Nick Hornby is another of those literary-cultural figures who annoys me almost as much as I like him (well, he probably annoys me a bit more than I like him, as to which, see below). The starting point was High Fidelity the film, which I enjoyed very much and in the course of which I found myself strongly identifying with both Rob (John Cusack) and Charlie (Catherine Zeta Jones) - an unusual duo for one person to see a great deal of themselves in, I dare say. Then, I read the book and enjoyed it in a lukewarm way, which was, I think, mostly the fault of the film, which did such a good job of reproducing the tone and flavour of the book itself. The only other thing I've read of Hornby's since was that 32 Song book (I'm not sure if I have the number right), and I think that it's with that one that it may have gone sour for me - while I was impressed by his choices, I have a feeling that I also took against his writerly persona as expressed in those miniature essays.
I'd browsed a bit of The Polysyllabic Spree in a bookstore a while ago, and not been unduly impressed, but in the interests of procrastination was still willing to borrow it from the library today and skim/read it on the way home and into the early evening. It's a collection of essays tracking the books that Hornby (a) bought and (b) read (with considerable disparity between (a) and (b)) from month to month, written in very much the Hornby style and so replete with asides about soccer ('football'), his family and the rest of his life.
What he has to say about the various books that he does read, and fail to read, is often diverting, but somehow never substantial (which is, to be fair, not really the intention). The little digressions are amusing enough, but never particularly profound (again, not the point). Also, while I'm doing my best to be scrupulously fair, I've gotta say that I haven't read most of the books mentioned in the essays. But then again, Hornby doesn't make me particularly want to read any of them, even when he's heaping praise.
The way that the people who run the magazine in which the essays were originally published, Believer, are characterised as a constantly changing number of "chillingly ecstatic" robe-wearing literary equivalents to the Polyphonic Spree is cute, but (one paragraph about Chekhov's strange obsession with the sound of pissing aside) the only really funny thing about the book. It's not that Hornby takes himself too seriously (except insofar as he takes himself too seriously as someone who doesn't take himself too seriously, which he does quite a lot, with predictably mixed results) but something about his persona-as-writer (which, not coincidentally, includes his persona-as-person) just rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why. Maybe there's some kind of half-buried snobbery at work. Or maybe I just suspect that he's not really as hip as he'd like us to think (while affecting not to think himself hip at all, which is part of the whole thing, natch), nor as nice/unpretentiously intellectual/etc...I don't think I've ever had the experience of disliking someone I've met because they possessed character traits similar to those which I disliked in myself, but maybe (only maybe!) the principle works for me in relation to figures such as Hornby.
