Books Read:
- Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend—Susan Orlean
- Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington—Terry Teachout
- Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show—Richard Zoglin
- The Dutch House—Ann Patchett
Books Bought:
- Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters—Martin Gayford
- This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality—Peter Pomerantsev
- Everything I Know about Love—Dolly Alderton
- Siege: Trump under Fire—Michael Wolff
- How Democracy Ends—David Runciman
- Run—Ann Patchett
Where would you like me to begin? Fiction or nonfiction? Nonfiction about the golden era of big-band jazz, or nonfiction about movie dogs? I need a toe-tapper to kick off, but I have no idea which of these books would produce the desired effect. I’m guessing that, paradoxically, neither of the books about music will do the trick. If I start banging on about 1930s dance bands or Vegas-era Elvis, I’ll lose you. You’ll wander off to read about something more fashionable elsewhere in the magazine—Himalayan fiction, say, or sculptures made out of Juul cartridges. I can’t believe I can go too far wrong with dogs. Lots of people like dogs. I’m going to start with Rin Tin Tin.
Having read Susan Orlean’s surprising, gripping, and informative The Library Book recently, I found myself wondering why I haven’t read every word she’s written. I then realized that her previous book was about a dog, and lots of people don’t like dogs. Perhaps as many people dislike dogs as like them, so maybe I was wrong to start with a book about them. At the time Orlean published Rin Tin Tin, I didn’t like dogs much, either, so I didn’t read the book, even though I bought it, but now I own a dog, through no fault of my own, and I can see they’re not irredeemably terrible. Owning a dog did not make me want to read a book about Rin Tin Tin. But owning a dog did enable me to see that this was a book by Susan Orlean, one of my favorite writers; the name on the cover became more important than the jacket image or the title. Thus emboldened, I picked Rin Tin Tin off my shelves and immediately became lost in the sad, complicated, occasionally hilarious, occasionally baffling story Orlean excavates.
A man called Lee Duncan found the original Rin Tin Tin, or Rinty, as his close personal friends called him (and, yes, we call him that still, because he exists still, in the way that Lynyrd Skynyrd exists still), in...
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contributor
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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.
