Tom Lynch

In the "Stuff I've Been Reading" essays in The Believer magazine, Nick Hornby, author of the famed "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy," read books for a month then documented his findings on the page. After about a year of writing the column, Hornby has now released each entry in a bound anthology titled "The Polysyllabic Spree." In each installment, he buys way more books than he could ever read in a month's span, and both he and the reader know it. Like his "Songbook," it's Hornby writing about something he adores, which always leads to his best, rawest, most internalized work. We recently conversed via email.

How did the column in The Believer first come together?

It was, I think, my idea. Or rather, The Believer approached me to write something, and I suggested the column. I'd just had an interesting reading month, and I couldn't recall a column of this kind, about what someone had chosen to read, as opposed to what they were being paid to read. Now I'm being paid to write about what I've chosen to read, which is ludicrously great.

How does your approach to writing about yourself compare to your approach when writing fiction?

Fiction writers tend to think about characters in terms of what happens to them, character being action and all that, whereas not much happens to me--especially in my reading life. And I can be harder on myself than I want to be on my characters. I suspect that any writer who has tried his or her hand at both fiction and nonfiction will tell you that the latter is easier. You only have to select from the real world, you don't have to invent it.

How does writing about books compare to writing about pop music? Which do you find easier, or more rewarding?

For a start, I don't have the technical chops to write about music. I can get around it, but after a while my own ignorance gets me down. And yes, I think it does matter: the best music writers write about how something sounds, and if you're going to do that over a period of years, you eventually find yourself reaching for a vocabulary and an understanding that I suspect only musicians truly possess. So I think I've probably written as much about music as I'm capable of, at this point in my life. Books have content, in a way that music doesn't, so even if you're not interested in describing the way a book feels, you can always talk about what it has to say--hardly an illegitimate response to a book. Whereas talking about what a musician has to say seems like a cheat, especially if you're writing about feelgood pop, or bedroom R&B, or whatever.

What are you reading this month?

An advance copy of Sarah Vowell's book "Assassination Vacation"--Sarah's a friend. An advance copy of Rodney Rothman's "Early Bird"--Rodney is a friend of Sarah's. You see how it works, the literary world? I'm about to read "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City." That guy's no friend of mine, or of anyone I know. So he's in trouble.

Any outright, favorite novel of 2004?

I'll cheat, in several different ways, and choose Julie Orringer's collection of stories "How To Breathe Underwater"--that book was published in '04 in the UK, although not in the U.S. She's some talent.

How do you feel about the current climate of the investigation of pop culture? Is it different now then it was years ago, when you wrote "High Fidelity"? Do you feel the world at large is becoming more critical of everything thrown at us (film, TV, music, books, etc), or are we in the midst of the feared dumbing-down of entertainment absorption?

Ten years ago it still seemed as though intelligent writing about pop culture was something of a rarity, but now it's absolutely everywhere--to the extent, I think, that fresh, intelligent, quirky writing about books, the sort of thing you can find in The Believer, has been forgotten about a little. I don't know whether it's a function of my age or the age, but I feel I've consumed enough junk--and dissections of junk--to last me a lifetime. I've got to the stage where I at least need to mix it up a little, eat a more balanced cultural diet.

A most poignant line of the book: "We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too." Please expand on the role of the reader and the writer and each of his/her responsibilities.

Oh, man, that's a long essay. I will always, always maintain that if a writer wants a book to sit in a bookshop with a price on its back, then he has a duty to entertain--there's very rarely an excuse for a book to be boring and/or hard work. If it's hard work, then a writer hasn't done the job properly. As for the readers: they have more responsibility than they realize. But I think we all know when we're letting a book down--when we read sloppily, or tetchily, or with extreme prejudice, or bittily--there are a lot of sins a reader can commit.

Was it difficult to write from a reader's perspective?

No! I've been a reader for over forty years now, and a published writer for thirteen. The reader's instinct still comes first. Plus, I wanted to become a writer because I was a reader--all writers do. (Or at least, I wouldn't want to read anything written by someone who didn't read much.)

What's next after the new book? Any plans?

I've been working on a couple of screenplays for a while now, and I'll be working more on them in '05. I started a novella, too, and I'd like to see where that takes me...It's always a liberation, finishing a book, because you realize that there was a lot of stuff jammed up behind it that can now float free. Some of it, I suspect, is now dead. But some of it isn't.

(2005-01-18)

Also by Tom Lynch

Tip of the Week
Chicago's resident badass artist and writer Tony Fitzpatrick visits Quimby's this week to present his newest creation, "The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City Volume 1," a new collection of collages and an ode to the city he loves
(2005-01-11)

Cartoon Network
A crowd of neighborhood fans gathers at Wicker Park's Quimby's for what could easily lead to disaster: four local graphic novelists, Anders Nilsen, Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz, and Paul Hornschemeier--collectively titled The Holy Consumption--plan to play their own version of "Win, Lose, or Draw" with the crowd as contestants
(2005-01-11)

Tip of the Week
DePaul professor Rachel Shteir certainly did a gigantic amount of research for "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show," her investigation of the history and significance of burlesque
(2005-01-04)

Music to our eyes
Over the final few months of 2004, a tub-full of music-related literature has hit shelves, including some yearly staples as well as some newcomer surprises
(2005-01-03)

Guide by Voices
(2004-12-21)

Tip of the Week
(2004-12-21)

Tip of the Week
(2004-12-14)

Tip of the Week
(2004-12-14)

Down with cream
(2004-12-07)

Tip of the Week
(2004-11-30)

Packer Green
(2004-11-30)

Tip of the Week
(2004-11-22)

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