Stuff I've Been Reading
On Nick Hornby and the joy of reuniting with a favourite writer.
Blame Nick Hornby.
He is responsible for you reading this. Actually, he is responsible for me feeling the need to write this.
“Who is Nick Hornby?” you ask. The reason I’m writing this, I’ve just told you. If you only listened for once.
Fine, let’s offer a bit of background, but don’t get too used to me explaining what should be common knowledge. It disrupts the flow of writing and we artists don’t do well with interruptions.
Right, Nick Hornby.
According to Wikipedia he is an English writer and lyricist, born in 1957.
According to me, he is the embodiment of British self-deprecating humour and acute social observations mixed with kindness, sharp irony and great humanity. Also a ferocious reader, music lover, Arsenal supporter, Dickens admirer, and generous soul and founder of Ministry of Stories.
Oh, and he lives in North London. Islington to be precise. That alone is a reason to admire someone. Right side of the river, right side of town and all that that those of us living in London silently judge people on before even bothering learning their names. What’s the point if they don’t even live in the right area anyway?
Several of his books have been made into films, and the following titles may ring a bell as they have all made it to the screen, big or small:
Fever Pitch - all football fans rave about it; you’ll have to trust them because I’d be damned if I read a book about sports. Colin Firth played in the adaptation.
High Fidelity - John Cusack was in it; I’m still personally offended about this being set in the US, but anyway (It’s a London novel!)
About a Boy - probably his best novel, screen adaptation, one of the best British films of the early 2000s and one of the finests Hugh Grant’s performances, so there you go. You may still not like the book or film, or both. Or worse, you may not even know they existed until now. I pity you.
A Long Way Down - savagely funny as a novel, as in crying with laughter but a bit more contained on the screen version. Still Pierce Brosnan is in it and he kills his role.
Juliet, Naked - have read the book and I remember it was endearing and not set in London for a change. The film featured Ethan Hawke, Rose Byrne and Chris O’Dowd.
Funny Girl - Recently read and even more recently adapted in 2023 as Funny Woman for Sky with Gemma Arterton as the lead - perfect choice and hope I can find a way to watch it soon.
He is also a scriptwriter and has unsurprisingly helped with the adaptations of some of the above-mentioned books. And far from being a self-centered prick, Hornby has also adapted for the screen Brooklyn (featuring Saoirse Ronan) by Colm Tóibín and written the original movie script for the film An Education (with Carey Mulligan). Both received Academy Awards nominations for Best Screenplay adaptations, which as we all know is the ultimate sign of approval if we had to decide whether he is any good at it.
I haven’t yet had the opportunity to watch either film but that doesn’t prevent me from putting Mr. Hornby on a pedestal and appointing him as my personal guru when I feel lost about life. On second thoughts, that may be a bit excessive for someone I don’t know and who is oblivious to my existence. Let me rephrase it and say that despite this one-sided ignorance of my existence, he has been a sort of saviour in moments of need over the years.
How? Through his writing obviously. Note that I am not limiting that to his books, but through his actual writing books and writing about books. And his matter-of-factly, let’s-roll-with-it, who-cares-anyway attitude.
I had no idea who Nick Hornby was until 2007 when About a Boy landed in my hands. Not by chance, but by force. In fact, it was a book I had to read for a course I was taking and this was a compulsory read.
Any reader I’ve ever met suffers from what I call Deflated Interest Syndrome. In other words, being told what to read automatically removes the desire to read it. With such a positive attitude, I embarked on this novel by an author I had never heard of before and I loved it from page one. Who was this man? Why haven’t I ever read anything by him before that day? What else had he written? Where could I get more of his books?
His characters felt alive, relatable, funny, absurd, endearing. I wanted to meet them all, be friends with them, tell them they were wrong/right/worrying about nothing/not paying attention to something that was important. And the story was genuinely funny and witty and heartbreaking at the right times and in the right way. I had never lived in London and, if I remember correctly, I believe I hadn’t yet visited yet either, but something in Hornby’s description of the life of these North Londoners made me warm up to the place instantly.
