“Read what you enjoy, not what bores you,” Nick Hornby tells us. That simple, liberating, and indispensable directive animates each installment of the celebrated critic and author’s monthly column in the Believer. In this delightful and never-musty tour of his reading life, Hornby tells us not just what to read, but how to read.
Whether tackling a dismayingly bulky biography of Dickens while his children destroy something in the next room, or getting sucked into a serious assessment of Celine Dion during an intensely fought soccer match featuring his beloved Arsenal, or devouring an entire series of children’s books while on vacation, Hornby’s reviews are rich, witty, and occasionally madcap. These essays capture the joy and ire, the despair and exhilaration of the book-lover’s life, and will appeal equally to both monocle-wearing salonnieres and people, like him, who spend a lot of time thinking about Miley Cyrus’s next role.

More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby
Genres: Nonfiction

Also by this author: High Fidelity

 

This is a typical Book about Books, the fourth one in the series “Stuff I’ve been reading” by Nick Hornby. I did not know that it was part of a series, otherwise I would’ve started with the first one. I have always enjoyed reading impressions about books, in general, I liked “High Fidelity“, so I knew beforehand that I’m going to enjoy this book too.

“One of the most impressive things about ‘Just Kids’ is its discipline: that’s Smith’s subject, and she sticks to it, and everything else we learn about her comes to us through the prism of that narrative.”

“And, in any case, it turns out that editing is kind of a metaphor for living. Our marriages, our careers, our domestic arrangements… so much of how we live consists of making meaning out of a bewildering jumble of images, of attempting to move as seamlessly as we can from one stage of life to the next.”

“In fact, ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’, like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s incredible ‘Random Family’, is about pretty much everything. (Random Family and Skloot’s book both took a decade to research and write, perhaps not coincidentally. I suspect that in both cases, the subject matter grew richer and richer with each year of contemplation.)”

“Both ‘Whoops!’ and ‘Nothing to Envy’ make it clear just how utterly dependent we all are on systems.”

“Per Petterson’s beautiful, truthful ‘Out Stealing Horses’ seems to me a pretty good example of the sort of thing that nonfiction can never accomplish. It’s about aging and childhood, memory and family, and it has things to say on these subjects. That Petterson can accomplish this while providing an ornate, time-shifting narrative that includes—spoiler alert and hopeless volte-face, all at the same time—dead children seems to me the reason why we should never stop reading novels, however old and wise we are.”

“Claire Tomalin is my favorite literary biographer; in the U.K., she’s everybody’s favorite literary biographer.” (n.b. to read at least Charles Dickens: A Life)

“One thing is clear: Dickens wasn’t thinking about posterity. In fact, I’m betting he would have said that he’d comprehensively blown his chance of a literary afterlife: he wrote too much, too quickly, to feed his family and his ego, and to please his public. […] Only ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Great Expectations’, and ‘Bleak House’ receive more or less unreserved praise, although the prissy, saintly women are always a problem, and he published Great Expectations with a crowd-pleasing feel-good ending.”