Stuff I've Been Reading

Our Review

I picked up Stuff I’ve Been Reading by Nick Hornby from the local library and read it in a few hours. Despite being a fan of the film, High Fidelity I have never read anything by Nick Hornby before. This isn’t a conscious decision I have made I have just never picked up one of his books.

This book is based on a series of columns he wrote for a newspaper column on reading. I liked the way the book was set out firstly into months and then how the first section of each chapter was split into ‘Books Bought’ and ‘Books Read.’

I was interested to see that often the two columns were equal in length and that made me think that my own columns would always be unequal. For many years my ‘Books Bought’ column would have outweighed my ‘Books Read’ column due to work commitments and my tendency to buy multiple books at a time. Now my ‘Books Read’ column far exceeds my ‘Books Bought’ although this is partially due to the limits of maternity pay and the sheer number of books I read for review via Netgalley.

One of the things I like most about the book is that Nick Hornby gets what it is like to be an avid reader as illustrated in the quote below:

Reading is a long conversation with several different people, all of them living in your head, all of them demanding your attention.

Stuff I’ve Been Reading focuses on Nick Hornby’s ‘reading journey’ over five years and increased my ‘to be read’ list massively.

It is clear throughout how much he enjoys reading for the sake of It rather than as a means of showing off how intelligent he is.

“Reading journeys are still the richest, most stimulating and cheapest journeys of all, and you don’t even have to go anywhere, apart from inside your head.”

The book has all of his characteristic humour peppered throughout and made the book all the more interesting. I enjoyed it.

Our Final Rating...

Fri, 7th September 2018