Nick Hornby on Books

Nick Hornby is one of my favorite authors, though I came to him in a rather round about sort of way. I'd seen the film version of High Fidelity, of course, but it wasn't until I picked up a copy of the literary magazine The Believer that I got to really know Hornby's writing. His monthly column in that magazine, entitled Stuff I've Been Reading, was always the highlight of my day whenever the latest issue showed up in my mail box.

From his writings there, I moved on to his actual novels and was far from disappointed. Funnily enough, the last issue of my subscription to the magazine coincided exactly with Hornby's final column and I decided not to renew. It's a great magazine, but Hornby's writings on the books he was reading were what always made it worth the subscription price to me.

The reason I bring all of this up is that I just came across a piece he wrote for the London Times about being asked to pick forty books for a Writer's Table at Waterstones, a UK bookstore chain.

Here's a bit of what he had to say:

"Like many readers I fancy myself as a pretty good recommender of books (up until the recent economic calamities I had been entertaining the idea of turning pro, but this might not be the right time), and so being given the chance to drop my enthusiasms and discoveries on to a grateful public is a thrilling privilege. But where to start? How are we supposed to decide which books are still important to us? In one important regard, it seems to me, books that have shaped and guided our tastes at crucial stages of our lives are like friends from the past: you wouldn't necessarily want to go on holiday with them now.

If I were to re-read John Fowles's The Magus, would I do so in 18 hours straight, with an open mouth (and lots of attendant dribble, presumably), just as I did more than 30 years ago? The novel hasn't stayed with me, but the experience of devouring it has; it's one of the reasons why I am a constantly hopeful reader, even now, prepared to believe that the paperback I've just picked up will absorb and inspire and change me. “If I were 16, I might have thoroughly enjoyed this book,” one Amazon customer reviewer says, crushingly; “It all seems awfully silly now,” says another, who has revisited the novel since her youth. I suspect that I shouldn't look at it again, not least because I can recall the gigantic narrative trick that took our collective breath away in the 1970s. I won't be fooled again, unfortunately."

First of all, what a great idea! I wish the bookstore chain I worked for would do something like this, have tables of titles selected by an author, which changed out every month or two. It would be a lot more interesting than most of the displays we end up with.

Secondly, I couldn't agree more with what Hornby is saying. I've always felt that a book finds you somehow at the exact moment you're meant to read it. I've started books that I just couldn't get into at all and then returned to them months or even years later and completely loved them. I've also made the mistake of trying to re-read something I was very passionate about at an earlier point in my life, finding it- or myself, really- altered completely. Of course, there are also a handful of books that I've read more than once and loved even more with each reading, but those ones are far more rare to find.

I think you should only re-read something when you didn't have a strong bond with it the first time around, since those are the ones you're more likely to find yourself appreciating in a different light. If you just completely loved it the first time, it's probably better to let it be.

Just reading this article makes me miss Nick Hornby's monthly columns so much! Luckily, I have the back issues of the magazine and, for those who don't, they have been released in book form in three volumes: The Polysyllabic Spree; Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt; and Shakespeare Wrote For Money. Do yourself a favor and look for them if you haven't already read them.

Books play such a huge part of my daily life and always have. I always mean to write more about them here, but the problem is that I usually don't want to write about a book until I've finished it and then after I've finished I'm usually on the next book which has all my attention.

I need to make a point of sitting down and writing as soon as I've finished a book, if it was worth blogging about. Maybe that should be a sort of belated New Year's resolution.