Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
A very interesting book with a lots of books that we might have reading it (or not!). But the way those books being elaborate making some of us want to read it. I think I got a few books that capture my interest.
Reading about other people can seem boring.
This was anything but...
Nick Hornby do have a way with words and he turned this compilation of lists and reviews into something highly enjoyable!. Reading his reviews was refreshing. Invigorating.
Although I sometimes wondered about his reasoning when buying books... Thinking about it, who am I to judge. My own purchases and lending lists at the library indicates a slightly split personality. Like I'm 25 different people...
Maybe I should get inspired by Nick and do a monthly summary? Nah. I couldn't possibly do it as well as Mr. Honby does it.
This was anything but...
Nick Hornby do have a way with words and he turned this compilation of lists and reviews into something highly enjoyable!. Reading his reviews was refreshing. Invigorating.
Although I sometimes wondered about his reasoning when buying books... Thinking about it, who am I to judge. My own purchases and lending lists at the library indicates a slightly split personality. Like I'm 25 different people...
Maybe I should get inspired by Nick and do a monthly summary? Nah. I couldn't possibly do it as well as Mr. Honby does it.
Gold. Hornby's enthusiasm about books he's read makes me want to read a gazillion more books.
Nothing wrong with the book, I was just a bit bored and had no desire to go on with it, and it was all about books I didn’t feel any desire to read. I think I would have enjoyed this more if I’d finished it the first time I tried it, it now feels a bit too outdated.
The problem with reading a book like this is it makes your reading pile even bigger!
Love Nick Hornby's humour!
Love Nick Hornby's humour!
So fun and entirely brilliant! Loved Hornby’s witty commentaries about the books he’s been reading and didn’t even mind it prolonging my already very long tbr-list. Though towards the end I could no longer relate as much to Hornby’s quests as a reader since he was heavily reviewing non-fiction, history and biographies mostly, in a way that does not quite represent me as a reader. To use the words of Philipp Roth, I myself don’t think I’ll ever quite “wise up” and discard fiction all together, and even though Hornby appears adamant that he would never do so either, he seems to have this tendency nevertheless.
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2226829.html[return][return]Reading, by Nick Hornby[return]Dec. 31st, 2013 at 3:01 PM[return]books[return]I was unaware of the existence of The Believer, the magazine for which Nick Hornby writes a regular book review column, but I may have to give it a go (I also find the Charles Burns covers very attractive). This assembles columns from mid 2006 to the end of 2011 (though he skipped 2009), all very deftly written with self-deprecating humour, aware of his own prejudices. One of the delights of the book is his discovery of YA literature as a thing of beauty, starting with Skellig (which I haven't read) and then Tom's Midnight GArden (which I have). Sadly Hornby refuses to read anything sfnal (he doesn't like "sprites and hobbits and third universes) so our tastes are not completely aligned.
DECEMBER 2015
Books bought:
An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sachs
Notes from the Underground, by Fiodor Dostoyesvsky (for a friend)
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
Leah Remini: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, by Leah Remini (heard on Youtube)
Books read:
Leah Remini: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (heard)
An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sachs
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
The reasons why I gave "Stuff I've been reading" two stars out of five might seem extremely petty, if not unjust. Nevertheless, it must be noted that these two stars for the first time mean the "It was ok" Goodreads would like them to represent, rather than the"It could have sucked more" they usually do- the scale being, of course: 5: 'I'l be forcing this book upon my kids', 4: 'I don't regret not doing whatever I urgently had to do for work or school and reading this book instead", 3: 'Kind of like olives: some people like it, some people hate it; I'm there in the middle, I have olive craving days and olive passing days, but never a particular Romantic rage or passion toward them, whilst constantly wishing someone could have made olive oil out of them. I suppose it's the same with lemons, hum? Lemons, lemonade...But then the metaphore would have been all cliched and worn out. Let's stick to my brilliant olive piece'. 2: 'It could have sucked more'. 1: 'An Algebra Class should be more interesting.' Unless you are an Algebra enthusiast, in which case 1 star translates into 'It so far from an Algebra class, I nearly fell asleep'.
Anyhow, that is only my way of interpreting the star scale- here at Goodreads we believe you are free to see things however you want: you could even mix things up, like the Germans, and make 1 be the best score one could possibly get. Although, it would certainly cost you your Recommendation feed. Yeah, you better not do it, unless you are on some sort of rebellion against the internet robots who decide everything for us, and yet can't understand a shift in scaling system. Good for you, sacrificing yourself for a cause! It might just be worth having to buy a book filled with human reviews in order to decide what to read next!
