High Fidelity

High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 1995
323 pages
ISBN 1-57322-551-7
Recommended by: Peter, Jesse, Adam




What books do you bring when you're travelling? This is a tough question, I've discovered. You have to be discerning, since you can only bring so many (weight restrictions and what not), plus, I'm never sure how much I'm actually going to read-- after all, I should be out seeing the sites, not holed up inside with my nose in a book. I can do that at home. Before I left, I had a number of conversations with people about how many and what kind of books I should bring. Sue mentioned that she had recently been reading Mansfield Park while at the MLA in California, because it was comfortable, familiar: when you're in a strange place, the last thing you're going to want is something alienating and experimental. Fair enough. I didn't bring Jane Austen, but I did bring a number of "Western" books, even though I had recently been trying to read books from countries that weren't Canada, the US and the UK-- Amsterdam, a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories and High Fidelity.

As it turns out, the number of books I brought-- six, I think-- was perfect. I had two lengthy plane rides, and I spent 24 hours total on the bus, and probably more like 30 on the train. I ended up reading a lot. And Sue was right-- it was nice to have something familiar, comfortable and funny to read in the middle of the night, in the middle of ass-end nowhere Turkey between Bodrum and Istanbul with exactly no one that spoke English.

So do I actually have anything to say about High Fidelity? Not at all.* It's a movie I watch when I want something familiar, when I'm bored or sick or lonely, and it always cheers me up, and in that, it was the perfect travel book. Thanks, Nick Hornby!


* This isn't really true. I'm sure I could say a lot about being a girl reading this sort of "romantic comedy for boys" kind of thing. But I don't want to. I like High Fidelity because it reminds me of my friends, who are exactly this kind of boy, with all the flaws that entails, and all the good things, and I love them either way.