by Nick Hornby
also by nick hornby
Fever Pitch
High Fidelity
About a Boy
Speaking with the Angel (editor)
How to Be Good
Songbook
The Polysyllabic Spree
A Long Way Down
Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Slam
An Education
Juliet, Naked
Shakespeare Wrote for Money
More Baths Less Talking
a division of
MCSWEENEY’S
849 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Copyright © 2003–2013 Nick Hornby
Cover design by Dan McKinley
Cover illustration by Daniel Fishel
All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.
These pieces appeared between September 2003 and June 2013 in the Believer magazine.
www.believermag.com
e-ISBN: 978-1-944211-15-8
Contents
Introduction: A Note from Jess Walter
September 2003
Some ground rules; predictions for a baby’s future employment; the opinions of grown-up critics; Legally Blonde
October 2003
The embodiment of a cultural obsession; re-reading in the face of mortality; empty threats of violence
November 2003
Unfinished, abandoned, abandoned, unfinished; the appearance of the Polysyllabic Spree; a zealous gleam
November 2003 / January 2004
Clarification about lost Victorian classics; overrated and peripheral skills; living with an autistic child; advice on smoking
February 2004
A modest celebration; the pram in the hall; in praise of the vernacular; jokes about commas; a fearful bashing
March 2004
Plans for a carcass; Cultural Fantasy Boxing League; an effort to get back on course; the young Flaubert
April 2004
Utter rubbish; a truth bent out of shape; unkind words about Amazon reviewers; upcoming Dickensian nutrition
May 2004
The secret of good writing; a guy who shouts “Goroo!” a lot; a long, lank skeleton hand; drippy Dora’s bloody dog
June 2004
The Croatian sex lady; the way middle-class people spend their time; a pregnancy scare; the support net; when Fischer played Spassky
July 2004
A visually uninteresting family tree; nipples not left alone; a taste for hopelessly bleak Eastern European humor
August 2004
A new baby; consumer fear; the appeal of the reappearing hero; the fourth-worst night of your life; a very pithy suicide note
September 2004
The Jesuit thing; several mistakes; finger-steepling and sharks in the same book; a new best friend
October 2004
Sex with cousins; Yorkshiremen; some clever-dick reviewer; the particularities of English Marxists
November 2004
Presumptions regarding cricket; Chekhov’s quotidian life; advice that holds good even now; a lovely little mongrel doggie
Nick Hornby’s Preface to the Second Column Collection, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006)
Nick Hornby on what he’s learned about reading from the Polysyllabic Spree, of all people
February 2005
The story so far; the Kingston Trio in curious company; Islington dinner parties; a totally original sentence
March 2005
Weasel words; a thoughtful and engaging website; the inevitable Incredibles cash-ins; an elite cabal; Bob the astronaut
April 2005
Ednit; a quease-inducing trend; a spoiler alert; the only problem with the Labour government; Gogol’s shoes
May 2005
Surprising action in Borders; respective tastes in bird books; some things that have the mucus; Greil Marcus on the Pet Shop Boys
June / July 2005
An excruciating purchase; a perfect black-body sphere; the announcement of the theme of the month
August 2005
Rules made by pompous twits; an astonishing hush; ongoing disciplinary troubles; a surprisingly juicy book
September 2005
Clearing up a few things; dismal brevity; an interesting philosophical debate; bullishness and self-aggrandizement
October 2005
Shame; the Holy Grail of this column found; some very specific pomposities; the ways in which a man can kid himself
November 2005
A question of comic judgment; attractive Kryptonite ashtrays; impatience with literary fiction; gay abandon
February 2006
A lot of stuff about farting and wanking; Major Reading Experiences; Jay Gatsbergen and David Copperbottom
March 2006
A new tradition; Puff Diddle; jolly Ukrainian songs; defining the beginning of sexual intercourse; our impending death
April 2006
Comparisons with Nikki Sixx; sea-creature combos; the price of egg burritos in America; use of the first-person plural
May 2006
Notes on a shelving system; the English equivalent of Oprah; musings on a lunar module; unintentional comic élan
June / July 2006
A very grim month; brotherhood on the road; histrionics from Abraham Lincoln; Arsenal makes the semifinals
August 2006
Crushing disappointment; life in Mississippi; stuffier compatriots; small beer; the fruits of a Southern kick; clumsy crabs
September 2006
Opinions about scientists; clever cynics; the flop and bawl; a spousal downgrade; the worth of weddings and the World Cup
October 2006
A scary woman; visiting with permafrost experts; an offer from ExxonMobil; toothless writers’ unions
April 2007
Endless craving for misery; a double burial; experimental novels from Slovenia; advice on how to deal with favorites
May 2007
The musical taste of iPods; reconsidering dated smut; thoughts on tinned food; devout Catholic wives
June / July 2007
Breakfast Frappuccinos; bacon-flavored potato chips; effortless use of the American vernacular; lippy kids
August 2007
Index entries on Greil Marcus; life behind the Berlin Wall; antinomians; up with fiction, down with facts
September 2007
The end of the world; kitchen gizzard experiments; a passable Mick Jagger impersonation; a blank-verse novel about werewolves
October 2007
Defending the honor of a pink book; the death of God; ten adult books that aren’t boring; weird chimes
November / December 2007
Helpful cake analogies; hamstring trouble; unreadable Marxist pamphlets; a middle-class twat; doublethink
January 2008
A fact-finding mission; sex education; writers with an eye on posterity; a sun-lounger in France; lovable Millennials
February 2008
Learning to read; a state of bolshiness; a hydrocephalic weakling; cricketers; Titmus, F. J.; hints on a proposed lordship
March / April 2008
Stuff he’s been watching; misery memoirs; unpleasant people doing unkind things; a fascist-killing machine; Juno backlash
May 2008
The fate of a man tired of books; an increase of snazz; the delivery of an unsporting thumping; mortgage payments on boxes
September 2008
Specialization on Doctor Dolittle; breakfast made by a chimp; tolerance of a bare breast; a temporary farewell
May 2010
; Learning from eHow; the old days; nude tableaux vivants; failed moneymaking schemes; delicate moral complications
June 2010
An invitation to the Oscars; iconic NHS spectacle styles; the postwar Labour government; LitCologne
July / August 2010
Advice from the Brits; tragicomedy; the Lost Booker Prize; a novel-shaped Manhattan; a pisseur de copie
September 2010
The return of the Scientist of the Month award; small males; possible roles for Miley Cyrus; words from Lorne Michaels
October 2010
Painfully cold sponsored parties; a hunky bad boy; Negative Twenty Questions; the moments on which a life turns
November / December 2010
Shakespeare’s most Tarantinoesque works; instructions on making yogurt; the time before funk; the Mau Mau uprising
January 2011
Literary fattism; sick burns by Dickens’s contemporaries; the difference between Scottish and Irish; Bose headphones
February 2011
Postman Pat; an MP3 of Elizabeth Bishop; diarrhea in the book; the universal love of Céline Dion; good goals and bad goals
March / April 2011
Victimhood; characters who are quite clearly creeps; a gift from the president; cells that grow like kudzu
May 2011
New forms of inadequacy; married bliss; curious descriptors for lovemaking; the Dillon Panthers; homework
June 2011
A worthy opponent; the Hawaiians’ need for the Bible; the favorite television program of Mr. Gum; a bald assertion
July / August 2011
A certain yen; a surprising anecdote; incomprehensible improbability; a man possessing the necessary anxiety; required reading
September 2011
A string of presumptions; the definition of monogamy; Democracy Versus Hot Sex; an ode to Body Shop Vanilla Shower Gel
October 2011
Chopsticks; an example of womanizing both real and prodigious; the gray North Sea; an endorsement of the Waboba ball
November / December 2011
Everybody’s favorite literary biographer; the posher papers; old tosh; Marshalsea debtors’ prison; the blacking factory
January 2012
A lemon-firing bazooka; unbearable quirk; WWOOFers; instances of transgressive and sinister sexual chaos
March / April 2012
A second chance for Sade; plastic carrier bag as madeleine substitute; taunting the fact-checkers; friendship with Woody Allen
May 2012
The definition of creative professional; an epiphanic right-hemisphere production; a theory regarding nonfiction books
June 2012
Passing the point of concern; penal reform; the notion of the second longhand draft; a month of fictional bravery
July / August 2012
The future for writers; a frustrating imagined dialogue; Fitzgerald’s rate; a gum-snap young-adult voice
September 2012
A personal library; the no-snark rule; a “meh” face; the end of the London Olympics; vital supplies
March / April 2013
Assorted woo-hoos; the fashionable Rod Stewart; a very common human propensity; a Christlike alter ego
May 2013
Casting notes; the transcendence of one’s subject; disappointment regarding orgies and uzis; a very long series of questions
June 2013
Asshole paranoia; quantifying the delusions of Kanye West; “Cheat Sheet” and PopEater; uses for a Wonder Bread bag
Introduction: A Note from Jess Walter
The crazy lady in 13B leaned over and asked what I was reading. Hoping to avoid one of those torturous airplane conversations, I simply held up the cover of a newish story collection.
“No. I didn’t ask what you’re reading,” the woman said. “Why?”
Why? And in a moment of sheer stupefaction I will regret the rest of my life, I made the tragic mistake of looking up from my book.
Over the next two hours, I found out she didn’t read much herself, didn’t entirely “get books,” and wouldn’t believe what she read anyway since so much of it came from “media scumbags” who didn’t properly “support the troops” and were tools for “those government scumbags” who kept raising her taxes and trying to take away the assault rifles she and her husband needed to protect themselves from “scumbag criminals like that O. J. Simpson.”
Wait. She needed an assault rifle to protect herself from O. J. Simpson?
“That son of a bitch,” she informed me, “got away with murder.”
I wanted to point out that using a phrase like “got away with murder” to describe someone who actually got away with murder is a little bit nuts, like owning a china shop, having a bull run through it, and then describing the experience as like… well, you know.
Instead, I sat there pondering her question.
Why do I read?
Looking back, I wish I’d had this “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” omnibus with me.
It’s a very heavy book and I could’ve hit her with it.
Or I could’ve turned to just about any page.
In the decade that he’s been writing this column for the Believer (with the occasional month off to watch Friday Night Lights or the World Cup—two of the three acceptable excuses for not reading, the other being “captured by pirates”) Nick Hornby has created the most intelligent, engaging case for reading you’re ever likely to encounter.
Funny without being snarky, generous without sacrificing critical heft, Hornby-on-books is, forgive my English, bloody brilliant. “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” is unfailingly smart but without any of the obnoxious showy bits—lit theory, obscure Russian surnames, untranslated French (agreeably psycho-surrealist, the book nonetheless reflects Spankmeoff’s fromage de l’extrémité arrière)—that might serve to remind a poor reader that while he attended Eastern Washington University on a partial welding scholarship, the author happens to be a Cambridge man.
Nick, who actually happens to be a Cambridge man, has done much more than display his casual genius for the last ten years, however. He’s crafted a wise, thoughtful, and wry narrative out of a reading life—“a paper trail of theme and meaning,” just as he promised in that very first column (September 2003).
Over those ten years, children are born and grow into readers; trips to America are endured; friends publish books that have to be considered; a beloved partner is “downgraded” to wife. Another beloved, the Arsenal football club, rises and falls like its own season, and in a quietly gut-wrenching moment, sells off its star Thierry Henry—“the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children,” yet somehow manages to win the Premier League (before another inevitable fall).
DiMaggio-like streaks of prodigious reading (eleven books in one month!) are followed by whiffs, by admissions of guilt, television, and the too-recognizable failure of concentration that afflicts our generation, a plague of distraction.
I was just itchy and scratchy and probably crusty, too, and I began to wonder whether I had simply lost the habit—the skill, even—of reading.
Amid this ongoing consideration of how and why and what we read are real lessons for writers, vital challenges to old tropes and clichés: “I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time.” Or this about our blind worship of spare prose:
And there’s some stuff about the winnowing process I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words?… I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?
Reading the whole enterprise again, I found it hilarious, surprising, incisive, and—for a certain kind of book lover like you and me and not the lady in 13B—thrilling.
A few confessions:
I did in
deed send Nick one of my books with the suggestion that he start a third column: “Books Foisted Upon Me.”
Also, I’m something of a Hornby completist. Novels, essays, criticism—I would read the man on anything. I only thank god his literary north pulls him toward music and books and sport, and that he’s not into ceramics or polo or necrophilia (anymore). In fact, now that I have the Believer’s ear, may I suggest publishing Nick Hornby’s Collected Parentheticals:
(Twice this week I have been sent manuscripts of books that remind their editors, according to their covering letters, of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, “This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.”)
But while I am an unapologetic Hornby fan, what I am not is a member of the Polysyllabic Spree (my application was rejected because of a perceived susceptibility to cult deprogramming), that robed band of somewhere between six and sixty lit lovers and ritual spankers who first assigned Nick this project.
That puts me in a good spot to evaluate the success of the most controversial aspect of this experiment, the Believer’s insistence on “acid-free” criticism, which, while clearly a challenge for Hornby, contributed to a few small but revolutionary ideas that book reviewers and critics had either forgotten or never knew:
