The Polysyllabic Spree

First Line:

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading--about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

Description:

The author of High Fidelity and About a Boy shares samples from his "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns in The Believer, focusing on various books he has found interesting, in a volume that includes selected passages from the novels, poetry, biographies, and comics discussed.

Selected Reviews:

"What's most valuable about this collection...is that Hornby, by dint of his sensibility and the variety of his choices, shows that the distinction still made between reading for the sake of 'enrichment' (as that gasbag Harold Bloom insists upon) and reading for pleasure is a phony divide....What Hornby does so beautifully here is to assume the intelligence of his readers, and to obliterate the literature/pleasure divide by acting, sensibly, as if it didn't exist."

--Charles Taylor, Salon