Category: Books

I picked this book up about a half-year ago at a foreign book sale, but I’ve had no real urge to read it until recently. To be honest, I had been a bit afraid to read fiction from Hornby, having only read part of Fever Pitch and his collection of essays related to music, Songbook (published as 31 Songs in the UK). (Surely watching High Fidelity a dozen times doesn’t count, does it?) But after recently finishing his two books of essays on books and reading (The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt — see my review), and enjoying them very much (as I had Songbook), I wanted to see what Hornby and fiction were like. And as it turned out, I ended up having Hornby’s non-fiction voice in my head so much that for the first 50 pages or so of this novel, which is narrated in the first-person by a woman, I couldn’t properly work out whether I was in this woman’s head or in Hornby’s. Fortunately though, very soon after that this question ceased to be relevant, so successfully did Hornby create this character and her voice.

I really liked this book, although somewhere around the three-quarters mark it lost a bit of its luster, for reasons I’m not sure I could explain. I suppose I started to lose a bit of clarity as to character motivation, and some of the decisions taken by the main characters didn’t ring quite as true as the did earlier in the novel. But overall I thoroughly enjoyed what was by turns a very funny book and at the same time rather sobering, especially for anyone who is married or experienced divorce. There are a few brilliant set pieces as well (the party and church scenes in particular) that could stand out on their own almost as short stories.

The main character (Katie Carr) seemed to be excellently drawn, by the end (minus some minor quibbles as mentioned) I really felt as if I was in her head. I really enjoyed the interplay between what she said to others, and what she was merely thinking (although given the book’s small print and the use of only a single apostrophe to not quotations, I often had to go back and check whether she was speaking or merely thinking). I found the criticism that goody two-shoes liberalism comes under to be absolutely spot on, even as the book shows that liberalism is not such an easy target as we might like to think it is. The question the book mainly addresses, eg. how to be (a) good (person), on both a personal, one-to-one level and a societal level, is completely valid and not easily answerable.

What I particularly liked was that it’s very difficult to draw sides amongst the characters here. At the outset, Katie is a doctor, doing that not for money but because she wants to be good, and she is the breadwinner of the family. Meanwhile, her husband David is a house-husband, a hack writer, and generally an insufferable Angry (Middle-aged) Man. Yet it is Katie who has had an affair. Later, we see that Katie may well be a “hack” doctor, slugging it out with incurable patients but perhaps not as committed as she’s led us to believe, while her husband has seen the light and now — in addition to turning a new leaf in his marriage — also wants to save the world, even if it’s just one household at at time (and it literally does start with his and Katie’s household). He then becomes an insufferable liberal, yet patently doing good things, while Katie finds herself pining for things the way they were before, when she was on the verge of divorce.

I’m glad I finally gave Hornby’s fiction a shot, and I can easily see myself reading some of his other novels, particularly his most recent A Long Way Down, before too long.

This post is actually not really about 2006 like Part One was, but rather about looking ahead to my reading plans for 2007. So here are some book-related resolutions for 2007:

Read more books on my shelf instead of always buying new ones.

I need to read more books on my shelf, rather than always buying new ones. Like a lot of folks who enjoy books, I suspect, I tend to buy a lot of books, knowing full well that I can’t possibly read all of them before the next urge to buy a lot of books. I rationalize this by telling myself that I’m creating a library, and that I’m creating a situation for myself where I will have a book on my bookshelf to suit any whim or fancy or urge I might have as to what I want to read next. The problem with this rationalization is that a) it’s doubtful my “library” as such would ever reach such a settled state, and b) I LOVE BUYING BOOKS AND I’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO STOP! (Phew, I feel better now.)

Still, of the 26 books I read last year, only three of them were books I had already owned for any length of time (here defined as being on my bookshelf for six months or longer). This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t have a lot of books, of course, but I have plenty of them. (Just last year alone, I probably bought, if I include photo books, about 75 books). So the bottom line is that this bought-read imbalance needs to be redressed.

Therefore, my first resolution for 2007 is that for every newly purchased book I read, I must read at least one book that I already own (this means any book bought before the start of 2007). So far I’m off to a good start: I read Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, which was bought in December; I then moved on to Hornby’s How to Be Good, which had been sitting on my self for almost a year; and now I’m on to Hornby’s Fever Pitch, which I bought (used) last week. (At this point, you might be wondering why my first New Year’s resolution isn’t, “Read at least one book by someone who isn’t Nick Hornby.”)

