Nick Hornby is a Kindred Spirit

I hope you find time this long Thanksgiving weekend to read some books. Reading, as far as I’m concerned, is like breathing. You just do it.
I’ve known many people who don’t read, but two who bragged about not reading were school teachers. These teachers were considered to be excellent, or excellent by the current definition of excellence in education, but I’m not going to get on that soap box now; I'll save it for another post.
I know these two didn’t read because they were laughing about not ever having read a book cover to cover. I was there. And lest you assume these teachers were in Backward, Alabama, they teach in a huge system which is supposedly one of the best in the country. When I said, “I read at least fifty books this summer,” they looked at me with thinly disguised contempt.
Those two will never read Nick Hornby, and it’s a shame. If your response is “Who?” it’s because he is not as appreciated over here as he is in England. Remember the movie, with About a Boy, with Hugh Grant? Hornby wrote the book upon which the movie was based (the book was better.) Actually, he’s written several books. I have yet to read them all, but I’m doing my best.
On my nightstand right now are Not a Star (one of the funniest books I have ever read), Slam, his young adult novel, and two collections of essays he wrote for a magazine called The Believer, a magazine for book addicts (me).
I’m glad his columns were collected, since he doesn’t write them any more. In each essay he began by listing the books he had bought and the books he had read. The column is his commentary on these books. His nonfiction is warm and funny, just like his fiction.
That’s it for the essay collection. I’ve already told you Not a Star was hilarious. Slam is ostensibly for young adults, but adults will enjoy it too. I certainly did. The narrator, Sam, is a teenage boy who learns that five minutes of stupid can knock a lifetime of common sense flat. Sam gets his girlfriend pregnant; Hornby tells Sam’s story as a cautionary tale which is never preachy, but sympathetic and darkly humorous. I wish all teenage boys would read this book, but I am pessimistic. In my experience teen age boys, if they read at all, choose literature (I use the term loosely) with more pictures than words—car magazines, graphic novels, and the like. (Even I, naive as I am, know they don’t read the girlie magazines.)
Of Hornby’s other books, I recommend A Long Way Down and How to be Good. I’ve read all the Hornby on my nightstand. It’s time to go back to Southern Storm
by Noah Andre Trudeau, about Sherman’s march to Atlanta, and the latest Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna.
Read, relax, eat turkey, and be well.
(If anyone of you know how to put italics in a post, please tell me. Until then, consider all the above titles italicized.)