But enough chit chat, let's talk about "The Books I've been Reading" (see what I did there?). As I have said, my problems with it are regrettably petty. First of all, I nearly died holding it- that's right, I have a very exciting life (...)- there I was, cheerfully engrossed in Hornby's thoughts on Austerity Britain while wondering if I should get up to find some Toblerones inside my bag, when the plane I was in nearly colapsed: due to turbulence, we took a deep fall into open air (Uff! That was lucky), and some kid, who was sitting by the wing, started screaming that it was on fire (It wasn't- kids are stupid and not to be trusted). Basically, we all thought we were going to die. Then another deep fall- then the pilot told us to 'Thank our Lord that we are OK' (which was deeply unprofessional to a country that prides itself in pretending to be a Laic State, but in which politicians make decisions entirely based on religion... Oh, well, we all know the story).
Unlike people who have had probably more entertaining near death experiences, I didn't see my life pass before my eyes or any of that cliche rubbish- neither did I see the person I love the most, which would have totally ruined 'How I Met Your Mother' for me had that finale not ruined that show already. No, I'm a more original being, full of light: all I could think of was 'Fucking God, the last piece of literature I'll have ever read cannot have been about women with vagina health problems in the 1950s!"- by the way, much like my country's State, I am also pretending to be unreligious most of the time. Truth is, God and I have a very close relationship, and I can adress him the way I adress my friends. So he understood that my dying in the middle of a Brasilia- Sao Paulo map of nonsense, whilst on coach, could not have been the perfect ending for me. In fact, everyone on that flight needs to thank me- because, hadn't it been for my close relationship to our Lord, we would all have been smashed into the Brazillian savannah- yeah, Brazil has a savannah. It's way less cool than it sounds (no African animals, just African vegetation. And some people I don't know. Hi, guys!).
But enough about me and my illuminated life, exempt of worries of any kind. Hornby's book was as entertaining as any of his novels- if there is something that can always be said of Nick Hornby (and by 'always' I mean in the four works by him that I read), he is never boring. His story might be rubbish, and he might be saying rubbish, but you will finish it 200% faster than anything else. It's true, I have run the proportions, having cronometered most of my reading time on my phone. Charlotte Bronte's "Villete" has been running for three years and seven months. It's almost a small child.
While Hornby's brilliant ironies never cease to be funny, and his imagination keeps working even as he writes non-fiction, the near-death experience thing made me think that maybe this wasn't one of the 1001 Books you should read before you die. It certainly shouldn't be the very last book. Suddenly, I wished I was holding 'The Old Man and the Sea', or 'Notes from the Underground' or 'The Catcher in the Rye'. But I'm getting existential here; my other petty reason will make more sense to you mundane beings who can't see the entire picture. My reservation is traced to the fact that I don't know whether I would like Hornby in person. It had never appeared as if while reading his fiction, but now that I have had an opportunity to watch him as a person (and not as a tomato with a typewriter) I am under the impression that some of his opinions sound quite dated to me. It's just that I am deeply annoyed by people from highly developed countries who think of themselves as leftists and yet repeat things that are stereotypically neoliberal. I myself hate Politics and Economy and all that, but it is very revolting to see a man talking about books written in white countries about Economy in white countries and think that this is it. This is how it is all over the world, except for Cuba and North Korea. I am certainly not a communist (I very much like buying things, and listing these things, as you can see above), but saying Socialism was a failed experiment is the same as saying that Stalinism was what Karl Marx projected in the first place. These ready sentences get to my nerves, simply because they limit people's views. Yes, Communism as it was sucked, and now it is no longer possible (or even intended) for us to recreate it, but there were some positive points to it. After all, it was the Soviet Army that surrounded Hitler.
In further attempt to be a leftist in a developed country, Hornby critizes Tony Blair after reading his biography, demonstrates sympathy for YA novels, and talks about hipster music. This annoyed me in a whole other way: despite my "Books read" list this month, I am a very posh reader, and I tend to immeadiately roll my eyes at people who find modern fiction better than classics. Even though I recognize this is a very arrogant attitude, I can't help myself- having grown up in a family where one could exchange accumulation of cultural capital for an overextended bedtime, and be subtly judged for reading or listening to anything older than The Beatles (Harry Potter was allowed, but because it was Harry Potter), I was raised to be a snob. I find conceptual works to be utter bullshit and roll my eyes at those "everything is art" idiots. And yet, I am somehow getting better- I am talking about Nick Hornby, after all. Although, to be fair, it was my vacation read.
Anyway, Hornby's declaration that he had read more current stuff than the classics alarmed me- not only because his recommendations were now less trustworthy, but because he had a go at Huckleberry Finn and thought it was 'meh'. Nevertheless, it is Hornby's merit to always mantain an open-mind. He does recognize that his prior reluctance to reading the classics was perhaps equivocated- and, on the process says something very wise about the way our education is handled, something I observed while I was at school, and the reason I didn't read anything they asked me to: we were not allowed to think about it, or have a dialogue with it. All that the teachers ever wanted was for us to run our eyes through it from afar.
