank Nick Hornby for allowing me to think that, although I do have a deep interest in serious novels and what makes them classics and, more widely, what makes a novel recognizably 'good', it's okay to put the thing down if reading it 'come[s] to seem a little more like a duty, and Pop Idol starts to look a little more attractive.'

So, though The Polysyllabic Spree may not have hit the mark for me, I look forward to picking up a copy of 'Fever Pitch' somewhere soon.

As an afterthought, and as a homage to Mr H:

Books Bought But Not Read - 12th February 2015

Portrait in a Mirror - Charles Morgan
Love and War in the Apennines - Eric Newby
Famous Roads of the World - E.F. Carter
The Practical Criticism of Poetry: a textbook - C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson
Heroic Adventure - Schweinfurth, Prejavalsky, Markham, Vambery, Serpa Pinto, J. Leslie

Really enjoyed this. Nick Hornby is around my age, loves football and books and music in the same way I do and has an easy way about his writing I really enjoy.

And he makes lists. He's my twin.

Some of the books he talks about I have read or have on my shelves ready to read (some for years...) and the way he talks of others makes me want to try them out. That said, at the speed I read, it will take me another 20 years or so to read what I have now (and that's with no re-reads).

On to one of his favourites next (Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude). Must have had it nearly 20 years...

Fitting I suppose.

This book came just when I needed it but didn't know it. Picked it up in a supermarket while holidaying on Corfu. I love how Nick sees the world, how he writes and how he reads. The only bad thing, if you could really call it a bad thing, is that because of this book I have added lots of new books to my 'to read' list. He made me laugh, freaked me out and made me think. If you're a reader who never has time to read you'll relate to this book. It's also a good in between book if the other 10 books you're reading get too intense or your mood looses its way.

I wasn't expecting to like it because I found high fidelity very dull, but it was surprisingly witty. I don't know if I would agree with all his recommendations but they were definitely intriguing.

Raccolta di saggi narrativi/recensioni presi dalla rubrica mensile tenuta da Hornby per la rivista Believer.
Riflessioni, spunti, divagazioni messe giù con il suo classico stile divertente e sensibile allo stesso tempo.

Anche se non ha pubblicato tutte cose indimenticabili, Hornby è una voce della narrativa contemporanea che se non ci fosse mi mancherebbe.
E non ci sono così tanti scrittori di cui potrei dire lo stesso.

Da mettere in conto che una parte dei libri cui si fa riferimento non sono tradotti in Italia.
Ovviamente mi ha fatto rimpinguare la fila dei to-read (non ce n’era bisogno Nick ma grazie lo stesso). [73/100]

Nick Hornbys debut var en sakprosabok om litteratur, men det er heldigvis ingen spor av dens ørken-tørre stil her. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree er en samling artikler om bøker og lesing som har stått på trykk i magasinet Believer.

Min målestokk for sakprosa er enkel: Lærer jeg noe nytt? Får jeg lyst å pepre omgivelsene med faktaopplysninger og sitater fra det jeg leser? Er den underholdende? Denne boka scorer full pott på alt dette. Dette er den morsomste boka jeg har lest av Hornby, som er minst like selvironisk som han er spydig. Han skriver om bøker han har kjøpt og bøker han har lest (han kjøper mye mer enn han leser), og livet ellers. Under det hele ligger et portrett av forskjellene mellom Storbritannia og USA (Believer er et amerikansk magasin).

Når du leser denne, bør du ha penn og papir tilgjengelig, for det kommer tett med boktips. Jeg har begynt på Robert Harris sin serie om Romerriket etter denne, takket være Hornby. Og Charles Dickens. Kanskje jeg må omsider lese Dickens.

Jeg gir fire stjerner og ikke fem fordi han utelukkende leser forfattere fra den anglo-amerikanske sfæren, og overveiende mest mannlige forfattere. (Jeg har ikke harde tall for å backe opp den påstanden, men det er helt i bokens ånd, hvis du skjønner.)

I had a breakthrough. You know, like you get after months, maybe years, of intensive therapy. The solution had been staring me in the face – it’s often the way, isn’t it. The thing was, the lowest shelf of my shelves of novels – it’s actually the space between the real lowest shelf and the floor - was just too short. It was 8 inches, which is fine for most of the novels on this shelf but Cold Snap (Jones), Ulysses (Joyce), Lake Wobegon Days (Keillor) and The Collected Works of TS Spivet (Larsen) are 8 and a half inches tall, just because they’re more important than all of Henry James (which are all 6 inches), so they won’t stand up, I have to lie them down on their bosoms with their backsides protruding into the public gaze – it’s just not right. I hate doing that to books more than I hate going to the dentist. But then I noticed the top shelf of the back wall, which was populated by plays and poetry and sundry unclassifiable items. I never read plays and poetry no more. I know – it’s a terrible thing. So I just don’t care if playwrights and poets are on their front or their backside, they probably couldn’t stand up straight if you paid them anyhow, what a bunch of drunks. So I switched the beloved novelists for the less well beloved poets and playwrights and voila! I switched them round! No more dentist!

