The Polysyllabic Spree

Last Friday my son started saying, “I want a tiger book.” We have no idea why. We searched all of his books for one that might fit the “tiger book” description and there was nothing that earned Aden’s Tiger Book Seal of Approval. We then decided it might be fun to take Aden to the book store so he could possibly find a tiger book. He’s gotten old enough to where we don’t really fear the unexpected with him in public anymore. He’s just started with mini tantrums though, but he can be easily talked out of those most of the time. The next morning we went to one of those big book stores. It’s the one that I hate, rather than the one that I just tolerate. Hint: the name of this store boastfully claims to have a very large inventory of books, which, by the way, I feel is not possible considering the size of the floor space and the massive volume of non-book merchandise that they stock. One additional note about this chain of book stores: I worked at the one in Macon, GA for about 3 months one time. Despite it being a large, cookie cutter chain store I was still excited about working in a book store. That excitement was quickly drained within hours of my first day on the job. See, this place does not have an inventory system, which is just crazy for a store of its size. You can walk in and ask if they have a book and unless the person you ask just happens to know (long shot), you are out of luck. Oh, they can tell you what section it would be in if they did carry it and they’d be glad to order it for you, but they can not look it up in the computer and say, “Yes. We have that. It’s in the Shitty Retail Practices section. Thank you and come again.” Anyway, we browsed for a while and Aden played with the toy train set they had set up in the Children section. Amy and I both found a book we wanted and Aden found a book he deemed worthy enough to call the tiger book.

The book I picked up was Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree. I started reading Nick Hornby when I just happened to pick up a paperback copy of High Fidelity while shopping one day. I had never heard of the book or the author before that day, but the first sentence on the back had me hooked. “Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store.” Sold! When I read that sentence in 1996 it might as well have been a summary of my ambition(s) at the time. I had no desire to go to college nor did I have a clue of what I wanted to do with my life. I already had “pop music junkie” down and “owning a semi-failing record store” sounded pretty good to me. Hell, it still does (although now my adult sensibilities won’t accept the “semi-failing” part). That random $10 I threw down that day has led to a steady stream of great albums and books, some written or compiled by Mr. Hornby and others he has just recommended. It has been an incredibly satisfying artist/consumer relationship. I feel I owe him a thank you card or something.

His new book is a collection of monthly articles he writes for The Believer about the books he has purchased the previous month and the books he has actually read the previous month. This might not sound exciting to you, but when you enjoy the way someone writes and that person has never (or very rarely) burned you in the past with his suggestions of what to read, watch, or listen to, well that’s a recipe for success in my book. Also, saying that it’s just about the books bought and/or read in a given month is a bit of an over simplification. Nick Hornby, unlike any other author I’ve ever read, really understands how people consume pop culture. Maybe “consume pop culture” is a poor choice of words. Let me put it another way. The way I purchase and enjoy art of all forms (as well as the way my friends do) is completely reflected in what Hornby writes. In his previous works he has mainly focused on music. With Spree Hornby seems to be defending his own line of work by doing for books what he has repeatedly done for music. For instance here’s an excerpt from the March 2004 article:

Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -- Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and then you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

That’s good stuff and it has strong possibilities of actually holding up; yet while reading it I thought if I were the one that came up with that, I would have spent the next week in self doubt coming up with a bunch of examples to counter my own argument. Hornby kind of covers that with his talk of Blonde on Blonde and Citizen Kane, but wait a second, here’s an excerpt from April of 2004:

Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything—how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I read four really good books this month, but even so, my cultural highlights of the last four weeks were not literary. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that’s a hole in my argument right there—one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?); I saw Jose Antonio Reyes score his first goal for Arsenal against Chelsea, a thirty-yard screamer, right in the top corner; and someone sent me a superlative Springsteen bootleg, a ’75 show at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr with strings, and a cover of “I Want You,” and I don’t know what else. Like I said, I loved the books that I read this month, but when that Reyes shot hit the back of the net, I was four feet in the air…So there we are, then. Books: pretty good, but not as good as other stuff, like goals, or bootlegs.

Those two passages remind me of the way I talk with my friends. In fact, I once came up with a system to determine whether something was great art or not. (By the way, using the word once in the previous sentence is just being generous. I do that sort of crap all the time. I said once because I’m thinking of just one in particular that could be used for all different forms of art.) I know I sent it in an email and I will search for it later. If I find it I’ll post it later and we can all enjoy and/or ridicule my goofy desire to rank and draw correlations between the different fields of popular culture.

To actually make this rambling mess seem more like a book review I’ll leave you with this: The Polysyllabic Spree is a fun read. If you are an avid reader yourself, it will get you thinking about what it is that makes you love books so much and why. You’ll also see that you are not alone in your reaction to reading bad books or your giddiness when reading the good ones. It’s also a very quick read, so if you are not an avid reader and want to know why someone else is, this wouldn’t steal away too much of your TV time.