MADreads

Onward, ever onward, brave readers

October 19th, 2009 Katie H.

Readers are perpetually frustrated people.  Is there any other pursuit more hopeless than that of the reader, manically consuming novels, nonfiction and any other scraps of writing that comes along, all with the knowledge that every day there are more books published, yet more to read and the despairing sense that one can never get to the bottom of that to-be-read pile.  Why do we do it?  And where can one find more good book suggestions?

Nick Hornby feels your pain.  He’s a busy man: novelist, music critic, dad, sometime movie screenwriter/producer and full-time Arsenal football fan.  He can be excused for not reading.  Yet he too has succumbed to this madness and even managed to write some pretty good articles for The Believer magazine.  And, he too has problems getting through all the books he has bought.  He’s one of us!

Hornby stopped writing his article in 2008, but luckily for posterity, his essays are collected in three easily digested volumes:  The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs The Dirt, and his latest, Shakespeare Wrote for Money.  They’re all fairly solid essays - even in the months that Arsenal duty kept Hornby from finishing any books - although the last few essays in Shakespeare suggest a writer who is ready to move on.  But still there is plenty here to amuse, recommend and perhaps even enlighten.  Hornby lets his books take him to other titles as they will, and his discoveries and rediscoveries (and in the earlier essays, his pans) are something that all readers can relate to.  Luxuriating in the world of a Dickens novel?  Learning that many young adult novels being published today are not only modern classics but are, as Hornby puts it, written like their authors want them to be read?  Readers, do not your toes tingle at the very thought?

All Hornby’s criticism is short enough to be perused during the commercial breaks of your favorite televised sporting event.  The books themselves are skinny enough that I’m reasonably certain that even if one were to check out all three, their combined heft would not be enough to topple that tippy to-be-read stack.  Good thing too, as that pile is unlikely to get any shorter.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction