Ten Years in the Tub

What an astonishingly great book! What an amazingly annoying book! What a hugely funny book! What a tremendously depressing book!

I'll clarify all those seemingly contradictory descriptions as we go along, but first up is just how great it is. It's a big book (in Jess Walter's funny intro, he mentions how it would be useful in bashing people who question the purpose of reading at all), but Nick Hornby (author of contemporary classics like [b:High Fidelity|285092|High Fidelity|Nick Hornby|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327928082s/285092.jpg|2961887] and [b:Fever Pitch|4264|Fever Pitch|Nick Hornby|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1426114203s/4264.jpg|2961920]) makes the pages fly by in this collection of his monthly column in a magazine called The Believer (never heard of it before to be honest). In "Stuff I’ve Been Reading”, he wrote about the books he bought and the books he read.

And he writes with strength, conviction, heart, and, most importantly, humor. An interesting diktat of The Polysyllabic Spree (his nom de plume for the editors, usually humorously inserted into each month's column, using a new random number) is that negative reviews couldn't be published. It's the old adage "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.". As this doesn't seem to apply to long dead author's, he does get a few zings in on some, including even his favorite author, Dickens. So each month's column has between 1 and 5 unusually glowing reviews.

Hence the annoying part - this means each month's column often has at least one or two books that I absolutely positively have to read. And as my To Read list was approaching 800 books, I had to be judicious in selecting books to be added to my ginormous list. But each one that fell by the wayside hurt, some more than others. While the 700 page history of post World War II Britain, [b:Austerity Britain: 1945-51|840441|Austerity Britain 1945-51|David Kynaston|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356468192s/840441.jpg|825990] was fairly easy to trim, most of the others were heartrending decisions.

Every column had at least one, and usually far more, real belly laughs. This guy is a really funny guy, let me tell you. Here's Hornby on approaching giant books (something I take very seriously as I try to reach my 2015 Reading Challenge of 35 books):

I have had a resistance to the more amply proportioned book all my adult life, which is why the thesis I'm most likely to write is entitled "The Shortest Book by Authors Who Usually Go Long.". [b:The Crying of Lot 49|2794|The Crying of Lot 49|Thomas Pynchon|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1375727632s/2794.jpg|1477756], [b:Silas Marner|54539|Silas Marner|George Eliot|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347323528s/54539.jpg|3049535],[b:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|7588|A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388201200s/7588.jpg|3298883]; I've read'em all. You can infer from that lot what I haven't read. And in any case, long, slow books can have a disastrous, demoralizing effect on your cultural life if you have young [ed. note: any!] children and your reading time is short. You make only tiny inroads into the chunky white wastes every night before falling
asleep, and before long you become convinced that it's not really worth reading again until your children are in reform school. My advice, as someone who has been an exhausted parent for seventeen years now, is to stick to the svelte novel - it's not as if this will lower the quality for your consumption, because you've still got a couple of hundred top, top writers to choose from.

But he can also be serious and share some wise words. Like me, he shares a fascination with the creative process, and thus there are lots of biographies and autobiographies read. He well and truly loved Dylan's first ([b:Chronicles, Vol. 1|14318|Chronicles, Vol. 1|Bob Dylan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348218030s/14318.jpg|20014]) and plenty of others. Heck, I even added [b:Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times|19542331|Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet His Life and Times|Tom Nolan|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394261428s/19542331.jpg|27669407] to my To Read list, despite my willful ignorance of jazz, he was so passionate about it. And he combined that with his Dickens passion when writing a review of Claire Tomalin's [b:Charles Dickens|11202585|Charles Dickens|Claire Tomalin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347862957s/11202585.jpg|16127699] biography, writing only about that for the full column. He ends the column discussing advice given to people who want to be authors. And he points out how everyone is different, but there is one piece of advice that holds for everyone - just do it, much like Scott Sigler emphasizes in his YouTube series:

It doesn't matter: they got the work done, and there they are, up on the shelves. They might not stay there forever: readers, now and way off into the future, make that decision. Claire Tomalin's wonderful and definitive book is, above all, about a man who got the work done, millions of words of it, and to order, despite all the distractions and calamities. And everything else, the fame, and the money, and the giant shadow that he continues to cast over just about everyone who
has written since, came from that. There's nothing else about writing worth knowing, really.

But the book is depressing because there are so many great sounding books that I'll never get to read. My To Read list grew by at least 20 books, and it probably easily could have been double that. So many books, so little time.

Don't let that "problem" dissuade you from reading this book. I'm not much on short stories, which is odd because my time is at such a premium. But I love the little bits of standalone writing this book contained. Entertaining throughout (does the guy every have an off day?), I highly highly recommend this book.