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A review by jjp723
How to Be Good by Nick Hornby
5.0
I love Nick Hornby, and this is my favorite ... and it is just like all the other reviews say, depressing, sad, perhaps cutting a little bit too close to the bone - all that. What starts out as a husband and wife reaching the end of the sniping and bitching turns into way more than that, makes you think about how maybe everyone feels a kind of sadness and desperation at how their life has transpired and what is to come - and realizing that you have it good, better than most. The ending is true, if not expected.
Funny and perceptive and REAL writing. Very highly recommended.
*The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.
*I feel suddenly hopeless, the way one always does when two alternatives become one chosen course of action. I want to go back to the time just seconds ago when I didn't know what to do.
*It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.
Funny and perceptive and REAL writing. Very highly recommended.
*The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for regret. I suspect not.
*I feel suddenly hopeless, the way one always does when two alternatives become one chosen course of action. I want to go back to the time just seconds ago when I didn't know what to do.
*It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.