This book made me laugh out loud. I've never read anything by Nick Hornby before, but I heard him mentioned recently on a podcast and decided to pick this up off my shelves. Hornby's reflections on the books he was buying and reading throughout 2003 and 2004 were such an honest depiction of the reading life, and despite having read approximately five of the hundreds of books he mentions in this series of essays, I related to the palpable love of books on every single page.

Certain of Hornby's jokes went a bit too far or not far enough, and I had trouble understanding what exactly was funny about them. Likewise, though many of the discussions of books were highly amusing, some of them went a bit over my head, side references to and snide remarks on books that everyone has supposedly read. The synopses of books I'd never heard of from Hornby's lists were fun, but the comparisons to other unfamiliar texts were a bit too much for me, and for those books that Hornby excerpted, I would have liked to read more of his reflections. Why this passage? Why this book? Nevertheless, Hornby's love for the classics is inspiring, and when I come across a collection of Nine Stories by Salinger this week, I scooped it up immediately, inspired by Hornby's first column, and I'm excited to read through them and compare our thoughts.