Nick Hornby, How to Be Good
A tonic, is what it was supposed to be, and it was: Nick Hornby's How to Be Good helped me get over Chip Kidd's Cheese Monkeys in next to no time.
Not that it's a world-changing novel, but I went into it expecting light and frothy, with turns of phrase precise as Salchows, but also something zeitgeisty, and I got more than I wanted. It's Nick Hornby, so he doesn't need my promotion, but I do thank him for this, this week.
Not that I was heartened by the collapse of the husband's project to Improve The World, or the somewhat defeatist concept of marriage, but the characters felt to me like people talking in the world, and my bourgeois allegiance to realist fiction (say it isn't so!-ed.) (um, it isn't so?-auth.) asks for that sometimes. And after Kidd, I needed to make peace with my stolidity and middle-classness.
Plus, I laughed on the bus as I was reading. Judging stares be damned -- I laughed in public anyway, and that's a rare thing for me.
Not that it's a world-changing novel, but I went into it expecting light and frothy, with turns of phrase precise as Salchows, but also something zeitgeisty, and I got more than I wanted. It's Nick Hornby, so he doesn't need my promotion, but I do thank him for this, this week.
Not that I was heartened by the collapse of the husband's project to Improve The World, or the somewhat defeatist concept of marriage, but the characters felt to me like people talking in the world, and my bourgeois allegiance to realist fiction (say it isn't so!-ed.) (um, it isn't so?-auth.) asks for that sometimes. And after Kidd, I needed to make peace with my stolidity and middle-classness.
Plus, I laughed on the bus as I was reading. Judging stares be damned -- I laughed in public anyway, and that's a rare thing for me.
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