About a Boy - Nick Hornby

Not even 50p. This was actually 30p from the Barbican Library overstock shelves. Now, I do realize that, much like David Nicholls a decade later, Nick Hornby isn’t exactly great literature, but it’s very well written and funny, and its cultural pop references are still better than those of plenty of bestsellers. So go ahead, and look down on me for enjoying a read like this every once in a while.

For once I actually had a book that I could pick-up on a short train journey (not that I use trains often – I just happened to do a bit of parkrun tourism when I was reading About a Boy), while waiting in line at the post office and, erm, on the toilet.

And it was great.

Having watched the movie, most of the gags and jokes were unsurprising (that said, I did still giggle aloud a few times – the dead duck remains priceless) but the ending was much more meaningful than I expected (not that seeing Hugh Grant accompany Marcus’s version of Killing Me Softly isn’t meaningful). And reading about my old neighbourhood always makes me feel all warm inside.

So yeah – Great literature? Not even remotely. Great read? Absolutely. 

Hamlet's Dresser - Bob Smith

An extremely random book – a memoir rather than a novel really – that my parents bought for my wife ages ago (maybe when she moved to London and started to accompany me to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, first at the Novello Theatre, than at the fairly awful New London Theatre, and then finally at the Barbican?).

To me the book is fundamentally divided in three intertwined plots/narrative lines – the narrator’s troubled family past and his complex relationship with his sister and her mental illness, his personal experiences as a dresser/stagehand, and lastly his Shakespeare classes for elderly people in New York City.

The first narrative line is soft and touching, and Smith is actually remarkably good at portraying the situation for what it actually is/was (or at least, that’s the impression the reader gets) without any need to sweeten it, or to portray himself as better or worse than how he genuinely appears to be.

The second narrative line is intriguing – reading about Katherine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, and all the other great actors who crossed the stage in Stratford CT is like watching a very good documentary with random comments and anecdotes by people who happen to have crossed paths with some of the greats of the 20^th century.

The last narrative line is clearly the one that touches me the least, probably because I am one of those awful people who tend not to find too much poetry in the elderly and the remarkably problematic challenges they have to face on a daily basis – to me those are just painful and very possibly insurmountable. 

The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

Despite having loved Middlesex I resisted the urge to buy this book when I found it selling for 2.50£ at Fopp. And well I did, since it appeared (untouched obviously, because why would people open a book?) on the shelves of the loyal local farm for 2£ less*…

The Marriage Plot is in so many ways one of the best campus novels ever: the confused characters, their witty exchanges (possibly a bit too witty at times? I definitely wasn’t that smart and quick back in the day), their frequent crises, their complex relationships with their families – it’s all there. Then the characters leave college (a Brown that at times is sneered upon by Eugenides himself, although not as much as Lisa Simpson does), and sadly their lives become just a lot less interesting. They seemed smart beyond their years in college, and when they enter the real world they appear not only completely unprepared, which would be fine and understandable, but also surprisingly dull and ordinary if compared to their younger selves.

Or probably I have seen a few too many students with mental breakdowns to be really shocked by the way in which the second half of the book develops.

*Considering I am one of the last few avid readers left in the world, I am quite aware of the fact that if everyone did what I do publishing houses would close even more quickly. But what can I do? I do love a bargain. And also, there are enough books that I still want to read to already last me a lifetime anyway…

On Chesil Beach and In Between the Sheets – Ian McEwan

This time I’m tackling two books at a time, and I can do that because a) I have already talked about McEwan more than enough, and b) put together, the two books barely get over 300 pages. As usual, I got the first of the two from the local farm, and the second was from a wonderful Amnesty International book-sale in Blackheath.

In short: reading the two books quite simply confirmed what I already knew/felt/thought about McEwan. His early stuff (in this case In Between the Sheets) remains dark, incestuous, pornographic and overall – when he doesn’t completely lose the plot (in all senses) – those short stories are frantically interesting and well-written. Most of the books he published recently (in this case On Chesil Beach) read like the author’s celebration of his own talent as a writer: sure, McEwan’s prose remains great, but his plots just bore me these days (and I do realize that the big surprise in the end is meant to make the reader reconsider everything he initially thought about the couple’s troubled wedding night – but is it really that much of a surprise?!?).

So yeah, only a couple more books and then I’ll stop reading McEwan. Well, only a couple more books and I’ll have read everything he actually wrote.