The Polysyllabic Spree

There's not much to say with what's happening just lately.  Britain is unusually cold and has been blanketed in snow and ice almost constantly since December -- thawing only to deny a white Christmas before coming back.  There was a day last week where it reached -20C in some parts of the country.  Sure, it's winter, but it's not normally this cold, or for so long.  That's about as interesting is that info goes.

Instead, I'm going to write about someone else.

Nick Hornby is the author of one of my favourite books -- High Fidelity -- a novel about music and love and growing up or growing old and how they are sometimes inseperable.  I don't know if it ever won any awards, and I doubt it was ever critically acclaimed or even makes anyone's "must read" lists, but I've ranked it in my top 5 for a long time.  I also greatly enjoyed About A Boy, although the latter inspired a much worse movie adaptation.

Unfortunately, Hornby's later novels have left me cold.  How To Be Good I am fairly sure did win awards, but it did absolutely nothing for me.  Long Way Down irritated me more than anything else.  But that's just me.  I'm not saying Hornby is a bad writer, or that they were bad books, just that they did nothing for me personally.

I might be more inclined towards harsh judgements of his work if I was any kind of a writer myself, but most importantly if his non-fiction wasn't so bloody good.

I don't recall where I heard about 31 Songs, where Hornby predictably enough writes about 31 different songs -- without ever talking about his memories associated with the songs.  That, to me, was a stroke of genius -- just writing about the music and the musicians and the history, and in a way that was so engaging and accessible that I immediately wanted to track down every song mentioned and listen to them for myself and see if I could experience the same magic.

More recently I picked up a copy of The Polysyllabic Spree, in which Hornby can't resist making another music reference.  The book is a complete collection of the columns he wrote for literary magazine Believer, which in the same simple concept as 31 Songs, he simply writes about what books he has bought and read each month.  And just the same, he writes about each book with humour and wit, managing to make each one -- books I've never heard of, and authors I wouldn't have considered -- seem indispensible.  Like with 31 Songs where I had to download and play these songs, Spree makes me want to dig out a notebook and record each title, before ordering them from my local library.

You might hate Hornby's fiction, or you might hate fiction entirely -- I know people who look down their noses at the idea of reading something "made up" -- but since these aren't fiction, unless you have an overwhelming grudge against the man's style as a whole, you can't go too far wrong with them.

And in closing, I had my meeting at work I mentioned in my last post, and, yeah, I told them pretty much what was suggested in comments.  I didn't jump up and down for joy about the job, I even admitted to not "enjoying" sales, but I kept mostly quiet -- because there wasn't much to say.