I love Nick Hornby. I truly like the way he writes. "Shakespeare Wrote For Money" is the third volume of "Books I've Been Reading" columns that he wrote for the Believer magazine. Each chapter starts with a list of the books he bought and a list of the books he actually read. As he puts it "Reading begets reading." and this is never more true than when he explains how his reading started out in one place and ended up in another. And he never takes himself too seriously, especially when he is talking about about the magazine's editors.
"The Polysyllabic Spree, the three hundred and sixty-five beautiful, vacant, scary young men and women who edit this magazine, have never really approved of my reading for fun, so after several warnings I was taken by force to the holding cells in the basement of their headquarters in the Appalachian Mountains and force fed proper literature. It's a horrific place as you can imagine."
I also love that his September 2006 column listed his books read as "none". A little something called the World Cup took over that month. Reading his justifications for not reading a thing for a column about books is some of the funniest stuff I've ever read.
The recommendations are varied from sports to poetry, literary essays to young adult, fiction to non-fiction, there is even a blank-verse novel about werewolves. That last surprised him as much as anyone and don't look at me I had to go goggle "blank verse". But it's seldom about the actual books for me. There are probably only a handful I'd check out further. It's all about Nick Hornby. This book is like a phone call from a good friend. You know, the one who makes you laugh because they can and will say anything.
(Originally posted 01/31/2012)
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