Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby

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СКАЧАТЬ Everybody’s favorite literary biographer; the posher papers; old tosh; Marshalsea debtors’ prison; the blacking factory

      January 2012

       A lemon-firing bazooka; unbearable quirk; WWOOFers; instances of transgressive and sinister sexual chaos

      March / April 2012

       A second chance for Sade; plastic carrier bag as madeleine substitute; taunting the fact-checkers; friendship with Woody Allen

      May 2012

      The definition of creative professional; an epiphanic right-hemisphere production; a theory regarding nonfiction books

      June 2012

       Passing the point of concern; penal reform; the notion of the second longhand draft; a month of fictional bravery

      July / August 2012

       The future for writers; a frustrating imagined dialogue; Fitzgerald’s rate; a gum-snap young-adult voice

      September 2012

       A personal library; the no-snark rule; a “meh” face; the end of the London Olympics; vital supplies

      March / April 2013

       Assorted woo-hoos; the fashionable Rod Stewart; a very common human propensity; a Christlike alter ego

      May 2013

       Casting notes; the transcendence of one’s subject; disappointment regarding orgies and uzis; a very long series of questions

      June 2013

      Asshole paranoia; quantifying the delusions of Kanye West; “Cheat Sheet” and PopEater; uses for a Wonder Bread bag

       Introduction: A Note from Jess Walter

      The crazy lady in 13B leaned over and asked what I was reading. Hoping to avoid one of those torturous airplane conversations, I simply held up the cover of a newish story collection.

      “No. I didn’t ask what you’re reading,” the woman said. “Why?”

      Why? And in a moment of sheer stupefaction I will regret the rest of my life, I made the tragic mistake of looking up from my book.

      Over the next two hours, I found out she didn’t read much herself, didn’t entirely “get books,” and wouldn’t believe what she read anyway since so much of it came from “media scumbags” who didn’t properly “support the troops” and were tools for “those government scumbags” who kept raising her taxes and trying to take away the assault rifles she and her husband needed to protect themselves from “scumbag criminals like that O. J. Simpson.”

      Wait. She needed an assault rifle to protect herself from O. J. Simpson?

      “That son of a bitch,” she informed me, “got away with murder.”

      I wanted to point out that using a phrase like “got away with murder” to describe someone who actually got away with murder is a little bit nuts, like owning a china shop, having a bull run through it, and then describing the experience as like… well, you know.

      Instead, I sat there pondering her question.

      Why do I read?

      Looking back, I wish I’d had this “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” omnibus with me.

      It’s a very heavy book and I could’ve hit her with it.

      Or I could’ve turned to just about any page.

      In the decade that he’s been writing this column for the Believer (with the occasional month off to watch Friday Night Lights or the World Cup—two of the three acceptable excuses for not reading, the other being “captured by pirates”) Nick Hornby has created the most intelligent, engaging case for reading you’re ever likely to encounter.

      Funny without being snarky, generous without sacrificing critical heft, Hornby-on-books is, forgive my English, bloody brilliant. “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” is unfailingly smart but without any of the obnoxious showy bits—lit theory, obscure Russian surnames, untranslated French (agreeably psycho-surrealist, the book nonetheless reflects Spankmeoff’s fromage de l’extrémité arrière)—that might serve to remind a poor reader that while he attended Eastern Washington University on a partial welding scholarship, the author happens to be a Cambridge man.

      Nick, who actually happens to be a Cambridge man, has done much more than display his casual genius for the last ten years, however. He’s crafted a wise, thoughtful, and wry narrative out of a reading life—“a paper trail of theme and meaning,” just as he promised in that very first column (September 2003).

      Over those ten years, children are born and grow into readers; trips to America are endured; friends publish books that have to be considered; a beloved partner is “downgraded” to wife. Another beloved, the Arsenal football club, rises and falls like its own season, and in a quietly gut-wrenching moment, sells off its star Thierry Henry—“the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children,” yet somehow manages to win the Premier League (before another inevitable fall).

      DiMaggio-like streaks of prodigious reading (eleven books in one month!) are followed by whiffs, by admissions of guilt, television, and the too-recognizable failure of concentration that afflicts our generation, a plague of distraction.

       I was just itchy and scratchy and probably crusty, too, and I began to wonder whether I had simply lost the habit—the skill, even—of reading.

      Amid this ongoing consideration of how and why and what we read are real lessons for writers, vital challenges to old tropes and clichés: “I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time.” Or this about our blind worship of spare prose:

       And there’s some stuff about the winnowing process I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words?… I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?

      Reading the whole enterprise again, I found it hilarious, surprising, incisive, and—for a certain kind of book lover like you and me and not the lady in 13B—thrilling.

      A few confessions:

      I did indeed send Nick one of my books with the suggestion that he start a third column: “Books Foisted Upon Me.”

      Also, I’m something of a Hornby completist. Novels, essays, criticism—I would read the man on anything. I only thank god his literary north pulls him toward music and books and sport, and that he’s not into ceramics or polo or necrophilia (anymore). In fact, now that I have the Believer’s ear, may I suggest publishing Nick Hornby’s Collected Parentheticals:

       (Twice this week I have СКАЧАТЬ