Response to the post on Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree

I also read this book, and Fred's comments are spot on.

Louise Rosenblatt said when reading, "the human being is... continuously in transaction" (Making Meaning With Texts, page 3). That means reader and writer are always engaged in conversation, an exchange in which the reader's experience and knowledge influence his or her reading, and the text also affects the reader. This is strongly how I felt when reading Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree: it was as if I was communing with a fellow lover of books, in which our mutual bibliophilism danced.

In addition to revealing his reasons for why he bought the books he did, where he bought them, what he has read and what he thinks about them, and what he hasn't read, Hornby entertains with witty remarks and anecdotes:

• Reading No Name by Wilkie Collins is like a boxing match. He'd read one paragraph and be knocked out. He'd read twenty or thirty pages, feel as if he'd won, but then have to go to his corner and wipe the blood and sweat off his reading glasses.
• Mark Salzman's True Notebooks was mostly written "naked, covered in aluminum foil, with a towel around his head, sitting in a car."
• Dickens should be the judge of the length of biographies. As a towering literary figure, a biography of Dickens should be around 1000 pages; anyone more important deserves a bigger book, anyone less important deserves a shorter book.
• He uses the Trivial Pursuit system to organize his books.
• He's one of seventy-three people who buy poetry. (Incidentally, I just purchased Tony Hoagland's What Narcissism Means to Me - so make that seventy-four now, Nick).
• Gabriel Zaid, in So Many Books, says it would take fifteen years to read a list of names and authors of all the books ever published. Hornby is tempted to do so because "A good chunk of coming across as educated, after all, is just a matter of knowing who wrote what..."

In addition, Hornby describes the realistic life of a bibliophile, which is refreshing. He admits that "... Boredom and, very occasionally, despair are part of the reading life, after all," reading can vary with your mood, and he has forgotten a lot of what he's read. He quips, "Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events... and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path."

All in all, reading this book is a sharing of the joy of reading: "Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. 'The Magic Flute' v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. 'The Last Supper' v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it."