Finished reading Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good last night. I haven’t read anything else by Hornby, but I enjoyed both the film adaptations of About A Boy and High Fidelity, and in the commentary for the latter, the Weitz brothers talked about how easy it was to make that film because of the great writing in the book.
So I thought I’d start with one I haven’t seen on film yet, and that was probably a good idea: no comparisons to make about how the story develops, the characters arc, or why the adaptation did this or that. Purely on its own merits, I think How To Be Good is a very well-written book, if a bit challenging in spite of its pervasive humor. Challenging in the sense that it’s like reading distilled anxiety on every page. (And hey minnaleigh: the narrator is, in a sense, unreliable. She’s flawed, for sure, and her flaws render the retelling of events that could be depicted in a very charitable, almost saintly way instead as very nearly malicious. Fascinating stuff, that.)
Overall, I recommend it. Just don’t read it when you’re on vacation. 😉