Introduction: A Note from Jess Walter

The crazy lady in 13B leaned over and asked what I was reading. Hoping to avoid one of those torturous airplane conversations, I simply held up the cover of a newish story collection.

“No. I didn’t ask what you’re reading,” the woman said. “Why?”

Why? And in a moment of sheer stupefaction I will regret the rest of my life, I made the tragic mistake of looking up from my book.

Over the next two hours, I found out she didn’t read much herself, didn’t entirely “get books,” and wouldn’t believe what she read anyway since so much of it came from “media scumbags” who didn’t properly “support the troops” and were tools for “those government scumbags” who kept raising her taxes and trying to take away the assault rifles she and her husband needed to protect themselves from “scumbag criminals like that O. J. Simpson.”

Wait. She needed an assault rifle to protect herself from O. J. Simpson?

“That son of a bitch,” she informed me, “got away with murder.”

I wanted to point out that using a phrase like “got away with murder” to describe someone who actually got away with murder is a little bit nuts, like owning a china shop, having a bull run through it, and then describing the experience as like… well, you know.

Instead, I sat there pondering her question.

Why do I read?

Looking back, I wish I’d had this “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” omnibus with me.

It’s a very heavy book and I could’ve hit her with it.

Or I could’ve turned to just about any page.

In the decade that he’s been writing this column for the Believer (with the occasional month off to watch Friday Night Lights or the World Cup—two of the three acceptable excuses for not reading, the other being “captured by pirates”) Nick Hornby has created the most intelligent, engaging case for reading you’re ever likely to encounter.

Funny without being snarky, generous without sacrificing critical heft, Hornby-on-books is, forgive my English, bloody brilliant. “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” is unfailingly smart but without any of the obnoxious showy bits—lit theory, obscure Russian surnames, untranslated French (agreeably psycho-surrealist, the book nonetheless reflects Spankmeoff’s fromage de l’extrémité arrière)—that might serve to remind a poor reader that while he attended Eastern Washington University on a partial welding scholarship, the author happens to be a Cambridge man.

Nick, who actually happens to be a Cambridge man, has done much more than display his casual genius for the last ten years, however. He’s crafted a wise, thoughtful, and wry narrative out of a reading life—“a paper trail of theme and meaning,” just as he promised in that very first column (September 2003).

Over those ten years, children are born and grow into readers; trips to America are endured; friends publish books that have to be considered; a beloved partner is “downgraded” to wife. Another beloved, the Arsenal football club, rises and falls like its own season, and in a quietly gut-wrenching moment, sells off its star Thierry Henry—“the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children,” yet somehow manages to win the Premier League (before another inevitable fall).

DiMaggio-like streaks of prodigious reading (eleven books in one month!) are followed by whiffs, by admissions of guilt, television, and the too-recognizable failure of concentration that afflicts our generation, a plague of distraction.

            I was just itchy and scratchy and probably crusty, too, and I began to wonder whether I had simply lost the habit—the skill, even—of reading.

Amid this ongoing consideration of how and why and what we read are real lessons for writers, vital challenges to old tropes and clichés: “I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time.” Or this about our blind worship of spare prose:

            And there’s some stuff about the winnowing process I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words?… I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that?

Reading the whole enterprise again, I found it hilarious, surprising, incisive, and—for a certain kind of book lover like you and me and not the lady in 13B—thrilling.

A few confessions:

I did indeed send Nick one of my books with the suggestion that he start a third column: “Books Foisted Upon Me.”

Also, I’m something of a Hornby completist. Novels, essays, criticism—I would read the man on anything. I only thank god his literary north pulls him toward music and books and sport, and that he’s not into ceramics or polo or necrophilia (anymore). In fact, now that I have the Believer’s ear, may I suggest publishing Nick Hornby’s Collected Parentheticals:

            (Twice this week I have been sent manuscripts of books that remind their editors, according to their covering letters, of my writing. Like a lot of writers, I can’t really stand my own writing, in the same way that I don’t really like my own cooking. And, just as when I go out to eat, I tend not to order my signature dish—an overcooked and overspiced meat-stewy thing containing something inappropriate, like tinned peaches, and a side order of undercooked and flavorless vegetables—I really don’t want to read anything that I could have come up with at my own computer. What I produce on my computer invariably turns out to be an equivalent of the undercooked overcooked stewy thing, no matter how hard I try to follow the recipe, and you really don’t want to eat too much of that. I’d love to be sent a book with an accompanying letter that said, “This is nothing like your work. But as a man of taste and discernment, we think you’ll love it anyway.”)

But while I am an unapologetic Hornby fan, what I am not is a member of the Polysyllabic Spree (my application was rejected because of a perceived susceptibility to cult deprogramming), that robed band of somewhere between six and sixty lit lovers and ritual spankers who first assigned Nick this project.

That puts me in a good spot to evaluate the success of the most controversial aspect of this experiment, the Believer’s insistence on “acid-free” criticism, which, while clearly a challenge for Hornby, contributed to a few small but revolutionary ideas that book reviewers and critics had either forgotten or never knew:

1)  That it’s OK to give up on a book. So, alongside works that brace and embolden, that thrill and surprise, are books “abandoned” and “unfinished”—unnamed big books of this season, or that classic which might simply not be worth the effort.

            Last month, I may inadvertently have given the impression that No Name by Wilkie Collins was a lost Victorian classic (the misunderstanding may have arisen because of my loose use of the phrase “lost Victorian classic”)… We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and aeroplanes and by hotel swimming pools.

2)  That sometimes the fault for a bad read lies not with the book and its author but with the reader. That we are never the same reader twice—sometimes we want the collected letters of some literary giant, sure, but sometimes we want “thrillers that make us walk into lampposts.” This is an especially important idea now, during this tyranny of the customer review, when a book can be dismissed with inanities like “It didn’t hold my interest,” and “It just wasn’t my cup of tea,” and “I didn’t root for the characters.” Well, gentle reader: did you ever think maybe the problem is you?

            We are never allowed to forget some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.

3)  That the books we buy are almost as important as those we read. From the beginning there were always two columns, Books Bought and Books Read. By my crude math, Nick spent somewhere around ten or fifteen grand on books he hasn’t even read. Besides showing that he did his part to support publishing during a tough economic period, this suggests something important about reading. Looking around my own obsessively crowded shelves, I see there are two categories of books I tend to keep: those I love and those I hope one day to read. If the books we read reflect the person we are, the books we hope to read might just be who we aspire to be. There is something profound in that.

            All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal… With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

In the end, that’s it, of course, books as “the fullest expression of self.” That is what our books say about us, about you and me and Nick Hornby and not the lady in 13B. We are our books, the ones we struggle with, the ones we put down and the ones we can’t, the ones we still hope to read, and, of course, the ones that we love. That, more than anything: the ones we love.

As that other great British-born writer, Zadie Smith, said of Nick Hornby in Time magazine a few years ago: “He believes that beautiful songs, beautiful books and yes, the beautiful game, are the great redemptive forces. He loves good stuff so much that one might call him the European Ambassador of Goodness.”

Right. Now go troll this big-ass book for some goodness. You might find it exists for you, as it does for Ambassador Hornby, in Charles Dickens, in Marilynne Robinson, in Roddy Doyle, in Anne Tyler, about whom Nick uses words that I would suggest describe the ambassador himself: a writer of “simplicity, intelligence, humor, and heart,” whose curse may just be “a gift that seems effortless.”