The above is the kind of thing that Nick Hornby might have but didn’t write in this book. Really, he’s quite similar to me – always playing the giddy goat – but of course he is a beloved million selling writer of novels so the resemblance shrivels and dies right there. This book is a collection of columns he wrote for The Believer, an American literary mag founded by Dave Eggars in 2003. So this is a chatty, witty record of what Nick bought and read in the years 2003 to 2006.

I liked it. I’ve spent 20 years avoiding anything by Nick Hornby until this year when I stumbled on the movie version of High Fidelity and thought it was a real hoot (not a fake hoot). Why did I avoid him? Well, who wants to read about modern British suburban life? No one has any guns, there are few tornadoes, a little bit of doleful adultery, it’s all a bit meurgh.

In true Hornby listlike fashion I will now present

BOOKS BOUGHT BECAUSE OF NICK’S ENTHUSIASTIC WIBBLING

Robert Lowell, a Biography : Ian Hamilton
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City : Nick Flynn

BOOKS I HAD ALREADY READ & WAS PLEASED TO SEE NICK AGREED WITH ME

Clockers : Richard Price
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World : Francis Wheen
Hangover Square : Patrick Hamilton
Like a Fiery Elephant : Jonathan Coe
Chronicles : Bob Dylan
In Cold Blood : Truman Capote
Stuart – A Life Backwards : Alexander Masters
Persepolis : Marjane Satrapi

BOOKS I HAD ALREADY READ & WAS HORRIFIED TO SEE NICK DISAGREED WITH ME

No Name : Wilkie Collins (it did not fall apart in the last 200 pages!)
The Long Firm : Jake Arnott (it was unreadable macho crap)
Saturday : Ian McEwan (it was stupid)
Housekeeping : Marilynne Robinson (it was like being buried alive in angel dust)

There’s a much longer list of BOOKS NICK READ SO I DIDN’T HAVE TO such as Philip Larkin’s Letters (ugh) and Oh Play that Thing by Roddy Doyle (sounds grim) or Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (I'm asleep already).

Reading about some guy reading is probably a complete waste of time which should be better employed filling in those terrible gaps in your own literary knowledge like BALZAC or HOUELLEBECQ or GOGOL but this was fun.

Quote from page 67:

Oh man, I hate Amazon reviewers. Even the nice ones, who say nice things. They’re bastards too.

Lord knows what he’s said about Goodreads since then.

I really liked this collection of reviews. I was amazed again how many books I have never heard of, inspite of having been reading for almost 30 years now.

Funny, witty... very enjoyable and makes you want to read all the books reviewed!

I absolutely adore this book of essays about books and reading. Certain parts had me crying with laughter. Plus it's a good way to increase your "to-read" list, although if you're reading this book, yours is probably already too long anyway!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I didn't get as much TBR inspo as I was expecting to get from this, we seem to have very very different tastes. I adore Nick Hornby's writing though, in fact I laughed out loud several times which is an achievement in itself.

Great palette cleanser.

Reading about reading
This book was bought for me as a birthday present shortly after I'd added it to my wish-list on Amazon. I like Nick Hornby's relaxed, chatty style, and was expecting this to do for books roughly what his 31 Songs did for music. I wasn't disappointed. For the most part, he uses his standard playfully passionate tone when writing about his reading, which is very entertaining; however, there are times (particularly near the start of the book) where he comes across as somewhat self-conscious about his tastes. In these passages, I was reminded of his shrill denunciation in "31 Songs" of anyone who didn't like Jackson Browne's "Late For The Sky" (as much as he did), which seems to miss the point of this sort of thing.

I was reading it to see if I agreed with his opinion of books which we'd both read, and to look out for interesting recommendations. Both of these expectations were more than met in this book, in spite of the way Hornby kicks against the restrictions placed on him by the editors of the original versions of these pieces - i.e. to never directly criticise an author or a book (he works around this by simply not finishing any book that he doesn't like, without giving its title).

I found one or two mismatches between the lists of books read and those discussed in the pieces, and it was somewhat distracting to find him referring to Christmas in his March column (presumably because of the time lag associated with the columns going into print). But overall, this was an pleasant read, with some nice insights into the communion that ought to exist between writer and reader.

Originally reviewed 1 July 2008