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.

The Polysyllabic Spree, or, how about reading a fucking book once in a while?

Soooo. Yesterday at work I picked up The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, and ignoring my personal ethics of reading (i.e., try not to read more than one book at a time), ended up reading a good half of it last night after my DVD player refused to read my current disc of Mad Men.

A few things, first. I've been busy working (busy for me means working about 35 hours a week, sometimes even 40), and when I'm not doing that or hanging out with the two friends I have left in Canada, I've mostly been watching TV. In my defense, it's mostly been Mad Men, which is stunningly good, but still. Given that I work in publishing and also at a bookstore, I feel a little guilty about how little I've been reading. I keep picking up books at work-- 30% staff discount, it's trouble-- and not reading them.

That said, I've been slogging through Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie for honestly the last month and a half. Embarrassing. Not to mention that I failed to finish the last book I was reading-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami-- because, even though I was enjoying it, it was just taking too damn long. I brought it to Chicago with me, figuring that spending 40+ hours in a van would be the perfect opportunity to finish a 600 page novel that I was halfway through. However, a combination of friends, WireTap and my apparently inexhaustible delight in staring out the window of a moving vehicle all conspired to ensure I did not, in fact, get any reading at all done on that trip. That was at the beginning of August.

Which brings us to my current book, which I found on top of a pile of books that had just come in at work. I love books about reading, and I assume I love Nick Hornby although I've never actually read any of his books, but I have seen High Fidelity like fourteen times. And, as I said, my shitty ancient DVD player wouldn't read Mad Men, and the book is so small, so I crawled into bed with that instead.

And it was so comforting and delightful! Reading another reader writing about how, sometimes, even if you really like the book you're reading, you are just not that into it, really helped with the guilt. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes the thought of sitting down and turning pages, for whatever reason, seems repulsive. You think about all the times you whipped through a novel in three days and loved every minute of it-- like when I read Middlesex this summer-- and wonder "What happened?" All in all, the almost 100 pages I've read have been reassuring to me as a reader.

So, with the hope of getting back on the Book Horse in mind, I think I am going to put aside Wednesdays as my day to myself, to read. My roommates aren't home, so I can sit in my armchair, which would not fit into my room, make a cup of tea, and just go for it for a few hours.

It is also hilarious, which brings me to another point. Most of the novels I have read or intend to read (and so, I suspect, most novels at all) are just not very funny. Which seems odd, because I would say that I'm someone who values fun in the things I enjoy. Like music-- some of my very favourite bands-- Spoon, The Decemberists, Of Montreal-- when it comes down to it, one of the main reasons I like these bands because they're fun. It often seems like, if literature is going to be serious, it has to be heavy. Like, for example, some of my other favourite things. The National. Arcade Fire. Mad Men. Not funny.

Obviously there are exceptions, but I wish more so-called "serious" literature was more fun, if beauty and humour could exist side by side more often in literature. And maybe it's not even true that they don't. Maybe it's a cultural construct-- there's Art, and then there's things that make you laugh. And maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or maybe I can't find the humour in beautiful, serious books (or the beauty in funny ones). But I think I'm pretty safe in my assessment of Ondaatje as Not Funny.

Not intentionally, anyway. Some of those sex scenes are out of control.