BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Mrs. Caliban—Rachel Ingalls
- Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay—John Lanchester
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain
- The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers—Christopher Vogler
BOOKS READ:
- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives—David Eagleman
- Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball—Stefan Kanfer
- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea—Barbara Demick
- Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay—John Lanchester
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there’s always something to be learned. It’s just that, every now and again, you can hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you’re pootling about. There’s nothing like a couple of sleepy novels, followed by a moderately engaging biography of a minor cultural figure, to make you aware of your own mortality. But what can you do about it? We don’t choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.
It wasn’t just that I enjoyed all the books I read this month; they felt vital, too. If you must read a biography of a sitcom star, then make sure the sitcom is the most successful and influential in TV history. You have a yen to read about a grotesquely dysfunctional communist society? Well, don’t mess about with Cuba—go straight for North Korea. John Lanchester’s Whoops! is a relatively simple explanation of the biggest financial crisis in history; Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is, according to Hemingway, the book from which all American literature derives. A month of superlatives, in other words—the best, the worst, the biggest, and the most important.
And, as a digestif, David Eagleman’s Sum, which invites us to contemplate forty varieties of afterlife. It’s such a complete package that it seems crazy to carry on reading, so I may well stop altogether. I’m not giving this column up, though. It pays too well.
Stefan Kanfer’s Ball of Fire contains an anecdote which seems to me to justify not only the time I spent reading it, but the entire genre, every biography ever written. Kanfer is describing the early days of Ball’s relationship with Desi Arnaz, which was stormy right from the off:
Almost every Sunday night ended with a furious argument about each other’s intentions and infidelities…. It happened that two of the town’s greatest magpies witnessed many of the quarrels. F. Scott Fitzgerald and his inamorata, columnist Sheilah Graham, used to watch the spats...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
