The Polysyllabic Spree is the first title in the Believer Book series, which collects essays by and interviews with some of our favorite authors—George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Michel Houellebecq, Janet Malcolm, Jim Shepard, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few. In his monthly column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading”, Nick Hornby lists the books he’s purchased and the books he’s read that month—they almost never overlap—and briefly discusses the books he’s actually read. The Polysyllabic Spree includes selected passages from the novels, biographies, collections of poetry, and comics discussed in the column.
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4.0 out of 5 stars A good book for readers
Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2005
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Nick Hornby, the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, among other novels, began writing his monthly column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” for Believer magazine in September of 2003. Fourteen of Hornby’s essays are collected here in The Polysyllabic Spree. Each is prefaced by lists of the books the author read and purchased in the month preceding the column’s appearance: Hornby, who reads a lot of books and buys even more, is admirably comfortable with populating his shelves with books he is unlikely ever to get to.
In his column Hornby discusses what he’s read during the month, how he came to read or buy the books he did, how the books under discussion relate to one another. In the course of writing about his reading life Hornby hits on any number of topics: the dampening effect of parenthood on one’s reading; his experience watching an unwitting stranger read his book poolside; Anton Chekhov’s unfortunate use of sappy endearments–“little ginger-haired doggie,” “my dearest chaffinch”–in letters to his wife (“For god’s sake, pull yourself together, man! You’re a major cultural figure!”); the surprising similarity between reading and, well, being the leader of the free world:
“Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.”
Hornby’s tone in his essays is conversational, his observations often witty. The book is most interesting, inevitably, when Hornby’s reading life intersects with one’s own, but familiarity with the books he discusses is not necessary to one’s enjoyment. (I fear I’ve read regrettably few of the books on his lists.) One comes away from The Polysyllabic Spree liking Hornby and appreciating his regular-guy take on the highbrow world of letters.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
5.0 out of 5 stars You can’t not like him
Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2005
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I am attracted to books that discuss the author’s reading and ideas about it and inevitably I get so far and wonder, why aren’t I out there reading for myself instead of holding this person’s hand? Not so with this, which is over far too soon. Hornby, riffing about his own reading, his life, his outlook, is holding the reader’s hand.
The title would suggest a word riot, which THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE is, but it is also the name Hornby puts to the murkily protean powers that be at “The Believer Magazine” where the book was born in monthly columns. Each month’s chapter begins like an entry in Bridget Jones’s Diary, books bought, books actually read, then leaps off into what happened, what he actually read, what he thought about it, how it connects (and sometimes does not, like when one’s football team is on the television) to life. Hornby is very funny, and also very serious. He is also full of contagious, unabashed wonder. He is quick to skewer pretension or gratuitous content. His style is highly caffeinated and raspy from nicotine, hilariously hyperbolic one moment, piercingly specific the next. He is willing to say he is wrong or doesn’t know. He keeps it all about our mutual love of reading, but divulges other insights along the way, like what it’s like to be the dad of an autistic child, to become a father for the third time, to try unsuccessfully to quit smoking, to be a writer amongst all the reading, the parenting and everything else going on.
Nick Hornby is the author of the novels The Polysyllabic Spree pdf Book, A Long Way Down, Slam, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and The Polysyllabic Spree, as well as the editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the winner of the 2003 Orange Word International Writers’ London Award. Among his many other honors and awards, four of his titles have been named New York Times Notable Books. A film written by Hornby, An Education – shown at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim – was the lead movie at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and distributed by Sony that fall. That same September, the author published his latest novel, Juliet, Naked to wide acclaim. Hornby lives in North London.
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