Housekeeping vs. The Dirt
by Nick Hornby
San Francisco: Believer Books, 2006.
I am book smart and book stupid.
I love books, but I have a habit of investing too much faith in them at the expense of paying full attention to the living world around me.
I love reading about other people’s love of books. That is why I collect (and now blog about) books about books.
But I also like being reminded that it is a rarified world. I like being taken down a peg.
A passage from Nick Hornby’s introduction to Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, the second of three collections of his column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” from The Believer, does both. It reminds me of the profound joy of reading and reminds me to be humble:
And please, please stop patronizing those who are reading a book—The Da Vinci Code, maybe—because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us knows what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing.
This passage stopped me dead in my tracks. “None of us knows.”
(Daniel Pennac makes a similar argument in his book about reading to and for children, The Rights of the Reader, a review of which is coming soon to a blog near you.)
Hornby’s introduction gave me another insight. He writes that “Inevitably… the knowledge that I had to write something for the Believer at the end of each month changed my reading habits profoundly.” Isn’t that just what your blog does for you?
I know that I read faster and more actively now that I have a print destination for my reading.
I also go to my bookshelves more often these days, looking for traces of my own engagement with a book after reading others’ blog posts. I know my books better because of others’ reading.
In the blogs I’ve read lately, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Sayers (2) and Tom Stoppard, have made appearances, sending me to my shelves and to my wishlists. I’ve just finished The Shrimp and the Anemone by L. P. Hartley, which I bought last year on the strength of Hornby’s praise. (A TBR pile of books, with volumes languishing there for years, is why I need to stop buying new books.)
All of this to say, this book is more of the same wonderful Hornby magic, and if you are looking for a good read, run, don’t walk to a copy near you. Read them in order, develop a smug insider knowledge about the Polysyllabic Spree, then let Hornby strip you of your smugness and leave the book love only.
Nathalie Foy 
Dorothy Sayers! I discovered Gaudy Night awhile back (after reading Maureen Corrigan’s *Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading* [and have you done that one yet?]).
“Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading” coming soon to a blog near you.
As for Sayers, I’m thinking I may do a campus novel blog next year…. It’s another of my collections.
This book is moving quickly to the top of my TBR pile. I loved Polysyllabic Spree and bought the other two right away. But I’ve been putting off reading them because I don’t want them to be finished — you know the dilemma. 🙂
I know!! You could do a real time thing and read one column a month!
The author of Jane’s Fame, a recent book about the Jane Austen phenomenon, read Austen’s letters at the pace of one a day. She wanted to be able to digest each one, but she also wanted to make the reading experience last as long as she could.
Reading one per day would also put you that tiny bit closer to experiencing the discovery of the letter as she and her correspondents would have, arriving in the post each day, anxiously waiting for the next response.
“None of us knows.”
For vacation a decade or two ago, I gave my mother a copy of Anne of Green Gables. It was the first novel she ever read.
As a (not particularly high-brow) booklover myself, I asked my mother why she didn’t read as a child. Growing up in a little chinatown in Malaysia, sheèd just say that she tried to read at night but would fall asleep. What she doesn’t say, but what I now know, is that after school, she sold homemade fish crackers to augment family income, tended to younger siblings (11 kids total), did chores, and then fell asleep doing homework.
She prefers numbers to words, but has read a couple more books in her life.
I really hope she liked Anne.