Nick Hornby's reading life

When he was asked to pick forty of his favourite books Nick Hornby was doubtful: the prospect seemed as presumptuous as a bum-pinch. Finally, though, he couldn't resist lauding some of his top reads, as he explains here in The Times.

It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don't know, and you're getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you'll like it.”

This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I'll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me more than 50 years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got?

Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance but for the most part the people that I listen to I've known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate.

We are asked to believe, usually by critics, that the most important factor in our response to a book should be its objective quality - a good book is a good book - but we know that's not true. Mood and taste are important, self-evidently, but mood and taste are formed by educational background, profession, health, amount of leisure time, marital status, state of marriage, gender (men don't read much fiction, depressingly), age, age of children, relationships with children, and parents, and siblings, and, possibly, an unfortunate experience with Thomas Pynchon's V as an overambitious and pretentious teenager. All these and thousands of others are governing factors, and many of them are wildly inconstant.

Read the rest of Hornby's piece at The Times.

He is to be the latest author featured in the Waterstone's Writer's Table series and this ,I guess, is his promotional preamble to his session on March 5. I wish I lived a little closer so I could attend.