Islington was as remote a place as Timbuktu for all I knew about either of them, but the sense of place that the novel evoked was strong. I could see myself being inside the houses these people lived in or walking along streets I had never crossed or had the faintest idea of what they looked like. This book made everything come to life. These people were relatable. They were imperfect, flawed, messy, and full of humanity. Surely these people couldn’t have been made up, they had to exist.
My second encounter with Hornby took place a year and a half later in Italy, when I was studying in Bologna. The city is home to a campus of John Hopkins University, but even if it weren’t it receives its fair share of international students in its own right, attracted by the reputation of the Università di Bologna, the oldest in Europe.
Catering to the inquisitive minds of international students, there was a bookshop hidden on a backstreet near the centre which offered a wide range of foreign language books at reasonable prices. This was a time where Amazon was mostly the place for university students to buy second-hand textbooks. For literature in foreign languages, this bookshop was the place to go in Bologna as it had a decent stock of titles. And fate put Hornby in my path again.
High Fidelity struck a chord. I read it at that particular time when one is a reluctant adult and therefore relatively oblivious to the workings of the real world, a bit like his protagonist.
I was 26 at the time, studying a masters’ in International Relations as I thought that’d be my entry into the work of international organisations, securing what had been a long-time ambition: to live and work abroad.
I had also recently ended a long and healthy relationship because I felt that by being with that person he would eventually sacrifice his life for following me and my dream to live abroad and he would end up blaming me for it. Behind all my determination for defining my future and the life I had always imagined for myself, I was actually scared of feeling responsible for someone else’s happiness, for dragging him to a life he hadn’t chosen and that I didn’t know how it would turn out as I myself wasn’t sure where I was headed. Abroad was quite an abstract place and I wasn’t sure it could fit more than one person.
And that feeling of being lost when you thought you had a plan, and that longing for someone who wasn’t there any more, was perfectly captured in High Fidelity and the romantic misfortunes of Rob Fleming, a 36 year-old English man who is an immature and obsessive music lover who owns a record-shop in London as well as an unreliable narrator of his own downfall. Apart from being utterly clueless at doing life, and using music as a coping mechanism, Rob and I had little in common in terms of life experience and future prospects. Rob had given up while the air that I breathed smelled of endless possibility and excitement about what the future might hold.
And yet I could relate so much to Rob at the time -in particular the utter mess his life was after his breakup and ensuing questionable hookups- that for several years I would reread this novel over Christmas as a way to check on how I was doing in life and whether I was where I wanted to be. A ritual of sorts to prevent me from turning into Rob when I would eventually reach his age.
After five years into this tradition, however, I decided to stop. As I was getting older the novel started to read like an account of my life instead of Rob’s. It was a reminder of the things I was not achieving, of how stuck I was, of all my shortcomings. Where I had first found comfort, there was now a cloud of failure looming over the pages and the realisation that somewhere along the journey I had turned into a fictional 36 year-old man from North London who used music to cope with his problems. Terrifying but accurate.
The funny thing is that at the beginning I figured that with every passing year I would eventually lose interest in High Fidelity as I would be in a completely different place to its protagonist. My more grounded, self-aware, compassionate, kind, shelfless, mature self would find it hard to relate to this hapless man that was getting nowhere -with good reason, he’s a fictional character- while I was making progress year after year, always evolving into a better version of myself. A real adult at last.
That’s why I had been hooked on High Fidelity in first instance. I was nothing like the protagonist - I couldn’t be anything like him in a million years even if I tried. And that was reassuring. Rob is oblivious to his own flaws, immature, trapped in a cycle where he repeats the same mistakes over and over. I could observe his life falling apart with detachment and the occasional chuckle because it was relatable to my situation at the time but not to who I was. Or so I thought, for I had slowly become an unreliable narrator of my own life. I could recognise the signs because I had seen them crystal clear through Rob with each reread of High Fidelity.
The only problem was that at 36, when I eventually got there, I had actually turned into a real version of Rob and my life was falling apart just like his. The only difference being that in my case it wasn’t fiction.
After putting aside High Fidelity, mostly to avoid dealing with changes I needed to make but I wasn’t ready to, I expanded my horizons and explored the rest of Hornby’s production. A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, Juliet, Naked. I couldn’t get enough of his fiction.
And then The Complete Polysyllabic Spree entered my life.
Nick Hornby started collaborating with The Believer magazine in 2003, the year the San Francisco based-literary publication launched. In a monthly essay-like piece he talked about the books he had bought and read in the previous month. Films, music and sports (mainly football) made guest star appearances as well. The Polysyllabic Spree was the first collection that gathered his articles from 2003 - 2006 and it was a really refreshing and inspiring read at the time, circa 2015.
These essays chronicle Hornby’s reading, which is free-range in the best possible way. Any book, old or new, fiction or non-fiction, could end up among these pages. As a reader I love reading about books and especially about what authors I like read. It is no surprise then that this slim volume ticked so many boxes for me. Consequently, I devoured it in a few days. Not only because of the subject but also because the writing was fluid, humorous -even when the book in question was dark and sombre- and Hornby’s well-balance and sparingly poignancy always hit where you least expected it.
At the beginning of 2015, months before discovering the Polysyllabic spree, I had started writing about the books I was buying and reading every month in a black notebook that I still have. I loved the idea of keeping track of my book purchases and literary musings, even if only to be reminded of what I felt after reading a certain book or how I came to it. I suspect that was probably another reason why I have always thought Nick Hornby and I could get on as friends. After all, we were talking about the same things, weren’t we?
And what’s more, reading the Polysyllabic Spree inspired me to read several books Hornby talked about in it and that I would have probably never discovered had it not been for him. Hornby’s reviews reflect the way life and reading interrelate, and that is what makes the books he discusses interesting, whether it is an account on Serbia’s underground rock scene in This is Serbia Calling by Matthew Collin or the downfall of a high school teacher that starts a relationship with a student in Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller.
When I crossed paths with The Polysyllabic Spree in 2015 the craze for social media and its pervasiveness was still a tiny light in the horizon. You really had to squint your eyes to see it. Discovering new, exciting books and writers happened mostly via analogical means, whether it was by the old good visit to the bookshop, a chat with someone that led to a book recommendation on the topic, or a friend causally sending a text about something they had read that you could like.
That was before. With thousands of new books reaching the shelves every month in 2023 only few would be read by a significant number of readers to guarantee its author a second book. Social media can have a tremendous impact on what gets read and by extension which authors get published. With the rise of BookTok (the book community in TikTok) and the news that it has contributed to increase book sales dramatically in the UK, the question is how will the publishing industry be affected in the future by social media?
Back in the pandemic years, during the first lockdown I created an account on Instagram to talk about books. I didn’t know what I expected out of it beyond inspiration to reignite my passion for reading.
As it is always the case when being new in an unknown place, it takes a while to navigate your way around and find your people, which eventually happened after over a year. That little community has been a virtual oasis where my mind has been nourished and has been responsible for me wanting to read almost everything they talked about because they are a source of discovery and stimulation. And yet, most of them have a very discrete following, which I can’t understand as they are the social media Hornbys I was grateful for.
One thing was clear from the beginning: most of the content that appeared in my Instagram feed focused on latest releases and I had the impression that the variety and inspiration that I was expecting to find was only a mirage. I believe I was quite unimpressed because I’m not the target demographic for most of the books people were sharing so I found them -and the reviews- quite shallow.
And this is why more books like The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, and more reviewers like Hornby, should be published in print regularly: as a service to anyone who would much rather avoid a slow intellectual death in the empty lands of sameness and immediacy that the literary steppe that social media is.
Hornby discusses books without any agenda about what’s popular or I dare say even relevant for his potential audience. He puts down on paper his thoughts on whatever he happens to be reading and that’s precisely why I love these reviews. Above all, his pieces are written with his trademark humour and brilliant unpretentiousness. If his articles were not contained within a literary magazine that has offered Hornby a platform and a loyal audience, it would be hard to come across these recommendations on social media, where the ultimate purpose of content creation is to push what’s popular to increase the chances of monetisation. Which I’m afraid may not happen easily if one picks up for discussion Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden (one of the many books Hornby has written about) instead of, say, Coleen Hoover.
