TheCompletePolysyllabicSpre47630_fSo this was my first proper exposure to Nick Hornby; of course I know who he is, I have High Fidelity on DVD (saw a bit of it when channel surfing and thought it looked good enough to buy but I haven’t yet watched it), I know about his Arsenal thing, I know the titles of most of his novels and so on.

But The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is the first of his books that I have ever read; I’m not even sure when I got it (must be recorded in a post on here somewhere) but I know why I bought it, and that’s because it’s a book about books and reading, and I can’t resist anything like that.

And of course when I started reading this Mr Hornby started popping up all over the place, because he is the screenwriter for the acclaimed (and hopefully to be seen by me at some point) film An Education, so I found myself watching him being interviewed by Jonathan Ross on the BBC; don’t you find it often happens that as soon as something comes to your attention in your reading you start seeing references to it all over the place?

I always find it difficult to review books like this because it really comes down to whether you like the writer’s voice or not and I found that I did. Setting aside his inability to get very far with the Iain M Banks novel he started (I have to understand that not everyone gets sci-fi, but it’s really difficult to make allowances sometimes), I enjoyed the columns and I clicked with his sense of humour.

I’ve added some titles to my wishlist, and actually succumbed and bought a couple of recommendations when on my way to meet my friend-who-hasn’t-yet-got-an-alias-for-the-purpose-of-being-referred-t0-in-this-blog on Thursday afternoon and thought I was going to be early so hit Waterstones, and we know how that normally ends. Please don’t tell the Book God, I’m supposed to be under a book-buying embargo on the run up to Christmas…..

Anyway, how can you possibly dislike someone who can point out that “there comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you are a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I’m beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.”

Will almost certainly be getting more Hornby – once I’m allowed to that is….