As so often happens when you intend to remember quotes from books by putting scraps of paper in the page concerned, you come back to the page and can’t remember which bit you thought was worth quoting. So for the time being, an end has come to Hornby quotes.
In the meantime, HitTails has once again thrown up a whole bunch of disparate keywords, including the following:

Athletes hand – and ‘itch between finger’
Swim brass crowl
Bill Roache
Coronation Street
Brent Stavig
Maggie Teyte Prize 2007
De mortuis nil nisi bene
Anna Leese
Toyota Townace

Boy, they’re a mixed bunch. It’s good to see Anna Leese makes the list again, and the Maggie Teyte prize. But how did Bill Roache get in there? Turns out I have mentioned the bloke – and even included a picture of him when he were but a lad. Though the post had more to do with US soaps than British ones.
The swim brass crowl no doubt goes back to the fact that people can’t spell ‘crawl’ and Brent Stavig may have to do with a comment I made about books beside my bed, one of which was by Arthur Stavig.
The Toyota Townace has certainly been mentioned, but de mortuis nil nisi bene? Yes, to my surprise, it turns up in a post on Sigmund Freud.
I’m satisfied now. I hate to think of people coming to my blog without good reason. The only disturbing thing is how quickly I forget what I've written about!

Hornby Himself this time

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is clearly a modern classic, and it hasn’t even been in print for five minutes. It’s a beautiful, rich, unforgettable work of high seriousness, and you don’t need to know that the book has already won the Pulitzer Prize to see that Robinson isn’t messing around. I didn’t even mind that it’s essentially a book about Christianity, narrated by a Christian; in fact, for the first time I understood the point of Christianity – or at least, I understood how it might be used to assist thought.
I had to reread passages from Gilead several times – beautiful, luminous passages about grace, and debt, and baptism – before I half-understood them, however: there are complicated and striking ideas on every single page.

This is from the August 2005 column. I can only agree with everything he says about Gilead. It’s one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. And I must buy a copy of that too, sometime!

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

I finished reading Nick Hornby’s ridiculously-titled The Complete Polysyllabic Spree last weekend, and have several pieces of paper stuck throughout where I wanted to remember things that were quotable. Actually an awful lot more of it was quotable, but I either didn’t have enough paper, or thought that my readers (all five of them) would probably think more than two or three quotes was enough from this book.

The book is about Hornby’s reading habits over two or three years – he wrote a column on the topic which was published in a magazine called The Believer. Hornby is by turns hilarious, sober, nonsensical and surreal. It’s a great book, and I’m tempted to buy a copy of my own. Or else keep the library’s one for another patch.

‘[Gabriel] Zaid’s finest moment, however, comes in his second paragraph, when he says that ‘the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.’

Hornby is quoting from Zaid’s So Many Books, which is about the ‘problem’ of far too many books existing in the world. Hornby writes about this in the Oct 2004 column.

Polysyllabic Spree and more

I’ve been reading Nick Hornby’s absurdly titled (intentionally so) The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, which someone reviewed in the ODT recently. It’s a collection of his columns for some magazine called The Believer (a rather pretentious magazine, if Hornby’s comments are anything to go by), and they are by stages hilarious, intriguing (in that you want to read everything, practically, that he’s read), detailed, annoying (there’s often too little detail, and he demands a wider reading habit than even I’ve got), and very quotable. Not that I’m going to quote anything at the moment, but I probably will.
Like me, he’s realised that a reading life doesn’t require you to read books just because people ‘who know’ say you should; nor does it require you to finish every book you start. Consequently I have never finished that dreary Booker Prize lump of lead called ‘the bone people’ (the pretentious, if I may be allowed to re-use the word, use of non-capitals marks it out as important – it isn’t). Equally I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that a book I’m supposed to be reviewing called Just Who Does He Think He Is? by George Webby, is going to go the way of unfinished books. I am sick of people writing about their lives and telling me when and how they masturbated and seeming to think this is somehow important. It isn’t. 100% of men have masturbated in their youth, either because they thought they should, because they just wanted to, because it seemed a good idea at the time, because they couldn’t help it, because if they didn’t all their friends would somehow know – or they have not masturbated, either because they were convinced they shouldn’t, or because they didn’t want to, or because it never seemed that great an idea, or because they were perfectly able to help, or because they didn’t give a toss (if you’ll excuse the pun) what their friends thought.
I couldn’t care less about Webby’s sexual life. I thought the book was about what he did in the theatre, which to me would be much more interesting. (It may eventually be, if he ever gets there.) Nor do I care that he thinks he knows more about religion than God. He doesn’t, so why doesn’t he keep his trap shut on the subject? And how is it that he gives his father a mere two pages of existence – almost as an afterthought when he realises he’s hardly mentioned the bloke (who fathered ten children in the family) – and prats on about his mother endlessly? Did his father have no life or character? He must have had something to have lived in a house with Webby and the other siblings, all of whom (except the one who died young) go almost entirely unmentioned.
Well, there we are: I’ve practically written the review already, and I haven’t even got past page 65.