So I’m off to a good start, but how sustainable it is I don’t know. Already in 2007 I’ve bought ten books (plus one photo book, but that doesn’t count here), which means that before I can read all of them (not saying I would want to read all of them, you know, that “library” thing), I would have to also read 10 books off my shelf. (And that’s assuming the impossible, which is that I don’t buy another book this year.) That would pretty much finish off 2007, so…. Ah, I can already see where this resolution is headed: to the same place as last year’s “continue study Japanese and pass 1st level” resolution.

(The astute will notice that I haven’t resolved to NOT buy so many books in 2007 as I did last year.)

Read more fiction.

Looking over the books I read in 2006, only two of them were fiction. I want to try to change that a bit, not necessarily even the balance but at least work a few more fiction titles into my reading pattern. I used to read so much more fiction than non in the old days, not sure exactly what happened. One thing I think is that, when deciding to read a non-fiction book, I usually don’t get hung up about whether the writing is good or not. I sort of make the assumption (somewhat naively, I admit) that it wouldn’t have been published if the writing hadn’t been half-way decent. And anyway, I figure I’m reading the book for the subject matter, and that if the writing rises above the pedestrian, well then, that’s a bonus.

But with fiction, I’ve always been attracted to the writing as much to the story or plot. I suppose I shouldn’t cop to it, but it seems I like the “literary” part of literary fiction more than the fiction itself. I suppose this arose from an earlier time when I had some aspirations of becoming a writer myself, and I therefore gravitated to those writers where the writing seems to stand out, not necessarily to call attention to itself but certainly not fade into the background. So I end up judging a book more on that than on other concerns (plot sensibility, well-drawn characters, fully-realized locales, etc.).

Like a lot of films, novels dissipate from my memory all too quickly, and I don’t like that. Part of that is that I don’t spend enough time thinking about the books after I finish them, and certainly very rarely if ever discuss them with others. But maybe this ephemerality is part of the medium, and it’s not so bad.

As of this writing I’ve already read one novel this year, and have quite a few in the hopper that I’m itching to get to, so I feel pretty good about my chances of making good on this resolution. And like a chair by the window on a rainy day, just thinking again about fiction and getting immersed in characters and lives makes me feel cozy.

Expand the times and places I read in.

I want to try to read more outside of my designated book reading time, eg. my commute to and from work. With a child, and distractions like satellite TV and high-speed internet, it’s well-nigh impossible for me to read at home. So I’ve already started to carve out little spaces of time where I can go to a cafe and read (like the couple of hours between dropping off and picking up Kaika at his school).

Jot down more thoughts on what I read rather than chucking them to the memory dustbin.

I would like to write more about the books I do read. I started to do that last year, but only ended up making three posts about books. Even making them more “thoughts about x book” rather than “reviews” didn’t really help ease the burden of having to articulate what I liked about each book. So I’m going to try to make it a rule that I have to write at least one paragraph about every book I read, even if it ends up being just a Cliff’s Note of my opinion (eg. “I hated it.”). Hopefully this will help me remember it better, as now only a couple of months (and a few books) are all it takes for me to almost completely forget about the book, how I felt about it, why it was worth recommending (or not), which understandably is rather frustrating.

Improve my reading speed.

I’m an embarrassingly slow reader. I had a feeling that “remedial reading” class I took in the 9th grade would come in handy later, just too bad it had to be taught by the most Nurse Ratched of all the teachers at my school, and hence I did my best to thoroughly not put into practice anything I was taught. I remember the basic concepts of speed reading (reading three words at a time, for a start), but every time I try to do this, it lasts for about a paragraph before I unwittingly return to my one word at a time snail’s pace. Henceforth, given the when and where of my book reading (see previous resolution), it takes me ages to finish a book. This not only obviously affects my enjoyment of what I’m reading, but impacts what I choose to read.

Basically anything that’s over 300 pages prompts me to ask myself if I should take it on. Of course it depends on the subject matter and/or the author. Bill Bryson, no questions asked. Sports books, yeah probably okay, even at 400 pp. A collection of essays, not a worry. (Who’s going to know if I conveniently forget to read two or three?) But just about anything else and there’s this fear I won’t finish it, or it will take two months to read. And in the past, I’ve been really bad about getting to page 350 or a 400-page book and then quitting, which really is a waste.

So, I’m going to try to improve my reading speed in 2007, as best I can. Any resources in this regard would be appreciated.

So, five resolutions in all, perhaps I’m biting off more than I can chew but I think they’re all doable. At the very least, like my desire last year to keep the reading kick going for the whole year, these should help keep me focused and committed to my reading rather than getting lazy. Hopefully, they’ll help me expand my horizons as well, and move a few of those books on my shelf from the “unread but looking good in the library” stage to the “read and justifying their place in the library” stage.

