Culture: The editor who decided Nick Hornby would make an engaging diarist of his own reading surely thought that he'd do for books what he did for records in High Fidelity. Vindela Vida of Believer magazine (for it was she) should not have been disappointed with Stuff I've Been Reading, Hornby's monthly column collected here: "Books are," he writes, "better than anything 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." Here is one of the rare occasions where Hornby's voice matches what he is saying perfectly. Elsewhere his genuine common touch is simply the medium through which an astute, funny, sensitive reader speaks. This makes The Complete Polysyllabic Spree a rare treat indeed: a not-very-bookish book about books.
Before reading this book, your reviewer had no idea what a Polysyllabic Spree was. And the only "snark" I was aware of appeared in Lewis Carroll. The Polyphonic Spree, I have since learned, is a choral rock band. Hornby adapts the name and applies it to a coven of robed Believer editors of his own invention. It's a running joke which doesn't get out of the starting blocks. Another meaning of "snark" does turn up in the OED; it means "to find fault with". Wanting their magazine to be free from spiteful reviews and backbiting - they're based in San Francisco, of course - the Believer editors have ruled out snarking. Snarking at anything is barred. A laudable rule, perhaps, but one which, frustratingly, constrains an arch snarker such as Hornby.
Hornby explains his populism by way of Tom Shone's comments on Spielberg's genius in Jaws: in a movie starring a rubber shark he finds room for artfully rendered moments such as when Brody's son mimics his father's worried finger-steepling at the dinner table. So it should be with books: sharks and finger-steepling. Such an aesthetic allows Hornby valuable insights from the outside: "we are being asked to imagine cultural judgements as a whole bunch of concentric circles. On the outside, we have the wrong ones, made by people who read The Da Vinci Code and listen to Celine Dion; right at the centre we have the correct ones, made by the snootier critics, very often people who have vowed never to laugh until Aristophanes produces a follow-up to The Frogs". Hornby is too humble to attempt a John Carey and pursue the implications of such intuitions. He does call What Good Are the Arts? "my new bible", agreeing with it all while claiming he has not the "breadth of reading" to have written a word of it. Yet Hornby has a capacity to state clearly, without, admittedly, deducing, what Carey spent a whole book pondering. Furthermore, Hornby tries to answer a much more important question: what joy are books? And he answers it without any of Carey's condescension.
Hornby is an approachable mixture of avidity and self-doubt. He quivers before his own ignorance, mortality and terrible memory while at the same time carrying that middle-class obsession with being well-read. For him, the "ninety-page classic is the Holy Grail" because it's easy to chalk up. When he finds he's read both Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Bob Dylan's Chronicles hot off the presses he feels himself the "mythical reader", managing to keep pace with "new and newsworthy" books, ready to throw an "Islington dinner party".
Journalism can often find its coffin between hard covers, Hornby's finds a vehicle for a wider readership, one which could not fail to be disappointed by this fresh, invigorating collection. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is the perfect tonic for anyone wearying of books or, dare I say it, the tyranny of the books pages.
Alan O'Riordan is literary correspondent with Magill and a freelance journalist and theatre critic
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree By Nick Hornby Penguin, 278pp. £16.99