... As the breadwinner (David was too busy writing down 'How to be Good' he didn't actually have a job) shouldn't she have had more of a say about how her salary was spent? Hornby plots this nicely, by giving David an opportunity to be very forgiving about Katie's affair - depriving her of the ... Read review
In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she ... more
became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her h...
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In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she ... more
became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her h...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
In Nick Hornby's How To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she ... more
became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her h...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
In Nick Hornby'sHow To Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she ... more
became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her hu...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
According to her own complex moral calculations Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a ... more
doctor after all and doctors are decent people and on top of that her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good - properly maddeningly give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions. Nick Hornby's brilliant new novel a No. 1 bestseller in the UK and Ireland offers a painfully funny account of modern marriage and parenthood and asks that most difficult of questions: what does it mean to be good?
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Advantages: Ooh, it's intelligent, funny, thought provoking - what more do you want? Disadvantages: Ok so I admit the dodgy cultural references can be a bit wearing but nobody's perfect!
...more of a say about how her salary was spent? Hornby plots this nicely, by giving David an opportunity to be very forgiving about Katie's affair - depriving her of the chance to really get mad at him, and his increasing smugness. Not fair, I cried! If it was my bloke giving away my kids toys I would tell him to shape up or ship out - as would most women I suspect.
The plot counts for little in this book - there's not much of it, and ... ...characters and their interactions. Family life, middle class relationships, popular culture in Britain in the noughties - it's all here for us to think and ponder over. And we may all ask ourselves - are we *good* people? And who gets to define what that is anyway?
It's thought provoking stuff.
Hornby's trademark is his constant references to popular culture - and here they fly thick and fast. Everything from Posh 'n Becks ... more
Hornby's back! And readers, get this. This time he's wearing high heels and mascara - would you Adam and Eve it?!
If like me you already love this mans work, you will no doubt be champing at the bit to read his latest. Well, I have no patience. I got the damn thing from my book club and was unable to delay the gratification - ripping through it, eyes aching, in three nights.
(Note: I can *only* read in bed. Don't ask why.)
So, what are we expecting here? Well, if you've read his other stuff, you'd be forgiven for thinking this may be another journey into the psyche of the middle class North London lad/bloke/man - with humourous insights into relationships, popular culture etc thrown in for good measure. Well, it kind of is and it kind of isn't.
This book is narrated by a woman. Yes, a *woman*! Katie Carr is our heroine - she's a disaffected GP, who does have kids and a husband but who sounds quite frankly like she could happily live without the lot of them. And she sounds suspiciously like Nick Hornby. OK, maybe Nick Hornby in a bad wig, or with a slightly high voice, but Nick Hornby is so unmistakeably providing the voice of this woman, it's a wee bit hard to visualise her (I used Haydn Gwynne from Peak Practice/Merseybeat as my imagined Katie - it helped me a lot).
Katie doesn't talk about the things normal women do in books. She never mentions any of her friends, for instance. She is clumsy and embarrassed when describing sex - and given that she has an affair in this book, that's a wee bit of a problem. She doesn't appear to have any tender feelings towards her children, and she makes no reference *whatsoever* to her own appearance - so we're left with characters from bland tv shows to fill in the blanks. And yet... everything she says - every observation, every caustic comment - leaves us gasping with total recognition.
Reading this book was sooo intensely personal for me. Two reasons: Katie's 'angry marriage' and her husband David's 'politically correct re-awakening'. I'll do them in order.
OK: have you ever had a relationship where you actually end up hating your partner, and effectively waging war on each other? Well, I have. And I suspect millions of others have too, or else this story came from nowhere. The heavy silences, the loaded questions, the veiled accusations - the blatant insults. Katie comes home a day early from her two-day conference. David greets her with, 'what, you talked crap at twice the normal speed?'
I recognised every word of this - and laughed out loud at most of their conversations. Everybody out there who has ever been involved with a bitter, cynical, angry and frustrated partner will know what I mean. Why not leave, then? I hear you ask. Well, I did eventually, and Katie's pretty near to it too as this story gathers pace.
But Katie is forced to re-assess the old, angry, bitter husband she has come to secretly (and not so secretly) loathe.
At this point readers, it may be best if you just suspend all your usual criteria for what is and isn't realistic. Being faith-healed by a man called DJ Goodnews, bringing him to live in your house, and undergoing a fundamental personality change because of it may not look like a very believeable thing for David to do. I'm with you on this one, but hey, we need a story so let's run with it!
It is this transformation, and poor Katie's struggle do deal with it that gave me the strongest shivers of recognition. That was *my* childhood. Yup, I was brought up by middle class liberals who thought that pretty much everything kids like to do was some form of 'sin' against all the poor, the oppressed and the impoverished masses in the world.