Indeed, Hornby at times puts things so brilliantly that the passage turns into more than the hillarious ironies of his speech. His thoughts on "the books that will turn us into our future selves", for instance. The trick is, you can read the book and you still won't be the future self you pictured- you know, the one exempt of the conscious of a sequential narrative, who can be himself fully.
There are some pieces of observations like these throughout the book which do make it worth reading: make it you 1002nd book, if you have enough time. Although, I wish I hadn't bought the collection and instead had subscribed to the magazine. That way, my indignation toward some of these articles would have dialed down as the months passed, allowing me to have been more excited about some of the others.
Anyway, I'm thinking this will be my last Nick Hornby book for a while- the first ones I read were funny, but "An Education" gave me indigestion and "Stuff I've been Reading" wasn't quite as I had hoped it would be. Well, never do judge a book by its cover.
UPDATE (August 2017): Having just finished "31 songs", another compendium of low-key criticism of Hornby's, I realize I have been unfair to this book. I was still in shock from my near-death experience and feeling like I should spend my life reading really difficult stuff- meh. Glad that didn't last.
Books bought:
An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sachs
Notes from the Underground, by Fiodor Dostoyesvsky (for a friend)
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
Leah Remini: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, by Leah Remini (heard on Youtube)
Books read:
Leah Remini: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (heard)
An Anthropologist on Mars, by Oliver Sachs
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby
The reasons why I gave "Stuff I've been reading" two stars out of five might seem extremely petty, if not unjust. Nevertheless, it must be noted that these two stars for the first time mean the "It was ok" Goodreads would like them to represent, rather than the"It could have sucked more" they usually do- the scale being, of course: 5: 'I'l be forcing this book upon my kids', 4: 'I don't regret not doing whatever I urgently had to do for work or school and reading this book instead", 3: 'Kind of like olives: some people like it, some people hate it; I'm there in the middle, I have olive craving days and olive passing days, but never a particular Romantic rage or passion toward them, whilst constantly wishing someone could have made olive oil out of them. I suppose it's the same with lemons, hum? Lemons, lemonade...But then the metaphore would have been all cliched and worn out. Let's stick to my brilliant olive piece'. 2: 'It could have sucked more'. 1: 'An Algebra Class should be more interesting.' Unless you are an Algebra enthusiast, in which case 1 star translates into 'It so far from an Algebra class, I nearly fell asleep'.
Anyhow, that is only my way of interpreting the star scale- here at Goodreads we believe you are free to see things however you want: you could even mix things up, like the Germans, and make 1 be the best score one could possibly get. Although, it would certainly cost you your Recommendation feed. Yeah, you better not do it, unless you are on some sort of rebellion against the internet robots who decide everything for us, and yet can't understand a shift in scaling system. Good for you, sacrificing yourself for a cause! It might just be worth having to buy a book filled with human reviews in order to decide what to read next!
But enough chit chat, let's talk about "The Books I've been Reading" (see what I did there?). As I have said, my problems with it are regrettably petty. First of all, I nearly died holding it- that's right, I have a very exciting life (...)- there I was, cheerfully engrossed in Hornby's thoughts on Austerity Britain while wondering if I should get up to find some Toblerones inside my bag, when the plane I was in nearly colapsed: due to turbulence, we took a deep fall into open air (Uff! That was lucky), and some kid, who was sitting by the wing, started screaming that it was on fire (It wasn't- kids are stupid and not to be trusted). Basically, we all thought we were going to die. Then another deep fall- then the pilot told us to 'Thank our Lord that we are OK' (which was deeply unprofessional to a country that prides itself in pretending to be a Laic State, but in which politicians make decisions entirely based on religion... Oh, well, we all know the story).
Unlike people who have had probably more entertaining near death experiences, I didn't see my life pass before my eyes or any of that cliche rubbish- neither did I see the person I love the most, which would have totally ruined 'How I Met Your Mother' for me had that finale not ruined that show already. No, I'm a more original being, full of light: all I could think of was 'Fucking God, the last piece of literature I'll have ever read cannot have been about women with vagina health problems in the 1950s!"- by the way, much like my country's State, I am also pretending to be unreligious most of the time. Truth is, God and I have a very close relationship, and I can adress him the way I adress my friends. So he understood that my dying in the middle of a Brasilia- Sao Paulo map of nonsense, whilst on coach, could not have been the perfect ending for me. In fact, everyone on that flight needs to thank me- because, hadn't it been for my close relationship to our Lord, we would all have been smashed into the Brazillian savannah- yeah, Brazil has a savannah. It's way less cool than it sounds (no African animals, just African vegetation. And some people I don't know. Hi, guys!).