And yet we deserve the longevity of content that transcends what is popular on a given period of time -which seems to be shorter and shorter as the moment you post about the latest release there’s another one claiming your attention- and which is only granted by physical books, where writers can share what they are reading over a period of time and can talk at length about what those books inspire in them, how they came to find them, what background story they are connected with, what other books they were compelled to read as a result. But with the exception of literary magazines -and luckily for me and for all of you Nick Hornby is on fire rolling out articles for The Believer- there are not many spaces where one can find accounts of what writers are reading on a regular basis.
You could argue that Substack has many great writers now on the platform sharing great content, which is very refreshing, but nothing compares to leafing through the pages of a physical book where a favourite writer discusses at length any books they want just because. This should be a must for any respectable author, the literary equivalent to a Greatest Hits album for musicians, only with writers publishing every 10 or so years a compilation of the best books they’ve read over that period of time.
Books are magnets and they are the perfect excuse for telling stories: about how we find them and what has led us to them, about what was happening in our life at the time we read them, about what they meant for us, and more importantly about what we want others to see in them when we share them. Perhaps a glimpse of us.
When in January 2023 I found a copy of Stuff I’ve Been Reading, the second instalment of the collected essays by Hornby for The Believer, covering the period between August 2006 and December 2011, I bought it on the spot. I had been thinking for a while about the Polysyllabic Spree and how it would be unthinkable for anyone now to use social media to talk about books in the way Hornby does for The Believer.
While reading Hornby and thinking about all the above I had an epiphany. If I didn’t like how social media pushed book recommendations, I could create something myself. Hadn’t I after all already started a notebook many years ago writing about the books I bought and the books I read without any care for who else would read it or whether it was of interest to anyone other than myself? Didn’t that give me a lot of satisfaction per se? Yes and oh yes. But this time I also wanted to share it with others.
As I said before my presence in Instagram was originally due to my interest in books. Once I became more comfortable expressing myself online, I felt frustrated by the restrictions imposed by the platform. I wanted to write more and at length, but a medium that focuses on visual images has its limits. Not to mention the tyranny of the algorithm. Besides, a platform that works by pushing users to engage constantly with new content to reward them for spending more time on the platform (back to the monetisation) is the opposite of what I had in mind to share my writing.
I thrive on taking time, elaborating on a concept, exhausting the possibilities of what I want to say and presenting it from all the angles the question should be considered without being restricted by space or pushed to follow a regular timeline. Creativity doesn’t work on a schedule, nor grows within confined spaces.
This serendipitous reunion with Nick Hornby after so many years is what inspired me to finally let go of expectations and simply write about whatever topic takes my fancy because I enjoy it and I have something to say about it. The time was right as I had been maturing the idea of creating a newsletter for a while, but I was hesitant to do so for fear of not having anything to say. Or not past a certain point. There is an inherent panic, in all creative activities, about ideas drying up, about not coming up with anything else ever again, about the brain not being able to keep up.
Most importantly, coming back to reading Hornby’s thoughts on writing, literature, and books has reminded me of three things:
The importance of never taking anything you do too seriously.
The pleasure of doing what you enjoy for the sake of it.
The value of generosity and sharing with others freely because chances are someone, somewhere, may find in your words what they were looking for in order to start their own revolution.
And for good measure, after finishing Stuff I’ve Been Reading and feeling such a surge of inspiration, I got a second-hand copy of High Fidelity as I felt we parted on bad terms the last time. I reread it for the fifth, maybe sixth time, over the summer during a flight back home. As soon as I turned the first page I reconnected with that younger version of myself who fell in love with this book and I felt reassured. In the end, despite all the ups and downs, things have worked out just fine. I am finally on the path of becoming who I thought I would be. And although there are times when I still feel lost and disappointed and have no idea of what I’m doing, I no longer lie to myself about it because I know I have the power to write my own story, not only reread it.
Blame Nick Hornby for that too.
Abroad is an independent publication about identity and belonging, living in between cultures and languages, the love of books, music, films, creativity and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.