Recently in Hornby, Nick Category

It's a little strange writing about this book, as it's partly about an obsessive fan of a musician. And I'm an occasional obsessive fan of Nick Hornby. Well, to be honest, I'm far from obsessive, but I have read all of his books and will often cite him as my favorite author. He even partly inspired this blog.

Much like how Duncan in this book eagerly awaits the new release from musician Tucker Crowe, I was eagerly awaiting this new novel from Hornby. I can't help but think that Hornby might be mocking people like me in here. Then again, many of his books are about obsessive fans. And here the twist is that the book is more about the woman who has to live with the obsessive fan and the subject of the obsessive fandom. At times, it's like High Fidelity in reverse.

There's even a part in here in which the obsessive fan writes a review of the new release by Tucker Crowe right after listening to it for the first time, so this entry is beginning to seem very meta.

Here's what for me was the most striking passage:

The truth abut autobiographical songs, he [Tucker] realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning. . . .The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Here, Tucker has always hated his most renowned album, because he felt it wasn't authentic. That's sort of how I feel about writing humor columns now, like I'm trying too hard to catalog life in a snappy 750-word column. Many of my old columns all seem vaguely inauthentic to me. I seem to have been striving too hard for an opinion on which I could hang some jokes. When someone would write to me angrily about my opinion, a part of me would always be confused. I didn't mean anything by it. It was just a humor column, and they want to debate me?

It's a little similar to how Tucker feels about his songs. Unless, of course, it's not. On an unrelated note, the obsessive fan later decides that his initial review of the Tucker Crowe album was completely off-base. He's soon a little embarrassed by it, in fact.

I actually finished this book quite a while ago, but it has taken me forever to write about it. That surprises me, because this is such a great book that I expected to write about it right away. For me, it's possibly Hornby's best. Still, I find I have some trouble writing about books I've already read.

I wasn't even sure I was going to read this whole book when I picked it up, and then suddenly it was the end of the weekend, and I had finished it. I chose it because I was looking for a strong first person narrative to study while I try to write a first person story of my own. Of course, you may have realized that this isn't actually a first person novel. I just remembered it that way, probably because Hornby captures the inner life of both a 36-year-old rich bachelor and an awkward 12-year-old boy so eloquently.

After reading this, I finally saw the movie, which was surprisingly good. The first half was very faithful to the book -- almost too faithful, in fact. It's a strange feeling to watch a movie of a book you love. You almost sit there with a checklist keeping track of what did and did not make it. Much of Hornby's material was kept, though I was in no condition to tell if it did indeed work. I'm still not sure how someone who hadn't read the book would have appreciated the film, but for me it worked well.

Eventually, the movie goes in another direction, because, well, the plot of a 2002 movie couldn't really revolve around the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The ending is completely different, although very satisfying and certainly in the spirit of the novel.

Speaking of Hornby, upon his recommendation, I started another young adult novel. This one was Skellig by David Almond. Alas, it seemed to be a lot closer to the young part of the young adult spectrum than the adult part. It wasn't a bad book, but I just couldn't make myself care about a little old man with wings who lived in the garage of a young boy. After getting halfway through it, I just decided I had had enough.

And that was a liberating feeling. I always forget how good it can feel just to give up on a book.

Along with possibly Charles Dickens, Nick Hornby may well be the patron saint of this blog. Shortly before starting this site, I had read the two previous collections of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column for The Believer magazine, and I admit that I've patterned some of what you see here on this column.

This is the latest, and unfortunately, the last collection. In each monthly column, Hornby begins with a list of Books Bought and Books Read. That they are often so different reveals how we all read. You buy something in the bookstore and then it often sits in a pile for several months. Occasionally, by the time, you get around to it, you no longer even remember why you buy it.

Like I try to do on this blog, this collection is as much about the experience of reading as about the books themselves. It helps that Hornby can make just about anything interesting.Frankly, it seems a little too meta to review a book about book reviews, so instead I'll just list a few  books he mentions that piqued my interest. You may or may not see these here in the future.

The Ghost - Robert Harris
The Abstinence Teacher - Tom Perrotta
The World Made Straight - Ron Rash
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences - Lawrence Weschler
Skellig - David Almond