Nick Hornby – The Polysyllabic Spree

The marvellous Melody alerted me to The Polysyllabic Spree and I do not need telling twice to pick up a Nick Hornby.

Though Hornby is extremely popular, I think there is a bit of snobbery towards him and his style. He just writes like people speak. Must be easy, right? Well, after six years as a speechwriter, I can tell you that almost nobody writes as people speak. That is the reason why ninety-nine per cent of the speeches you will ever hear will horrify you with their boringness. (I would write more about this but there are such things as trade secrets and the need to earn a living).

I don’t know whether Hornby will thank me for saying this, or consider it praise, but he would be the world’s best book blogger. He reads things you’ve never heard of and makes you want to rush out and get them, he obsesses over the money he wastes on books, and when he isn’t reading, he’s coming up with random theories about reading. For example, he wonders whether there is/should be a rule of pacing when it comes to choosing your next book. Reading a literary biography after finishing a graphic novel was like ‘playing John Lee Hooker after the Chemical Brothers…John Lee Hooker is the greater artist, but he’s in no hurry, is he?’ He also says ‘if we played cultural fantasy boxing league, and made books go fifteen rounds against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time… “The Magic Flute” vs. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six.” This is a game I would like to play. For hours.

At one point, he says that he has the wrong sort of friends, because none of them would ever recommend a thriller to him and I was all ‘NICK I WILL BE YOUR FRIEND! Let’s hang out.’ I even got ready to come up with a list of thrillers, just in case. This would have been tricky to say the least, because I don’t read thrillers either.

But then, horror of horrors, he would come to my blog and see that in my top ten book to film adaptations I forgot High Fidelity. This is utterly unforgivable, because it’s not just one of my favourite adaptations, it’s one of my favourite books, and one of my favourite films in it’s own right. So I forgot him three times over. True friends do not do that. They promote each others’ work at every occasion, even when this is an unequal friendship, where one of us is a highly successful author/critic with many bestsellers and fantastic film adaptations to our names and the other is a random internet blatherer.

So you should read this book and then read High Fidelity and then watch the film. (Also, the original Fever Pitch is infinitely better than the baseball remake, and stars Lord Colin of the Firth).

The only thing I disliked about this book is that it ended very abruptly, with no explanation. I thought up many conspiracy theories about why this might be and why Hornby had been fired and how I could start up a campaign to get him reinstated as part of our new friendship.

But it turns out that all the other columns are available on the website. Happy days.