BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Cheryl Strayed—Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
- Glenway Wescott—The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
- Janie Hampton—The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948
- Jane Austen—Persuasion
- YY—XX
- Selina Hastings—Rosamond Lehmann
- Mary Roach—Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
BOOKS READ:
- Cheryl Strayed—Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
- Ben Fountain—Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
- Glenway Wescott—The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story
- Janie Hampton—The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948
Here’s the thing: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best books I’ve read in the last five or ten years, up there with David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, and Mark Harris’s Scenes from a Revolution, and Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets, and Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang—or rather in there, because whereas the former preposition indicates some kind of indefensibly objective ranking system, the latter more accurately reflects what happens to our favorite books, I think: we separate them from the other books we’ve read—the ones we liked but didn’t love, or admired but didn’t connect with, or hated and didn’t finish—and we place them on a special and infinitely extendable shelf somewhere within our souls. So Wild is now in this personal library, which consists of probably three or four hundred books, a number I intend to add to as often as I can for the rest of my life; it’s “mine,” in a way that Sullivan’s Travels is mine, and the first Ramones album is mine. In other words, it’s not mine at all, but such is my affinity with it that I’ve somehow ended up embarking on long and expensive legal battles in an attempt to get myself a co-credit. (Preston Sturges, by the way, is not an easy man to deal with, if you’re thinking about going down that road yourself with The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story.) Anyway, we’re lucky if we find one of these a year; my admiration for Wild means that this was a very good reading month, whatever else happened.
I put down Strayed’s book and picked up Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and suddenly a very good reading month turned into a very difficult one. The problem was this: I loved Fountain’s novel as much as I had loved Wild. So suddenly, all was chaos. Is it possible to read...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
