I am not ashamed

I've been reading Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree. It's a collection of his columns from The Believer, a magazine from the people who do McSweeney's. (I bought an issue when I was in America this spring, and it was good, though they seem somewhat over-impressed by post-modernism.) He wrote for them monthly about what he was reading. The Believer has a strict policy of no negative reviews, so if he didn't like a book he had to anonymize it when he talked about it, so "Contemporary Literary Novel by Anonymous" appears quite often in the list. (The only one I could identify is a Bonfiglioli mystery, which he really hated. Don't read them unless you truly don't mind a repulsively amoral narrator.)

I like Nick Hornby. A Long Way Down is funny in such a grim way it's quite painful, and How To Be Good is one of the few recent novels my mother has read. (She thought it would be interesting to know what people understand being good to mean.) But I picked The Polysyllabic Spree up several times in shops before actually buying it, because it is obvious even at a glance that Nick Hornby is a very different sort of reader from me. He likes books about sport, and aggressive thrillers. He read Jonathon Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson although he hasn't read any B.S. Johnson, while I need to like an author a lot before I can muster interest for a biography. (Though a biography written by Jonathan Coe might be the exception given that he's one of my favourite authors.) Nonetheless, his writing about the books he has read and the books he has given up on in each month is very readable, and I've found a few things he mentions which I might now check out. Also it makes me think that I should write more on this blog about what I read.

Today I read the new Harry Potter book. I had to queue for two hours in the middle of the night to get it -- if I'd known it was going to be that long I wouldn't have done it, I expect, but once I'd queued for 45 minutes it seemed like a waste to give up. I texted someone at 1 am to say I was still there (and still on the first floor) and he replied that it was ridiculous given that the book was not by Pynchon. (I might have queued at midnight for a book by Pynchon -- certainly the fancy dress would have been more interesting. I could have gone as Fairing, who preached to the rats of New York. (Can I just point out I didn't go in fancy dress to the Potter thing?)) The problem is that the huge hype has polarized opinion about Potter. I find them very readable, and I doubt there'll be another two-hour long queue for a book in my lifetime -- it's like the people waiting at the docks in New York for the next installment of Little Dorrit. I first heard about them when there were only two out. My cousin was a primary school teacher, and I asked her if she was discovering good new children's books or if they still all read the old favourites, and she said that her class of nine-year-olds had all told her to read the Harry Potter books. I don't think it was til the third came out that it was widely noticed as a phenomenon, so I was lucky to be able to read them unclouded by hype. Nick Hornby writes very strongly in his introduction to the Polysyllabic Spree that he thinks people shouldn't be ashamed to read for pleasure, though I suspect he's not a Potter fan; some people express the opinion that adults shouldn't read children's books but I occasionally watch Big Brother and if I'm not ashamed of that I'm hardly going to be ashamed of anything I actually read.

Here are a few names I forgot for my list of the authors whose new work I would definitely read:
Chuck Palahniuk: though they are mostly foul, especially the latest one with all its rabies
Orhan Pamuk: some of them are really hard work, but My Name is Red is great, and it has a talking dog in it (sort of)
J.K. Rowling: see above