Dud.

I like Nick Hornby; he's one of the very few British novelists whose work I keep up with. The concept seems ok and Hornby is a generous man, but the book just didn't work. Even more startling, you assume: must have worked better on the Web. Yet I don't think this entire series appeared online--maybe just some of the entries. I think one would have had to read them in the print editions of The Believer.

I thought he'd write at least a paragraph on each book--an off-the-cuff reaction. There's rarely even that!

Although I appreciate his honesty, I was shocked by the canonical works he hadn't and hasn't read. He has never read Robert Lowell, has no sense of Lowell's status, doesn't feel compelled to read his work after reading Hamilton's bio.

This great vista opened out of all the other post-World War II poets he hadn't read: Anne Sexton, Isabel Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and on and on. Hell, he probably hasn't read the Beats or New York or Black Mountain Poets or John Ashbery. William Carlos Williams? Ezra Pound? Brodsky? Neruda? I don't want to think about it. Well, he apparently doesn't read poetry and never has. Awesome, and not in a good way.

But it gets worse: Until this series, he'd never read Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey. (He had read Catcher in the Rye, I think.) Hornby's writing style in his fiction owes a lot to Salinger so you're waiting for some little apercu about one of these stories or one of these books. Nada!

Also shocking how little in the way of translated literature he read. There were only two or three and they were classics, like Candide and Chekov's short stories, that he should have read decades ago. I read Chekov's short stories in high school, a mediocre one, and again in college.

I know that a big difference between American, Filipino and British readers is that the former two tend to read a lot more Latin American lit. And Americans often read it in Spanish. But he's a fiction writer ... he seems to be cut off from one of the most vital currents in literature today. And it's not like he's up on Indians writing in English either.

I'm glad that I borrowed it from the library's paperback shelf. I'd be annoyed if I had lugged home a hardback. ( )

Required reading for LibraryThing members. I know Nick is somewhere here on the site when Arsenal is not playing at the Emirates.

A collection of Hornby's Believer columns. Hysterical, witty and fun. ( )

Hornby was the only thing I really liked about The Believer.

Hornby was the only thing I really liked about The Believer.