ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
Читать онлайн.Название Ten Years in the Tub
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781944211158
Автор произведения Nick Hornby
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Ingram
In the end, that’s it, of course, books as “the fullest expression of self.” That is what our books say about us, about you and me and Nick Hornby and not the lady in 13B. We are our books, the ones we struggle with, the ones we put down and the ones we can’t, the ones we still hope to read, and, of course, the ones that we love. That, more than anything: the ones we love.
As that other great British-born writer, Zadie Smith, said of Nick Hornby in Time magazine a few years ago: “He believes that beautiful songs, beautiful books and yes, the beautiful game, are the great redemptive forces. He loves good stuff so much that one might call him the European Ambassador of Goodness.”
Right. Now go troll this big-ass book for some goodness. You might find it exists for you, as it does for Ambassador Hornby, in Charles Dickens, in Marilynne Robinson, in Roddy Doyle, in Anne Tyler, about whom Nick uses words that I would suggest describe the ambassador himself: a writer of “simplicity, intelligence, humor, and heart,” whose curse may just be “a gift that seems effortless.”
BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading—about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. “We talked about books,” says a character in Charles Baxter’s wonderful Feast of Love, “how boring they were to read, but how you loved them anyway.” Anyone who hasn’t felt like that isn’t owning up.
But first, some ground rules:
1) I don’t want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it’s my money. And I’ll bet you do it too.
2) Similarly, I don’t want anyone pointing out that certain books I write about in this column are by friends—or, in the case of Pompeii, by brothers-in-law. A lot of my friends are writers, and so some of my reading time is, inevitably, spent on their books. I won’t attempt to disguise the connections, if that makes anyone feel better. Anyway, it’s been five years since my brother-in-law, the author of Fatherland and Enigma, produced a book, so the chances are that I’ll have been fired from this magazine before he comes up with another one. (I may have been fired even before this one is published, in September.)
3) And don’t waste your breath trying to tell me that I’m showing off. This month, maybe, I’m showing off a little. (Or am I? Shouldn’t I have read some of these books decades ago? Franny and Zooey? Jesus. Maybe I’m doing the opposite: maybe I’m humiliating myself. And maybe you have read all these and loads of others, in the last fortnight. I don’t know you. What’s—ahem—a normal amount, for someone with a job and kids, who watches TV?) But next month I may spend my allotted space desperately trying to explain how come I’ve only managed three pages of a graphic novel and the sports section of the Daily Mirror in four whole weeks—in which case, please don’t bother accusing me of philistinism, laziness, or pig-ignorance. I read a lot this month a) because it’s the summer, and it’s been hot, and I haven’t been working very hard, and there’s no football on TV and b) because my eldest son, for reasons we don’t need to go into, has spent even more time than usual stuck in the toilet, and I have to sit outside on a chair. Thus do books get read.
This month, it went something like:
Against Oblivion → Lowell → In Search of Salinger → Nine Stories → Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters → (Pompeii) → Seymour: An Introduction → Franny and Zooey
The Robert Lowell–Ian Hamilton thing began with Anthony Lane’s intimidatingly brilliant review of Lowell’s collected poems in The New Yorker: Lane mentioned in passing that Hamilton’s biography was still the best available. Even so, I wouldn’t have bothered if it hadn’t been for several other factors, the