How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of How to Be Good
Book Review: Did not Enoy this
Summary: 1 Stars
I tried reading this on the beach. I fell asleep and ended up sunburned.Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed Hornby's previous books; however, this book was a huge disappointment. As one reviewer mentioned, he has changed his tone in this novel, that wasn't the problem. The book was simply uninteresting, the main character was unappealing, the plot/dilemma is revealed within a few chapters and from there the book doesn't move, the same problem is reviewed over and over, the same character traits are displayed repeatedly with no forward plot movement. I am an avid reader and cannot remember the last time I did not finish a story regardless of how bad it was. This book did me in, I ended up skimming through the last two chapters and wishing I hadn't bothered.Book Review: Disappointing read on several levels...
Summary: 2 Stars
...For starters if you were a fan of previous Hornby gems like 'High Fidelity,' and 'About A Boy,' my bet is that you will ultimately find this to be a crap read. The book spends the bulk of its pages locked up in the mind of the protagonist as she internally tussles back and forth on the merits and negatives of ethics, morals, familial strife and approaching mid-life crisis. Some readers may find such internal dialogue to be somewhat captivating, however, less then 50 pages into the book I found myself highly annoyed by the whininess and lack of pro-active action of our protagonist and practically forced myself to read through the remainder of this novel. With that being said, the book does improve the further you go with the occassional vintage Hornby moments of subtle humour and crafty dialogue but even these few redeeming moments surely do not justify the time required to slog through this book. While Hornby's prowess as a writer is certainly not in question, his experiment in capturing middle-aged fem angst certainly is. Nice, bold experiment on his part though.
Book Review: Don't Believe the Other Reviews
Summary: 5 Stars
I just finished reading this great and funny novel by Nick Hornby. He wrote High Fidelity (the john cusack film) and he also wrote the novel that About the boy is based on.
How to be Good is a novel about a woman doctor, liberal, well intentioned, caring, etc, who gets her life turned around or finds her life turned around.
The novel thinks about some of the things people are talking about: especially "the what are liberals" and "what are
conservatives" really like discussion.
I recommend the book. It's funny about a lot of different things (including the practice of medicine and the function
of Star Wars in our society) and is told pretty convincingly from the point of view of a woman doctor. Pretty neat.
Book Review: Don't Read This Alone
Summary: 4 Stars
Even if you are not a book group kind of person, you will want to read HOW TO BE GOOD with at least one other soul. This is a book that sprays out discussion questions like a garden sprinkler gone mad. It is also a decent contemporary urbane London novel, not one that particularly epitomizes the genre or takes it to new heights, but a decent exercise in that mode all the same.HOW TO BE GOOD is the first person narrative of a doctor, Kate, who lives a middle-class life in a liberal way, meaning that she chooses to work in a clinic, she recycles, she votes labor. She is married to a misanthropic newspaper columnist, David, who has reached the point of insufferability (there comes, well into the book, a two-pages-long list of everyone David disapproves of, which is hilarious and is followed by the list of all four people who are okay in his lights, though Bob Dylan only makes the thumbs up for his early self). The book sets out immediately with Kate's blurting out the d-word (Divorce) to David during a routine call home from a conference and taking a break from the marriage in the form of an unexciting one-night affair. When she returns the next day to life at home with her husband and their two young children, things begin to change dramatically. David undergoes a sea-change, becomes Mr. Charitable. He installs a faith healer in their home, and the plot wends its way through their schemes, their effects on the family and the community.
It's an interesting, engaging journey, told in a witty voice. It never reaches the manic pitch it could (imagine what Martin Amis would do with this material), but it moves right along, so that for all its ideas to mull over, it is a fast read.