A Long Way Down<\/i> by Nick Hornby<\/p>\n
A book about four people who are thinking of killing themselves by jumping off a roof didn’t really strike my fancy.<\/p>\n
But, Nick Hornby has a limited oeuvre just now… 5 novels (one of them young adult), some non-fiction focused on English Football1<\/sup> and music, and of course the delightful Believer<\/i> articles on reading. So, sooner or later, I’m was going to have to give A Long Way Down<\/i> a try, since it seemed unlikely that he was going to go off rambling about football or music too much in it.<\/p>\n The book popped up as available on PaperbackSwap.com, so I dropped a credit on it. As a bonus, whoever had it last left a hand drawn index-card-as-bookmark in it. So it had that going for it.<\/p>\n If High Fidelity<\/i>, About a Boy<\/i>, and How To Be Good<\/i> tie for first place, then A Long Way Down<\/i> comes in a not very distant and very readable second. But I think it only keeps from being a distant second by the presence of one of the four main characters, Jess, the crazy teenage girl; She’s got enough Quirk to her to keep the story going and interesting. The other characters are fine, but would probably fall flat without Jess stirring things up. <\/p>\n Then again, that’s not unreasonable considering they’re all suicidal.<\/p>\n ____________ A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby A book about four people who are thinking of killing themselves by jumping off a roof didn’t really strike my fancy. But, Nick Hornby has a limited oeuvre just now… 5 novels (one … Continue reading
\n1<\/sup> I tried to read Fever Pitch<\/i>. I really did. But it defeated me.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"