Finding Nick Hornby

What I’m reading today is a collection of essays called Songbook by Nick Hornby, my new favorite writer. I stumbled onto Nick Hornby because my Comcast bill was too high. Here’s how that happened: an AT&T salesman came to the door a while back and put together an equivalent internet and TV package for $40 a month less than what I was paying. Not wanting to switch service, I called Comcast, and lo and behold, it turns out that for $40 less a month I could keep my service and add a phone line and a premium TV channel called Starz. Having lived in Europe for a bit I can tell you stuff like this is why I love America!

Not that I’m not irritated by the overbearing “z” in Starz, but what are you going to do? I started exploring the On Demand Starz movie listings and didn’t get too far in the alphabet when I found a movie called An Education. I saw Carey Mulligan had been nominated for a best actress Oscar for it, so I decided to watch a while and see if it captured my attention. Within the first few minutes she’s walking home from school in a downpour carrying her cello and a guy in a sports car pulls up and says something like, “Look, I don’t think you should get in a car with a stranger, but I’m a music lover … so could I give your cello a ride home while you walk alongside?” That was all it took to hook me.

You’ve probably never heard of the movie because there are no explosions or guns or car chases, but it is funny, intelligent, heartbreaking, joyful, real and well worth giving a couple of hours of your life to. The cast includes two actors whom I always seem to enjoy: Emma Thompson and Alfred Molina.

Further exploring the “A” section of my new toy, I found the Hugh Grant movie About a Boy. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I knew I’d been told that this was a good movie, so I watched it and was delighted. If I still had my old job in youth ministry I would make everyone I worked with watch this movie. The film’s title has two meanings, you see, because it’s not only about a needy twelve-year-old boy named Marcus but it’s also about the equally needy adult boy played by Hugh Grant, and if you are doing youth work and don’t realize there is just as much redemption going on for you as for the kids you are working with, well then you aren’t being honest with yourself. Anyway, if you’ve seen the movie, you will understand that I will never hear “Killing Me Softly with His Song” the same way again, nor ever again feed bread to a duck without laughing.

As is my habit, I went online to learn more about these two movies and discovered they were both written by Nick Hornby. I looked him up and found out that he is my doppelganger – almost exactly my age, bald, and he writes a lot about sports and music. Never mind that he’s British, an atheist, and very successful as a writer. I won’t let a few details like that bother me, my brother!

I found another book of his had been made into a movie called High Fidelity, and, as with About A Boy, I knew I’d heard it was good. I watched that courtesy of my son’s girlfriend’s free trial of Netflix, and liked it, too. John Cusack convincingly plays a record store owner who knows more about music than relationships. I suppose the genre of the film is “romantic comedy,” but it’s not very romantic and at times is starkly painful rather than funny. Like the other two movies it is intelligent and real, and really better than at least 95% of the stuff filling our theaters.

Now I’m reading Songbook, which I bought for a penny online, so I have to apologize to Nick Hornby and say that although I’m a new fan, I haven’t actually spent any money supporting your work yet. But give me time. Last night I read a line that made me envious. I wish I could write like he does. In a discourse on why love songs are the only type of songs that really work, he goes off on a riff about social conscience songs and writes, “And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway?” Exactly.

He knows way more music than I do. Since “new music” for me tends to be anything Paul McCartney has done since the breakup of The Beatles, I find myself listening to songs I’ve never heard before in order to understand what he’s writing about. Last night I listened to songs by both Nelly Furtado and Rufus Wainwright, which, I’m guessing, might have made me one step closer to cool if I’d been listening to them eight years ago when this book was published. Oh well.

Look for the name Nick Hornby. You won’t regret it.