Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Full Arsenal

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

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Nick Hornby is a man defined by his obsessions. In his Believe column he catalogues both his extensive monthly reading and his even more extensive book buying. His obsession with music is obvious from his essay collection Sonngbook and the novel High Fidelity, whose protagonist is forever making lists of various best songs. But perhaps his principal obsession is with Arsenal, the venerable English football club whose games have thrilled and tormented Hornby since he was 11 years old. Published in 1992 when the author […]

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading–about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning…

Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby

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This website in a book! Starting in March of 2004 (I think, I don’t feel like checking) Nick Hornby of About a Boy and High Fidelity began writing a monthly column (I wanna say 2000-3000 words per month) where he catalogs the books he buys, the books he reads, and his thoughts on both. He even does us the service of mostly skipping books he didn’t like and not naming a lot of other books. He will mention when he doesn’t finish something, but that usually comes with […]

Life, Messy and Unfiltered

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Bingo Square: The Book Was Better While I never became a huge Nick Hornby fan, I have enjoyed a few of his novels and adaptations of his novels (I quite like the ABC show About a Boy with Minnie Driver – between that show and Speechless, Minnie Driver has found her niche as overprotective sitcom mother, and I love it).  But he’s never been a go to author for me, so I tend to read his stuff after I realize another piece is being adapted. […]

Good book for the new year. Sort of.

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I have been a fan of Nick Hornby since I read “High Fidelity.” I came at it after having seen the film, and they can both really standalone as solid entertainment. I later read “About a Boy” and enjoyed that as well, so this is my third Hornby, and I liked it just as much as the first two. The subject matter could be a bit of a downer, especially for this time of year, but it really just depends on your perspective. I have […]

Up on the Roof

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It’s tough to write about suicide and not glamorize it or, alternately, vehemently condemn it. Most of the time, suicidal characters have Big Trauma in their lives, and so, to some extent, their desire to end their lives is understandable, at least from a literary point of view. Or on the other side of the coin, suicide is used as a tool to show how selfish a character is, to show the destruction left behind, and the character is vilified. But in A Long Way […]

Nothing like waiting four months to post my first review…

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I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m such a procrastinator. Anyway, I have at least a dozen reviews, so maybe by September I’ll put up another one. Me: Hey, can I borrow this? JB: Sure. Me: How was it? JB: I dunno. I never read it. This from the man who reads everything. That should have been my first warning. From Nick Hornby comes what all the fancy newspapers called “a page turner” (Washington Times) and “fearless” (San Francisco Chronicle), but what I call […]



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