SHAKESPEARE
WROTE FOR MONEY:
AN INTRODUCTION.
BY SARAH VOWELL
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The following is Sarah Vowell's affectionate introduction from Shakespeare Wrote for Money, Nick Hornby's third and final collection of essays from his monthly column in The Believer magazine, "Stuff I've Been Reading."
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I like liking things. It's just that there are more books to like than anyone can ever read. Which, granted, is an uptown problem, but a problem nonetheless. I'm looking at my teetering to-do stack right now: the new thriller by Irish writer Tana French; Trying Leviathan, one of those 19th-century legal chronicles that the kids are into these days, about the 1818 trial that decided whether or not whales, taxonomically speaking, are fish; biographies of Will Rogers and Captain Cook; a history of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater; Richard Price's Lush Life; a few petal-thin volumes of poetry because I've been on this kick where, before I face the morning paper's apocalypse roundup, I read a poem. I had hoped this would make me start each day in awe of humanity. Sometimes it works, but mostly I just read the news imagining melting polar ice caps drowning all the Emily Dickinson paperbacks in the world.
Lurking in the stack are five crumbling old novels by Earl Derr Biggers I scored from used-book stores on the cheap. My whole life I was under the impression that Biggers's tales of the Honolulu police detective Charlie Chan were racist claptrap and thus—hooray—one less thing to read. But then a friend gave me a copy of The House Without a Key, the first in the Chan series, and it turned out to be both charming and suspenseful and, by the way, partially about racism, in that the citizens of prewar Oahu are forced to deal with a kindly, Sherlock-level genius who happens to be Chinese. And so, alas, I am compelled to crack open every one of Biggers's musty art-deco covers with something close to what Galway Kinnell described as "the sadness of joy." (Another byproduct of reading a poem a day is that it leads to the lame habit of quoting poets instead of more morally defensible sources like Human Rights Watch or Superbad.)
That to-do pile of mine is what Nick Hornby labels "Books Bought" in his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column in The Believer magazine. The fact that his "Books Bought" list is so often so different from his "Books Read" list makes his portrait of a real reader the most accurate I have ever seen. The hope! The guilt! The quest for shelving!
I'm dismayed by how cheered up I was when the September 2006 issue of The Believer arrived and under "Books Read" Hornby had put down "none." In that column, collected herein, he confesses that he didn't read a book at all because something called "the World Cup" was on TV. I'm not entirely sure what that is, as I do not live in the world; I live in the United States. But from what I can tell, he didn't crack a book because this World Cup thing was as all-consuming a free-time eater-upper as the DVDs of the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica were to me. Not that I'm convinced that this Ukraine v. Tunisia rivalry he describes has the depth of feeling and moral ambiguity so dramatically summoned by the space humans' ongoing war with the Cylons the humans themselves created, but then again what does?
"Stuff I've Been Reading" is a subset of what Hornby's been doing—traveling, worrying, parenting, getting married, and (spoiler alert) being British. After seeing the German film The Lives of Others, he picks up a history of the East German secret police and is intrigued by the "implausibility" of its true anecdotes, thereby identifying the secret of all great nonfiction—that it seems unbelievable. He hears a cover of "Ain't No More Cane" in a bar and reads Across the Great Divide, about the Band.
Sometimes he reads books simply because his sister's husband wrote them. "I have the cleverest brother-in-law a man could wish for," he declares, on the subject of Robert Harris's Imperium. Lest ye roll your eyes at such nepotism, think back to Harris's Pompeii, a thriller whose plot revolves around hoping an engineer can mend the aqueduct in ancient Pompeii on the eve of the famous eruption of Vesuvius. Even though the reader knows full well that the whole town will be buried alive, and therefore who the hell cares if the aqueduct gets fixed or not, Harris is so riveting that the reader can't help but root for the stupid aqueduct to be repaired. I bet every Guy Fawkes Day Hornby's extended family is gathered around the traditional Guy Fawkes Day sugarplum goose curry, or whatever it is the English spend their holiday ha'pennies on these days, and Harris has the whole clan on the edge of its wing-chair seats with yarns about a Russian bike messenger trying to deliver an important package to Czar Nicholas II on firing-squad day. The brain knows the Romanovs will be dead by the time the cyclist shows up and yet the heart still hopes he can patch his flat tire in time.
Mostly Hornby's monthly syllabus progresses from one book to another. "Reading begets reading," he notes. George Orwell's writing on Henry Miller, for instance, leads Hornby to Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Or, more interestingly, nonfiction on the horrific consequences of climate change leads Hornby to fiction set in the future for the simple reassurance that humanity might actually have a future. (Things might be looking up, Emily Dickinson paperbacks.)
With every installment, Hornby's Believer column about what he's reading or not reading or hopes to someday read wormed its way onto my to-do stack. So it is with the pleasure of displeasure that I report that this collection of Hornby's Believer columns is to be the last. He's quitting "Stuff I've Been Reading" so as to "spend more time with his family." What—they don't let you read books in rehab? Kind of one of those good news / bad news situations: one less thing to read but one less thing to like.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Shakespeare Wrote for Money: An Introduction By Sarah Vowell
Q&A With the Head of My Carpool By Jon Methven
FactCheck.org's Coverage of Elliott Blaufuss's 2008 Halloween Party By Jeffrey Day
David Foster Wallace: A Profile By Bill Katovsky
Fifty Years of Popular Songs Condensed Into Single Sentences By Marc Haynes
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