Passionate reader

Nick Hornby’s chummy new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, is a volume composed over the course of a year and change for The Believer magazine. It is essentially a reading diary that rants about what Hornby was buying and reading and why. Because this is a diary, as opposed to a straight book review, Hornby can toss in everything that is sacred—but annoyingly fussy—about book reviewing and communicate directly with readers as if he were speaking to us at a holiday party about the books he recently read and loved.

As most readers probably know, Hornby is famous for his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, but he is first and foremost a fanatic, someone who thrives on obsession. His first book was a memoir about being a soccer fan; his best—by my yardstick—was his recent collection of essays on music, Songbook, which McSweeney’s published in 2003 with a nifty CD attached to the hardcover. Like most fanatics, Hornby is terrifically passionate about what he likes. But, unlike most fanatics, he isn’t going to tell you that you’re an idiot for hearing about something for the first time through him.

The Polysyllabic Spree is written in this spirit. Everything that is typically covert in reviewing books becomes overt in Hornby’s monthly diary of what he bought, shelved and read. He reveals who he knows and how that affects his reading, confesses how badly he read a book (of Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School he says, “I should have read it in one sitting”) and even admits to what he gets in the mail for free and what he actually buys, which is important to note in a format like this, because books that simply appear on his doorstep have a leg up in getting his attention. He even owns up to hating science books: “[E]very time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry.”

Because The Polysyllabic Spree originally was published in The Believer, the magazine Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits started in San Francisco as an alternative to snarky criticism, Hornby keeps the griping to a minimum. Most of his ire is directed at himself: for being such a lazy reader, for not being smart enough to “get it” (or understand the point of a book) or for flattering his intellectual ego by buying great big tomes of letters and diaries by highbrow writers he knows he will never read.

Here is a typical example of Hornby melding self-deprecation and literary criticism to create a disarmingly sincere tone: “We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and airplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes—usually late at night, in bed—he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses.”

It is through metaphors like this that Hornby snatches reading back from the dusty, obligatory lilt of criticism that presumes you have six hours a day to read and a library of knowledge behind you. You can read this little book in 90 minutes, if you’re in a hurry, or you can stretch it out over a few days—like I did—and savor it. Either way, it will give you a remarkable opportunity to spend some time in conversation with a guy who almost certainly will make you go out and buy what he reads.