Читать онлайн «Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books»

Автор Ник Хорнби

June 2013

Asshole paranoia; quantifying the delusions of Kanye West; “Cheat Sheet” and PopEater; uses for a Wonder Bread bag

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 what you’re reading,” the woman said. “Why?”

Why? And in a moment of sheer stupefaction I will regret the rest of my life, I made the tragic mistake of looking up from my book.

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 got away with murder is a little bit nuts, like owning a china shop, having a bull run through it, and then describing the experience as like… well, you know.

Instead, I sat there pondering her question.

Why do I read?

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 Believer (with the occasional month off to watch Friday Night Lights or the World Cup—two of the three acceptable excuses for not reading, the other being “captured by pirates”) Nick Hornby has created the most intelligent, engaging case for reading you’re ever likely to encounter.

Funny without being snarky, generous without sacrificing critical heft, Hornby-on-books is, forgive my English, bloody brilliant. “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” is unfailingly smart but without any of the obnoxious showy bits—lit theory, obscure Russian surnames, untranslated French (agreeably psycho-surrealist, the book nonetheless reflects Spankmeoff’s fromage de l’extrémité arrière)—that might serve to remind a poor reader that while he attended Eastern Washington University on a partial welding scholarship, the author happens to be a Cambridge man.

Nick, who actually happens to be a Cambridge man, has done much more than display his casual genius for the last ten years, however. He’s crafted a wise, thoughtful, and wry narrative out of a reading life—“a paper trail of theme and meaning,” just as he promised in that very first column (September 2003).

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).