Housekeeping vs. the Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in Reading Chronicled by the National Book Critics Circle Finalist for C

The book is great BUT... This is merely the second half of "The Polysyllabic Spree." Both the description and numerous reviews here call it a sequel, implying that it's a collection of his columns beginning AFTER the ones collected in Spree. Not so. The columns reprinted in Housekeeping are completely contained in Spree so if you have that book, you already have the columns in Housekeeping. Apparently other reviewers aren't actually reading the books they're talking about. But the columns themselves are excellent, even though I've now spent money on this particular set twice.

i have never seen the believer magazine. i don't know if mr hornby is still doing this column. i hope he is. the first volume of these collected essays "the polysyllabic spree," was addictive, so i was thrilled to see this second volume on my local barnes & noble shelves. i took it home with me, put all other reading material aside, and devoured it in an evening. just as addictive as the first book. long may mr hornby run. someday i hope to see more volumes of this material at bookstores than, say, volumes of patrick o'brian sea novels. i don't know what it says about me, but lately i've been enjoying reading what other people have to say about the fiction they are reading, more so than i am enjoying reading fiction myself. call me knucklehead johnson, i guess.

This is a book I read in 1 sitting. I love Nick Hornby's writing and, much like "The Polysyllabic Spree," (and yes, I know titles of books should be underlined or italicized, but I don't seem to be able to do that, so quotations marks it is!) this book makes me want to run to my local library and check out all the books he's talking about. Some sections of "Housekeeping..." are hilariously funny and many parts had me nodding and saying, "me too!". The introduction had me hooked when he said that sometimes it's just a lot easier to watch TV than read, but his book made me want to read more than watch television that night, and most nights since.

Time spent with Nick Hornby is always time well spent. In essay mode, he is a companionable conversationalist making sparkling observations, and since he hits so often on my cultural zeitgeist list, I feel like we're having a dialogue, not that he's doing a garrulous solo riff. HOUSEKEEPING VS. THE DIRT is the second collection of his mostly monthly reading column for "The Believer" magazine, covering much of 2005, right up to the June/July 2006 edition. Hornby, an incorrigible book acquirer, begins each month with the list of books bought and those actually read. His reading is eclectic, the choices often serendipitous, as in picking up a book a small child has yanked off the shelf, and the title sums up the range, from Marianne Robinson's critically acclaimed HOUSEKEEPING to Motley Crue's sensational THE DIRT. He recognizes that we don't read in a vacuum, we read while under the influence of moods and the events of our personal lives and the world, and as such our book acquiring and reading is a part of that dynamic, part of our fiber. It's nice to sit down with a guy who gets it that reading is cool and essential, that it's not a disassociated science or a substitute for life or something that distracts us unnecessarily from doing other things someone else may deem more useful.