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guppyur's review
2.0
I came to Fever Pitch in a slightly roundabout way. I'm seeing someone with a couple of Nick Hornby books on her shelf, and feeling I had read some rather poor books recently -- and that few of my ways to book recommendations were leading me to books I enjoyed of late -- I had been thinking of giving Hornby a go. I still procrastinated it for a while, but I was thinking fondly, recently, of my experience with Jonathan Tropper and I happened to see something online comparing the two.
So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.
The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it "soccer" and not "football," please don't bother. The English coined the term "soccer" in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use "football" elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)
Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.
So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis -- "I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession" -- and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.
Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as "a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes," I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.
On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.
I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.
So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.
The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it "soccer" and not "football," please don't bother. The English coined the term "soccer" in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use "football" elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)
Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.
So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis -- "I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession" -- and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.
Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as "a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes," I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.
On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.
I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.
zoefruitcake's review against another edition
1.0
I read this as part of the Reading Ahead challenge which required a book about a sport to be read.
Well known as I am for my dislike of all sports I struggled to find something I thought I would find interesting and decided on this because I had enjoyed everything else he had written and I expected it to approach the subject from an engaging angle.
Unfortunately, I was very wrong and no part of this book was in the slightest bit interesting, engaging or entertaining to me and I suspect no one else who doesn't have a deep interest in football
Well known as I am for my dislike of all sports I struggled to find something I thought I would find interesting and decided on this because I had enjoyed everything else he had written and I expected it to approach the subject from an engaging angle.
Unfortunately, I was very wrong and no part of this book was in the slightest bit interesting, engaging or entertaining to me and I suspect no one else who doesn't have a deep interest in football
cultneophyte7's review
5.0
Ykw, I'm just gonna write down some quotes.
“I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”
“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”
“So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”
“But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?”
“Like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to me no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere.”
“Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can't play, or bash the ball the seven hundreth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.”
“A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films I didn't want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books - everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on EARTH would my English teacher think that 'The History of Mr Polly' was better than 'Ten Little Indians' by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.”
“I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”
“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”
“So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”
“But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?”
“Like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to me no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere.”
“Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can't play, or bash the ball the seven hundreth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.”
“A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films I didn't want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books - everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on EARTH would my English teacher think that 'The History of Mr Polly' was better than 'Ten Little Indians' by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.”
josepheck23353's review
4.0
Fever pitch. Honest. Perceptive and witty. Chronicling the Author’s Journey into and through his obsession withe Arsenal Football Club.
It articulates the nature of being a sports fan , its pitfalls and all consuming nature. One in which many can relate too. Football in particular is a religion , one in which the fan devoted themselves too. For the Author it served as a lifelong companion , closely following his own personal ups and downs.
And as an avid follower , Nick witnessed many more downs than ups. Yet his devotion and obsession grew and never wavered. For non-sport fans this is still a great read , as it gives you an insight into the purpose a fan finds in following there team. It also gives a perspective to the outsider looking in , explaining the why’s.
Great read , related a lot to how football has helped me and also nice to read a book about a different club existing outside my Manchester United Universe.
It articulates the nature of being a sports fan , its pitfalls and all consuming nature. One in which many can relate too. Football in particular is a religion , one in which the fan devoted themselves too. For the Author it served as a lifelong companion , closely following his own personal ups and downs.
And as an avid follower , Nick witnessed many more downs than ups. Yet his devotion and obsession grew and never wavered. For non-sport fans this is still a great read , as it gives you an insight into the purpose a fan finds in following there team. It also gives a perspective to the outsider looking in , explaining the why’s.
Great read , related a lot to how football has helped me and also nice to read a book about a different club existing outside my Manchester United Universe.
dubsington's review
3.0
You had best like yourself some Nick Hornby, or you'd better be a football (read:soccer) fanatic if you're going really dig this book. I happen to be quite a sports enthusiast so I was okay with it. The book is mostly a series of page-or-two vignettes that parallel Hornby's life with his football obsession. At times he is insightful about both life and football, and at other times both sides fall flat. As a fan of sport, it was interesting to get a clear glimpse into another fanatics way of life, but if you're not a big fan of sports, specifically football, this one may best be left on the shelf.
ginadylan's review
informative
medium-paced
2.75
This was a good book a nice book but if you aren’t into football a lot of it is a little boring lol