In the past five years or so I’d come to realise that I had more in common with my mother-in-law’s reading tastes than those of my wife. She tends to the more historic/biographic and I toward small-town life/whimsy and so we cross paths around the Peter Carey and Ian McEwan mark. I thought I’d broken the link recently after a slightly desperate suggestion of David Mitchell, who is fairly experimental but rewarding – she gave up very early on. Hmmm.
So, when I received Nick Hornby’s Polysyllabic Spree from her for Christmas, I decided I would give it a fair go, and I only just finished it this morning on the 112 tram, somewhere around the Scotchmer Street mark, after which I was forced to resort to some cruddy crossword-free magazines still in my bag, to avoid having to stare at an annoying but attractive lady sitting opposite me. She was a nightmare, talking about her inadequate boyfriend at full voice on a mobile phone to a girlfriend at 8am who probably didn’t care. But I digress.
The book is a series of extracts from his monthly column in the U.K where he outlines which books he bought this month, and which he read (usually completely different) and what his thoughts were about all and sundry. Browsing through the lists at the top of each chapter, it was nice to see I knew something about many of them. So, I pretty much read a few chapters at a time and put it down again. For months. Perfect. Little self contained passages. No pressure. Start again each time.
He’s a funny writer and I really enjoyed his book, set over a 3 year period, though his tastes seem too willfully divergent to be natural. He admitted that he wasn’t able to seriously trash anything (darn it – I was waiting for a demolition of The Da Vinci Code) and those he hated were mostly listed as “Anonymous Novel – abandoned”. By far the most annoying part of the book is where he inserts 4-5 pages from his favourite books, which are usually less interesting than his own work. Mostly he loves Dickens, a surprising amount of modern popular stuff (Anne Tyler etc..good on him!) and some scholarly biographic books of letters which are partly there to give him credibility. He even reads an atrocious biography from Motley Crue’s drummer, from which he prints a horrific line at a font size of 1, so you need a magnifying glass to read it. For those who wish to know (I have great eyes), it involves said individual immersing his genitals in a hot piece of take away food (American Pie style) to remove other telltale groupie scents prior to reuniting with wife. And on that stunning note I finish. 4 out of 5 stars.