Doug’s World

The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

The pace of blogging around here has really slowed down lately. This is primarily due to the 24-hour nature of the day on this planet … after trying to get a bit of exercise (I have a new bike to ride, you know), maybe hitting a few golf balls (the season’s almost over and we haven’t begun!), doing some work (lots going on in Redmond these days, and I’m trying to catch up from so much time on the road), and other things that seem to come up every day, it’s hard to find the time to post anything.

But it looks like rain today, in which case maybe we won’t get to the golf course after all, so I might get a few things posted.

Oh, another thing that has interfered with blogging time lately: reading books. I’m usually an avid reader, but I’ve been so busy this year that I hadn’t read many books, and now in the last month I’ve started to make up for lost time.

I finished “Napoleon’s Egypt” yesterday, the inspiring story of an imperial power’s attempt to invade and conquer the Middle East and their discovery that slaughtering the brutal leadership of a country can lead to even more brutality instead of less; who knew? And I’m most of the way through several work-related books on XML topics (Philo Janus’s InfoPath book is pretty good), and tonight I hope to finish up Malcolm Gladwell’s entertaining “Blink,” which is a book about why the shallowest and simplest of salesmen tend to be better putters than highly educated scientists and engineers. (Well, Gladwell doesn’t actually mention putting, but I know what he’s really talking about, and will probably explain in tedious detail in this space before long.)

But the book I’d like to ramble on about today is Nick Hornby’s “The Complete Polysyllabic Spree.” I finished it the same day I started it, reading the whole damn thing (well, a trim 270 pages) on the flight across the Pacific last week. The last time I read a book in a day was also a flight over the Pacific Ocean: “Killing Pablo” between Sydney and Los Angeles. When they don’t have working electrical outlets in business class I read a book, because my Toshiba M4 laptop has 8 minutes of battery life these days — I’ve timed it — so it’s not even worth booting up without an outlet handy.

I bought “Spree” in Kinokuniya Books at the Petronas Towers shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur. I can’t really explain why. I think it was the garish cover. And the sub-title, I guess: “the diary of an occasionally exasperated but ever hopeful reader.” I was wandering around the bookstore, checking out the cute cashier and stern security guard, and after passing the religion section and noting that Christianity was up front but the Islam section was much larger, I came upon a few “best-sellers” and there it was. Sold.

Nick Hornby wrote a column for Believer magazine called “Polysyllabic Spree,” and this book is a collection of two years of those columns. Each column starts with a list of books purchased that month, and books read that month (usually a bit of overlap between the two lists), and then offers some rambling, disjointed, often outrageous thoughts about the buying and reading involved. To call these “book reviews” would be a bit of a stretch; they’re no more book reviews than, say, the things construction workers say to one another when a nicely dressed woman walks past are “fashion reviews.”

Hornby is a real writer, who has written novels and reads the classics. So the first chapter’s list of books bought, full of Salingers and poem collections and so on, scared me a bit. I wondered if I’d have the patience to actually finish the thing, but I took heart in seeing Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened” on the list, a book I’ve purchased myself, although I misplaced it after reading a couple chapters and have never missed it. But the Salinger … I tried to read “Franny and Zoey” many years ago (and even claimed to have finished it, because that seemed to be important to somebody I wanted to impress at the time), but I sure didn’t get it.

But the good news is, this book isn’t about literature. It’s about reading. For example, here’s the paragraph that starts the second chapter/column:

If you write books — or a certain kind of book, anyway — you can’t resist a scan around the hotel swimming pool when you go on holiday. you just can’t help yourself, despite the odds: you need to know, straight off, whether anyone is reading one of yours. You imagine spending your days under a parasol watching, transfixed and humbled, as a beautiful and intelligent young man or woman, almost certainly a future best friend, maybe even spouse, weeps and guffaws through three hundred pages of your brilliant prose, too absorbed even to go for a swim, or take a sip of Evian. I was cured of this particular fantasy a couple of years ago, when I spent a week watching a woman on the other side of the pool reading my first novel, High Fidelity. Unfortunately, however, I was on holiday with my sister and brother-in-law, and my brother-in-law provided a gleeful and frankly unfraternal running commentary. ‘Look!. Her lips are moving.’ ‘Ha! She’s fallen asleep! Again!’ ‘I talked to her in the bar last night. Not a bright woman, I’m afraid.’ And at one point, alarmingly, she dropped the book and ran off. ‘She’s gone to put out her eyes!’ my brother-in-law yelled triumphantly. I was glad when she’s finished it and moved on to Harry Potter or Dr. Seuss or whatever else it was she’d packed.

Hornby takes us through dozens of books and the experience of reading them, often latching on to a little detail like that and writing about it instead of the plot or the characters of the books themselves. For example, in Woodward’s “Bush at War” (yes, he does cover a bit of non-fiction), the author found it disturbing to read of the President being “woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08PM” on 9/11. ‘If it had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day.’ Nick Hornby for President, I say!

Oh, he can’t be President because he’s British. As he constantly reminds us. In fact, I think nobody in his own country reads him at all, because he always assumes the reader is American. For example, right after saying “it would be great to be you, sometimes” he goes into a rant about how Americans like to read Johnathan Livington Seagull’s message of “don’t abandon your dreams,” but contemporary British culture is based on the “more truthful” motto “ABANDON YOUR DREAMS.” The word “you” means “you stupid Americans,” everywhere it is used in this book.

Other recurring themes include the comic relief provided by autistic kids (he has one himself, so he should know), religion (not a reverent perspective, as you might imagine), soccer (much reverence here, though), and biographies of famous people (ranging from Dickens and other literary bigshots to Nikki Sixx, whose tale of “naked groupies, endless combinations of class-A drugs, and booze” Hornby finds to be “weirdly, not a bad book”).

Having lived in Spokane for a few years, I especially enjoyed his comments about “Citizen Vince” by Jess Walter, including an excerpt that starts like this:

Eighty-seven bars in greater Spokane, serving three hundred thousand people. One taxicab company: eight cabs. So on a Tuesday morning just past two a.m., last call, the economics are clear: more drunks than the market can bear. They leach out onto the sidewalks and stagger and yawn into their cars — those who own them and remember where they’re parked. The rest walk from downtown to the neighborhoods, scattering in all directions across bridges, through underpasses, beneath trestles, up hills to dark residential streets, solitary figures beneath thought bubbles of warm breath and cigarette smoke. Rehearsed lies.

Megan and I are familar with that long drunken walk up the South Hill to which the author alludes, and all the other details of this passage ring true as well. Maybe it’s not true that Spokane only has one cab company (I recall having two cab companies’ numbers in my wallet, actually), but it’s entirely believable that Spokane would, and that’s really the charm of Spokane: there’s nothing so base or crass that one couldn’t imagine it happening there. So when Walters’s book comes across a late-night argument in a gravel parking lot between a john and hooker who ask a passer-by his opinion on whether it’s possible to deliver exactly half a blow job, and the passer-by helps calm the hooker down and sends her on her way, then tries to sell the john a bag of pot, that sounds like Spokane, too.

Enough rambling. Read the book. I think you’ll like it.

Of course, first you have to buy it. And that’s a bit tricky, if you’re not in Malaysia at the moment. It seems that Amazon.com only has an older version which was published before this one. I guess that’s why it says “THE COMPLETE” on it, because mine contains a bunch of material written after that version was published in 2004. There’s a “complete” version on Amazon UK here, although the cover’s different from mine, and the ISBN is different too so I’m not sure that’s the same content. Although it might be better, who knows.

OK, I finally found where to buy the version I have, from a UK bookseller. Here’s the link. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:50 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.