But enough about me and my illuminated life, exempt of worries of any kind. Hornby's book was as entertaining as any of his novels- if there is something that can always be said of Nick Hornby (and by 'always' I mean in the four works by him that I read), he is never boring. His story might be rubbish, and he might be saying rubbish, but you will finish it 200% faster than anything else. It's true, I have run the proportions, having cronometered most of my reading time on my phone. Charlotte Bronte's "Villete" has been running for three years and seven months. It's almost a small child.
While Hornby's brilliant ironies never cease to be funny, and his imagination keeps working even as he writes non-fiction, the near-death experience thing made me think that maybe this wasn't one of the 1001 Books you should read before you die. It certainly shouldn't be the very last book. Suddenly, I wished I was holding 'The Old Man and the Sea', or 'Notes from the Underground' or 'The Catcher in the Rye'. But I'm getting existential here; my other petty reason will make more sense to you mundane beings who can't see the entire picture. My reservation is traced to the fact that I don't know whether I would like Hornby in person. It had never appeared as if while reading his fiction, but now that I have had an opportunity to watch him as a person (and not as a tomato with a typewriter) I am under the impression that some of his opinions sound quite dated to me. It's just that I am deeply annoyed by people from highly developed countries who think of themselves as leftists and yet repeat things that are stereotypically neoliberal. I myself hate Politics and Economy and all that, but it is very revolting to see a man talking about books written in white countries about Economy in white countries and think that this is it. This is how it is all over the world, except for Cuba and North Korea. I am certainly not a communist (I very much like buying things, and listing these things, as you can see above), but saying Socialism was a failed experiment is the same as saying that Stalinism was what Karl Marx projected in the first place. These ready sentences get to my nerves, simply because they limit people's views. Yes, Communism as it was sucked, and now it is no longer possible (or even intended) for us to recreate it, but there were some positive points to it. After all, it was the Soviet Army that surrounded Hitler.
In further attempt to be a leftist in a developed country, Hornby critizes Tony Blair after reading his biography, demonstrates sympathy for YA novels, and talks about hipster music. This annoyed me in a whole other way: despite my "Books read" list this month, I am a very posh reader, and I tend to immeadiately roll my eyes at people who find modern fiction better than classics. Even though I recognize this is a very arrogant attitude, I can't help myself- having grown up in a family where one could exchange accumulation of cultural capital for an overextended bedtime, and be subtly judged for reading or listening to anything older than The Beatles (Harry Potter was allowed, but because it was Harry Potter), I was raised to be a snob. I find conceptual works to be utter bullshit and roll my eyes at those "everything is art" idiots. And yet, I am somehow getting better- I am talking about Nick Hornby, after all. Although, to be fair, it was my vacation read.
Anyway, Hornby's declaration that he had read more current stuff than the classics alarmed me- not only because his recommendations were now less trustworthy, but because he had a go at Huckleberry Finn and thought it was 'meh'. Nevertheless, it is Hornby's merit to always mantain an open-mind. He does recognize that his prior reluctance to reading the classics was perhaps equivocated- and, on the process says something very wise about the way our education is handled, something I observed while I was at school, and the reason I didn't read anything they asked me to: we were not allowed to think about it, or have a dialogue with it. All that the teachers ever wanted was for us to run our eyes through it from afar.
Indeed, Hornby at times puts things so brilliantly that the passage turns into more than the hillarious ironies of his speech. His thoughts on "the books that will turn us into our future selves", for instance. The trick is, you can read the book and you still won't be the future self you pictured- you know, the one exempt of the conscious of a sequential narrative, who can be himself fully.
There are some pieces of observations like these throughout the book which do make it worth reading: make it you 1002nd book, if you have enough time. Although, I wish I hadn't bought the collection and instead had subscribed to the magazine. That way, my indignation toward some of these articles would have dialed down as the months passed, allowing me to have been more excited about some of the others.
Anyway, I'm thinking this will be my last Nick Hornby book for a while- the first ones I read were funny, but "An Education" gave me indigestion and "Stuff I've been Reading" wasn't quite as I had hoped it would be. Well, never do judge a book by its cover.
UPDATE (August 2017): Having just finished "31 songs", another compendium of low-key criticism of Hornby's, I realize I have been unfair to this book. I was still in shock from my near-death experience and feeling like I should spend my life reading really difficult stuff- meh. Glad that didn't last.
The Polysyllabic Spree is better overall than this second collection. Nevertheless an enjoyable read and Nick Hornby is very good company. Just the kind of book that's perfect for a couple of quiet afternoons curled up on the sofa.