After I read Nick Hornby’s Songbook (published in the UK as 31 Songs) a couple of years back, wherein the writer takes 31 of his favorite songs and delves into why they’re meaningful for him, for weeks afterwards I had this internal voice that seemed to have been pulled directly from Hornby, which would go on and on about various songs that were important to me, where I was when I first heard the song, past girlfriends they reminded me of, that kind of thing. I even had the idea of committing these to the blog.

Something similar happened when I read these two books, The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, which gather together Hornby’s monthly “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column from the literary magazine The Believer. Though it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what is Hornby’s style (unlike say that of Bill Bryson), it’s clearly there, and it’s peculiarly infectious for me.

Each month Hornby goes through the three or four (sometimes more, sometimes less) books he has read. These are not reviews per se, and sometimes they serve merely as springboards for other ruminations. He talks a lot of why he read the book in the first place, how he came to buy it or receive it (naturally he is sent a lot of books by publishers hoping for a review). He’s up front when he’s reading books by friends or relatives, and tries to be honest when books or genres that don’t tickle his fantasy, which requires some verbal dancing given The Believer’s policy of not being unnecessarily negative. He takes to task the “literary” novel, especially what he sees as a disturbing trend of novels about writers or literary folk, and book blurbs don’t fare much better either.

But more than that, the columns are about books, and people who not only read books, but buy them as well. Each column begins with a list of not only what Hornby has read, but also the books he has bought, and it should surprise no one who, like Hornby (and myself), likes to buy books, those two lists rarely if ever correlate. So much about what Hornby writes about in this regard, such as the compulsion to buy books that stand very little chance of actually being read, or the idea that sometimes, buying and collecting books with the purpose of appearing cultured seems to matter more than whether or not we’ve read the book, was so spot on with respect to my own book buying that I couldn’t help but curse Hornby a bit for seeing right through me (and himself). He also has a lot of good things to say about how books have acquired this feeling that they must be hard work, that unless they’re a struggle then perhaps they’re not worth it.

If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity — and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured — then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits.[…] [P]lease, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a TV program.

Along these lines, he talks about his publisher sending him a new version of the classic Candide, and after discovering that it’s only 90 pages, he decides to read it, to “chalk it off” the list of those books one is supposed to have read. And he does. However,

There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you’re a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I’m beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they’re a few letter short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy.

(How’s this for a coincidence: the very same day that I read those words, I was in one of Tokyo’s big bookstores, on the English language floor, and in the “Penguin Classics” section. (Hornby had written glowingly about David Copperfield in the first book and I felt I should at least thumb through it.) There were three American (?) friends standing next to me, from their conversation it seemed they were studying in Japanese universities, and one of them was asking the others if they had read Candide: “Oh man, you gotta read it, it’s so awesome.” I kid you not.)

I loved both collections, and took away so many recommendations as to what I should read that really, I could fill 2007 with only Hornby-recommended books and more than likely that would suffice to keep me contented. (I have already purchased four books that were a direct result of reading these two books, and my Amazon wish list has been thrown out of whack). Both books also feature selected excerpts from some of the books Hornby talks about, which I suppose in this day of the “Amazon Online Reader” might be somewhat superfluous, but I found to be a nice bonus. (The excerpt from the yet to be published Then We Came to an End by Joshua Ferris in the second book was so frickin’ hilarious that it practically justified the book in and of itself.) And since Hornby has been so honest, let me cop to the fact that this particular book fetishist loves the look and feel of each book (they’re identical really beside the slightly different cover designs). I wish all paperbacks felt like this, nice and solid, yet supple.

If I have a criticism about the books, it would only be that after a while, I found his running gag about the “polysyllabic spree,” a kind of white-hooded editorial body who proscribe all sorts of restrictions against what Hornby can write about, to grow old after awhile. I just didn’t find it very funny to begin with, and it wore fairly thin by the end. Additionally, while the book collector in me loves having two great looking books (that I’ve now actually read, what a bonus!) to add to my bookshelf, in truth each volume is rather slim and one wonders why The Believer didn’t wait and then publish a single, more substantial collection. Perhaps when they published the first they weren’t expecting to publish another one, I don’t know, but there is a lingering feeling they were trying to milk the readers a bit. Or maybe that’s just my sour grapes at blowing through both of these books so quickly and wanting more.

You can read excerpts (and one full text) of Hornby’s Believer columns online to judge for yourself. (There’s also a nice review of The Polysyllabic Spree from Salon.) Hornby hasn’t written one since October of last year so I’m not sure if the series will be continuing or not. I for one hope it does, and if there is another collection put together, I have no doubt I’ll be adding that to my book collection, er, I mean, reading it.