In my house, it wasn't enough to donate to Oxfam, or to do a sponsored walk for the elderly. We were made to face up to the worlds inequalities much closer to home. One year, my mum told us all she didn't want any Christmas presents - we were to give the money to the starving in Africa. And all of this was on top of the fact that almost everything we wanted to watch on TV was frowned upon - on grounds of sexism, racism, fascism, or whatever 'ism' was that weeks cause of choice.
For this reason, I found myself identifying most with Katie's son Tom, who simply can't get his head round why his dad had given away his Playstation to some disadvantaged kids. I felt I was there with him as he asked (quite rightly) 'but why do *we* have to give our stuff away?' Why us?
This really made me think. Where does charity begin - and who deserves our charity? Our kids? Our neighbours kids? Some poorer kids we have never met? Or do we go the whole hog like David, and ask random homeless people to come and live in our houses?
I wrestled with this a bit, but kept coming down on Katie's side. As the breadwinner (David was too busy writing down 'How to be Good' he didn't actually have a job) shouldn't she have had more of a say about how her salary was spent? Hornby plots this nicely, by giving David an opportunity to be very forgiving about Katie's affair - depriving her of the chance to really get mad at him, and his increasing smugness. Not fair, I cried! If it was my bloke giving away my kids toys I would tell him to shape up or ship out - as would most women I suspect.
The plot counts for little in this book - there's not much of it, and what there is develops pretty slowly. This book is about characters and their interactions. Family life, middle class relationships, popular culture in Britain in the noughties - it's all here for us to think and ponder over. And we may all ask ourselves - are we *good* people? And who gets to define what that is anyway? It's thought provoking stuff.
Hornby's trademark is his constant references to popular culture - and here they fly thick and fast. Everything from Posh 'n Becks and Ali G through to Tracy Emin and the cast of Friends gets name-checked. The kids don't just watch tv. They watch 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' - you get the idea.
Personally, I think Hornby shoots himself in the foot with this technique. OK, we all like to hear a wee mention of somebody we're familiar with - but by cataloguing every single little cultural detail, he is putting his book into such a specific timeframe, it's dated by the time we get the book in our hands. This was a big problem for me in 'About a Boy' - where the death of Kurt Cobain was a central plot device. This book is now consigned to the 'retro' or 'nostalgia' shelf already. I know that when the action took place, I myself was only 19 years old.
And here again, Hornby name-checks a specific song - '1, 2, 3, 4, Get with the Wicked'. Yes, that dodgy rap track that has now been long forgotten. I can't even remember who sung it - if I ever knew to begin with. Look mate - the pop charts wait for nobody. A big hit today is tomorrows embarrassment. Leave out the music references - unless they're *meant* to be dated. Your book's current relevance is depreciating daily because of it!
OK, this is a minor gripe. I've given this book five stars. It deserves more - it's painfully funny, it's thought provoking and the dialogue throughout is utterly priceless.
I can't wait to read it again - I'll give it a couple of months and then rediscover it.
This book represents Nick Hornby at his brilliant, intelligent best. Damn, he's *GOOD*!
Advantages: Nice character development Disadvantages: Bit slow for some people
...with all things Arsenal and how that obsession impacts upon basic human relationships. In How to be Good he is once again on the subject of relationships however this time the story is told from the female point of view.
I always imagine it must be a bit harder for a writer when they write from the perspective of the opposite gender however in this book Hornby makes a pretty good job of it, having said that as I'm male maybe he is just confirming ... ...book is about relationships and how people sometimes just accept the life they lead without really questioning it. It is not meant to be a feel good book, there is a lot of friction within the book however there are also some very funny lines as well which is one of the strengths of Hornby writing, the ability to capture the self defacing humour of the British. The main character Katie goes through a huge amount of soul searching in the book and ...
atticusuk 08.04.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
...Boy, and the parts of How To Be Good that I’d read novelized in the Times had been fantastic. Plus, this was the paperback version. But, it wasn’t the mainstream paperback version. It was a limited edition £9.99 version which, in my book, is almost as bad as a hardback. Hardbacks aren’t me – they look funny on the shelf for a start – and this version, although softback, was also big. Too big. So, with a heavy heart, ... ...me, there’s no comparison. ********* How To Be Good Published by Penguin ISBN 0 140 28701 9 £6.99 rrp (but you'd be mad to pay that) ~13 x 20 cm – just the right size :p ...
zoe_page 18.05.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
Advantages: Some laugh out loud moments Disadvantages: wrote for the true Hornby fan
...a couple of days – how wrong I was, its less than 48 hours since I started the book – and well, I just finished it. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying I have a dislike of Nick Hornby, in fact if I was being honest I’d say that theres only 3 authors that I’d buy a book by solely because they’re involved in it – and Nick Hornby comes way above Stephen King and Alex Garland any day. For you ... ...book by how long it takes me to read it, the longer it takes me the more dull it is to me – and How to be Good broke my record reading time by a whole 2 days, so it has to be, well, errr, good doesn’t it? So first things first a little bit about the story-line – the biggest selling point of this title was that Nicks done this one from the female point of view rather than the male and well, to be honest, it’s a classic Hornby ...
