Like most people, I’m good at coming up with an idea, good at starting a project, good at setting a plan into motion, but not always great at seeing it through.
About two weeks ago I started a blog series with the intent of highlighting some of the insightfully inspiring books I’ve read this year, and the blog posts that they helped me spark to life. I only made it through two installments of this series before getting distracted by other blog ideas.
I always succumb to a small burst of serotonin laced excitement when I finish a book, because I get to start a new one. Even within the rush of dopamine that comes after I crack open the cover of a new book, there is the sensational thought of what book I’ll start after this fresh one. At the beginning of a book I am already pondering the next one. I am much like Pamela Paul in that “I am always…pining for the next book”, always lusting after “the forward movement,” lost in ecstasy and “the anticipation of what book comes next”. Not long after my Matt Haig book reading bender, I was looking through my bookshelves trying to decide what to start. Itching with the need to chase the dragon, I noticed I had a books by Nick Hornby that I hadn’t read yet. I burned through one, and before I knew I had gone through another two.
I started with A Long Way Down, and quickly followed it up with About a Boy and Funny Girl. I won’t lie, Hornby’s books didn’t hit in quite the same way Haig’s, but they were refreshing and delightful. They are fun to read. They filled with interesting and quirky characters that are flawed and fucked-up in the most glorious and hopeful of ways, and they find their way to meaning and belonging not in spite of their many faults and foibles but because of them, because of their ability to own them, to embrace them, and to recognize them in someone else too.
If you’d like to read the blogs I wrote that make reference to Hornby’s books, you can find them below: