Do you…
Enjoy hilarious novels? Love aimless or obsessive characters? Fancy an enlightening essay? Harbor a secret desire to be a football hooligan? Want to support educational charities?
London author Nick Hornby can help you with these dilemmas and much more!
The Novels: In his debut novel, Nick Hornby dared to explore the questions “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” High Fidelity is a story of love and music, although not necessarily in that order. Most everyone who reads this book comes away saying “Wow, I know somebody just like that guy.” When John Cusack starred in the movie adaptation, the characterization of thirty-something record store owner Rob Gordon was complete.
His second novel, About a Boy, features a hip London man with the ultimate Peter Pan complex, living off a comfortable inheritance and filling his days with television shows, shopping, and getting expensive haircuts. When Will invents a toddler so that he can meet women at a group for single parents, he finds an unexpected complication in Marcus, a twelve-year-old boy with more grown-up problems than Will himself has ever faced.
How to be Good has all of the wit, humor and penetrating observation that we now expect from Hornby, along with a female protagonist. Katie Carr is a doctor and mother who wishes her bitter and sarcastic husband would try to look on the bright side of things. She is overwhelmed though, when he decides to try to save the world through hands-on philanthropy. How does any person reconcile her desire to be good with the realities of her life?
In Hornby’s most recent novel, A Long Way Down, he chronicles a few months in the lives of four suicidal strangers who meet on top of a building on New Year’s Eve where they were each planning to jump. Rumor has it that Johnny Depp already bought the film rights!
Footballers: Speaking of Nick Hornby movies, don’t get me started on Fever Pitch. The original book is a true account of Hornby’s lifelong obsession with Arsenal and a great introduction to English club football fanaticism for the novice American reader. A 1997 British film adaptation Fever Pitch starred Colin Firth. Then, in 2004, the Farrely brothers directed the movie Fever Pitch, targeting American baseball audiences with a Boston Red Sox fan. With so much great baseball writing out there, I wish they could have trusted American consumers to just enjoy the originals.
Non-fiction for a good cause: Hornby has published two personal essay collections and edited an anthology of original stories by famous writers as fundraisers for the special school that his autistic son attends.
Songbook contains twenty-six autobiographical essays about specific songs, interweaving his own experiences, how he encountered the songs and why they found significance in his life, with cultural background on the songwriters and the pop music industry.
The Polysyllabic Spree is a hilarious and true account of one man’s struggle with the monthly tide of the books he’s bought and the books he’s been meaning to read. This publication gathers fourteen of Hornby’s columns from the Believer magazine.
Speaking with the Angel gathers star-studded first-person narratives by Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith, Helen Fielding, Colin Firth, Dave Eggers, Melissa Bank and others.
The Blog: What can I say, it's wonderful!
