June 2013
Introduction: A Note from Jess Walter
The crazy lady in 13B leaned over and asked what I was reading. Hoping to avoid one of those torturous airplane conversations, I simply held up the cover of a newish story collection.
“No. I didn’t ask
Over the next two hours, I found out she didn’t read much herself, didn’t entirely “get books,” and wouldn’t believe what she read anyway since so much of it came from “media scumbags” who didn’t properly “support the troops” and were tools for “those government scumbags” who kept raising her taxes and trying to take away the assault rifles she and her husband needed to protect themselves from “scumbag criminals like that O. J. Simpson. ”
Wait. She needed an assault rifle to protect herself from O. J. Simpson?
“That son of a bitch,” she informed me, “got away with murder. ”
I wanted to point out that using a phrase like “got away with murder” to describe someone who actually
Instead, I sat there pondering her question.
Looking back, I wish I’d had this “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” omnibus with me.
It’s a very heavy book and I could’ve hit her with it.
Or I could’ve turned to just about any page.
In the decade that he’s been writing this column for the
Funny without being snarky, generous without sacrificing critical heft, Hornby-on-books is, forgive my English,
Nick, who actually happens to
Over those ten years, children are born and grow into readers; trips to America are endured; friends publish books that have to be considered; a beloved partner is “downgraded” to wife. Another beloved, the Arsenal football club, rises and falls like its own season, and in a quietly gut-wrenching moment, sells off its star Thierry Henry—“the man that both my wife and I wish had fathered our children,” yet somehow manages to win the Premier League (before another inevitable fall).