About a reader

Nick Hornby’s last collection
of book columns is a keeper

by JULIET WATERS

A couple of years back, I was introduced to an audience by a well-meaning person who felt the need to explain the importance of book columnists. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I don’t have much time to read anymore and I really depend on book critics to summarize the latest books for me.”

This idea, that it’s the job of book columnists to read books so you don’t have to, seems to be a North American one. It goes in hand with the idea that everyone exists to either provide some kind of service to make your life easier or guard against the ever-present danger that you might be wasting time or money.

Perhaps because most North American book reviewers still write as though their high school English teachers are checking to see if they read the book, New York-based literary magazine The Believer had to go all the way to the U.K to find someone who could write a reasonably entertaining book column. Sadly, Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column ended in 2008. Shakespeare Wrote for Money is the final collection.

In the world as I think it should be, book columnists should not exist to inspire you to go out and buy a particular book, anymore than professional athletes exist to inspire you to buy a particular product. Book columnists are professional readers who should inspire people to commit regular energy to the act of reading. Their job is to read in an interesting and entertaining way that makes you want to read as much and as well as they do.

Nick Hornby gets that. In this collection of 15 columns there’s not a single plot summary. In one there aren’t even any books.

During the month of Sept. 2006, Nick Hornby bought a few books, but didn’t get around to reading any because he was too obsessed with The World Cup. Instead, we get a hilarious contemplation of the similarities and differences between the steroids controversy in American sports and the “flop and bawl” drama queen theatrics in European soccer. This column is so timely in the wake of the recent synthesis between the two cultures (yes I’m talking about you, A-rod), it makes me wonder if maybe book columnists should just give up all mention of books.

I’m joking—but not totally. I’ve never read my favourite critics to get plot summaries of books or films. For instance, I like Liam Neeson but have no interest in going to see the thriller Taken. Still, I would never want to miss Anthony Lane on the character of ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills: “ The point at which he casually shoots a friend’s wife (who has invited him to stay for supper), in order to extract information from the friend is either proof of Mills’s own madness or, at best, a thoughtful critique of the decline in domestic French cuisine.”

Hornby is as dependably witty as Lane, but he has his thoughtful side too. It’s been a long time since I read any Anne Tyler, and Hornby makes me realize exactly why. At some point, I decided that the “real” Baltimore existed only in HBO’s The Wire. In writing about Tyler, Hornby quotes John Updike: “But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last?”

Updike wasn’t writing about Tyler, he was criticizing the relentlessly dark and violent world of bad boy novelist Michel Houellebecq. Hornby’s intention here isn’t to pit Tyler against Houellebecq. It’s to make this point: “Perhaps no single novel can capture the variety of our lives; perhaps even Houellebecq and Anne Tyler between them can’t get the job done. Perhaps we need to read a lot.”

If you haven’t been doing that recently, Hornby’s columns would be a good place to start.

SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY BY
NICK HORNBY, BELIEVER BOOKS,
PB. 133 PP. $18