BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The Ha-Ha—Jennifer Dawson
- Poppy Shakespeare—Clare Allan
- Yo Blair!—Geoffrey Wheatcroft
- Salmon Fishing in the Yemen—Paul Torday
- The Myth of the Blitz—Angus Calder
- This Book Will Save Your Life—A. M. Homes
BOOKS READ:
- Across the Great Divide: The Band and America—Barney Hoskyns
- Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall—Anna Funder
- Yo Blair!—Geoffrey Wheatcroft
- The Ha-Ha—Jennifer Dawson
- Coming Through Slaughter—Michael Ondaatje
- Poppy Shakespeare—Clare Allan
On the face of it, the Stasi and the Band had very little in common. Closer examination, however, reveals the East German secret police force and the brilliant genre-fusing Canadian rock group to be surprisingly…. Oh, forget it. I don’t have to do that stuff in this column—or at least, if I do, nobody has ever told me. It goes without saying that the two wires that led me to the books by Barney Hoskyns and Anna Funder came from different sockets in the soul, and power completely different, you know, electrical/spiritual devices: Stasiland and Across the Great Divide are as different as a hair dryer and a Hoover. Yes. That’s it. I’m the first to admit it when my metaphors don’t work, but I’m pretty sure I pulled that one off. (I wish I’d hated them both. Then I could have said that one sucks, and the other blows. Regrettably, they were pretty good.)
The journey/length of cable that led me to the Hoskyns book began a couple of years ago, when I was just about to walk out of a music club. We’d gone to see the support act, but the headliners had this amazing young guitar player called James Walbourne, an unearthly cross between James Burton, Peter Green, and Richard Thompson; Walbourne’s fluid, tasteful, beautiful solos drop the jaw, stop the heart, and smack the gob, all at the same time. We still walked out of the club, because we really wanted a pizza, and pizza always beats art, but I was determined to track him down and make sure that I hadn’t been imagining it all. I’ve seen him a few times since—when he’s not playing with the Pernice Brothers or Son Volt or Tift Merritt, he’s been appearing with his own band in a pub not far from me—and he’s recently taken to playing a cover of the Band’s “Ain’t No More Cane,” a song off The Basement Tapes. So then I had a fit on the Band—I have pretty much listened to every single track on the box set that came out last year—and then I noticed that I...
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contributor
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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.