Angelus 14.04.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
Advantages: tis Nick Hornby... Disadvantages: ...but not at his best
...that I have no idea how to be good. ‘Behave’ was a term I was incredibly comfortable with by the age of, I dunno, bout three months. If there was ever trouble, guaranteed it was my sticky paw to blame. I thought I was cute; I called it ‘mischievous with a smile’. My mum thought I was ‘brat like’. Looking back she was probably right… Anyways… I’m sure if I’d had Nick Hornby’s latest ... ...humane struggle with it and how bloody difficult it actually is to attain along with ones sanity. ‘How to be Good’ is a smashing book, the fourth of a smashing, eh, foursome from Mr Nick. Smashing smashing smashing! And that’s all I’ve gotta say about that!!! Only playing…. Like I’ve EVER written a review under 6980 words. .parp! Well here goes…
Nick Hornby has been one of my favourite authors for quite ...
Daysleeper 29.05.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
Advantages: Quite entertaining, cheap to buy Disadvantages: A story that doesn't develop, you constantly think you have just read the same thing on the page before, the ending
How to be Good by Nick Hornby was described as “Hilarious, sophisticated and compulsive” by The Sunday Times and was thrust upon me by the wife after I complained of being bored on the tube to and from work. She gave me a choice of two books, but How to be Good won as I had rather enjoyed Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and although it had remarkably sad undertones, was in parts a very funny book.
The book follows the life of Dr Katie Carr, mother to ... ...read her expressions and knows how to make her tick. Out of spite, rather than attending a doctor when he is laid up with back pain he visits a faith healer called GoodNews who pushes David onto a path of enlightenment. Unfortunately for Katie, David wants to drag her along with him and so the story continues with conflicts with the in-laws, taking in the homeless and David’s plan for everyone to give away their earnings to feed the world! At 244 ...
Badger_Boy 01.02.2005
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of How to Be Good - Nick Hornby
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Advantages: Easy read, excellent writing style Disadvantages: Perhaps trivialises issues, but it's just a story!
of the problems the characters seem to have brought on themselves...but then that's the case with life really.
Frustrating as it is, and unrealistic as the story is - it is just that, a story. So, there's not too much point dwelling on the ins and outs of it!
Finally
NickHornby is an excellent writer - black humour, just how I like it! I feel that the book would appeal to those who like writers such as Ben Elton, Rob Grant and Andrew Holmes (3 of my favourite writers). But I'd say that even if you're not a Ben Elton fan you should still give it a go.
Since reading this I went on BookMooch (a site where you give away books you don't want and get books you do want) and have ordered "About A Boy" and "HowtoBeGood" also by NickHornby. Nothing better to get me back into a reading mood than finding a new author - well, new to me ...
Advantages: An interesting idea Disadvantages: You can't feel sympathy for the main character
of the people in his apartment building as he falls past their storey and we are introduced to them via a little glimpse of their day, as well as meeting his estranged wife and daughter.
The whole story is written largely without speech marks and paragraph breaks, which seems tobe a very popular style at the moment, as it's the third book I've read this year written that way. If it's the first time you come across this style of writing, it can be a little confusing, but once you get used to it, you stop noticing and it becomes quite an open and flowing style.
There are elements of NickHornby's "HowtobeGood" in the basic story, one of a man who is only trying to help but hasn't really thought it through. This time around it's his own decision, rather than being influenced by someone else, and the book isn't filled with the same level ...
Advantages: Funny Disadvantages: Read the book before you see the film
Marcus? which I think makes the book laugh out loud funny. Many of the views/thoughts you expect of Will actually come from Marcus? view point and vice versa. I don?t want to give too much of the story away so I will leave at this.
If you are a teenage boy, a grown man or a woman who enjoys a good read and a good laugh at the opposite of sex then I would definitely recommend giving this book a go. It is 278 pages of humour with a quick pace so you don?t feel like you?ve been reading the same anecdote for hours. There are also some very touching points in the book but these are far outweighed by the entertaining aspect of the story.
The book is written by NickHornby, author of Fever Pitch, HowtobeGood and High fidelity which have all been best sellers and all but one turned into a film.
I actually borrowed the book from a friend ...
According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's doctor, after all, and doctors are decent people, and on top of that, her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions...Nick Hornby's brilliant new novel offers a painfully funny account of modern marriage and parenthood, and asks that most difficult of questions: what does it mean to be good?
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