Rating: 
Summary: the top five are:
Review: After a conversation where I started to describe my extremely emotional reaction to the movie <i>High Fidelity</i> (set in Chicago, with the Kusacks'), a good friend told me to go read the book. Well, how could I say no to her? (hell, how can I say no to any woman? But that is not the discussion...)Overall, it was a good book. It seemed to be slow in parts. But I connected to the character, having lived in England for a few years (just before the book was published). I knew what they were talking about & where, which helped me read the book. I have not been reading much fiction lately; hell I have never read much fiction. Overall it followed the theme of the book, but it was adapted for the states & a stateside setting along with our feeble Americanized minds. Not the emotional response I was expecting, certainly not the response the movie provokes out of me. This would be a definite read the book before watching the move. I found myself comparing the book to the movie the whole way through, which was distracting as all hell. Quite a few say they see themselves when reading this book - I did not see that when reading the book. Why is that the main character proposes getting married because he does not want to "fight" anymore, not wanting to try finding 'the one'? WTF was that? Oh, I will just settle for you then.... I finished the book in Chicago, when I was up there for a conference. Weird how the movie was set there, and that is where I think about some of my exes. A light read, that you will easily get through in a short time. Most likely asking why & putting your own top five list together.
Rating: 
Summary: Then she asked me why I liked the book
Review: I recommended this book to someone I knew only through correspondence. When we finally met, she asked me (accusingly) why I thought she'd like the book, and indeed why I liked it. I knew then that things were going downhill. The main character, Rob, and his self-centered stumbling through life provide valuable lessons in how people view themselves and the world. Hornby gives away insights to male thinking that are tantamount to State Secrets of the Species. Have you ever kicked yourself for screwing up a perfectly good relationship? Read this book and feel a bit better about yourself knowing you were not the only one to do so.
Rating: 
Summary: Top Five
Review: I got scared reading this book. I thought, "Holy cow, this guy is describing me!" Considering Rob, the narrator of High Fidelity, that is not a good thing. We even have two of the same books on our Top Five (Red Dragon, and The Big Sleep). Rob is always making top five lists. The book opens with his top five break-ups of all time. Rob has just broken up with Laura and is doing the top five list to put his life in perspective and try to figure out how his life went so, so wrong. Hornby hits the nail head-on as to what guys are like and how they think. As such, Rob may not be a likeable character all of the time. He is actually very reprehensible in some respects. Rob's whole life is CD's. He owns a CD store. I have the feeling he would hate me if he ever saw my CD collection. He would hate most of us if he saw our CD collections. He runs the kind of store where customers are booted out for requesting a copy of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You." This is a very funny book. Hornby is full of great observations about modern life and relationships. The main fault of the novel however is that there is no plot. I often found myself not being pulled along with the story, simply because there wasn't one. When I put the book down I didn't feel a NEED to pick it up again. However, when I did pick it up, I laughed.
Rating:
Summary: Life According to Rob
Review: High Fidelity is very well written and engaging, funny and honest, and I think everyone should read it. Single guys in their late 20's or 30's who haven't quite grown up yet - I include myself in that category - will especially identify with the (often self-constructed) trials and tribulations of Rob Fleming. Maybe they'll even understand themselves a little better after reading it. And it helps if you're a record collector with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music, and pop culture in general, but I don't think that's absolutely essential to identifying with the central character. Neither is being British (Rob gets transplanted to Chicago in the movie version, and overall the movie is pretty true to the flavor of the book) - but you might learn some entertaining British slang, such as the difference between "snogging" and "shagging".
For me, High Fidelity consistently delivered flashes of recognition, a series of "I know exactly how he feels!" experiences, it was spookily dead-on. Examples: Ever gone out on the weekend with your parents as an adult and, nothing against your parents, but it makes you feel pathetic to be seen in public being escorted by your parents? Ever been obsessed with a woman and yet you can't picture what her face looks like, so that you end up imagining her with generic features, even though you have no trouble picturing the hot dog vendor you saw last week? Ever looked at a childhood photo of yourself and felt like you've failed him, because that's as good as his life is ever going to get? Hornby's descriptions are very true to life, sad and funny at the same time. At the end, it looks like at least the stage is set for Rob to finally move forward with his life (whether he actually does so is left open), and how he reaches that point is well worth seeing for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Real Romance
Review: High Fidelity is a glimpse into the way REAL relationships work. Throughout, the narrator, Rob, contradicticts the reality of love with the fantasy that he always thought love was. There are the mundane details of the break-up and the move out, plus the "lets still be friends" attempts that never work. Occasionally Rob seems like a bit of a dolt, and this observation makes one not always totally sympathetic towards him. His life seems to be drifting along and he doesn't seem to care either way. But this is the character and at least he is honest. I wouldn't call High Fidelity a "page turner". But it certainly is an easy read and a good one at that.
Rating:
Summary: Funniest book I have ever read
Review: Maybe it is because I lived in London amoung a bunch of music freaks right at the time this book was set but I thought it was hilarious. Even if you don't really care about London or music particularly, if you have ever had a crush on someone, you will relate to this insightful narrative.
I have been dating for a long time and have had my share of boyfriends but when I read this book I said to myself, "I finally understand men."
Nick Hornby has gone on to write some fantastic books but this book stands alone as a real classic.
Rating:
Summary: Lightweight but vastly entertaining
Review: I decided to give this book a read after seeing the excellent John Cusack film for the second time (and shame on you if you haven't seen it!). I wasn't sure what to expect of the novel, knowing as I did that, among other things, Cusack and director Stephen Frears had taken the liberty of relocating the story from London to Chicago. What other things might have been messed with? Not much, as it turns out. Never in the history of book-to-film translations (with the possible exception of Fight Club) have there been fewer alterations and deviations from the novel than in the case of High Fidelity. This is aided, of course, by the fact that the book, in trade paperback, consists of a slim 323 double-spaced pages. The end result is that in the film, no important scenes are omitted, and hardly any characters got the axe either. The flip side of the coin is that the book, as fiction, is a bit of a light lunch. Like the movie, the novel is narrated by Rob, the beleaguered owner of one of those wonderful out-of-the-way (translation: customer-free) used record stores, this one being named Championship Vinyl. After being abandoned by his pretty and smart girlfriend Laura for an aging, hawaiian-shirt- and ponytail-sporting, incense-burning New Age hipster named Ian, the perplexed Rob - who thinks in Billboard-style lists - goes on to tell us the stories behind his "all-time desert island top five" breakups, while in the present day desperately trying to win back his skeptical ex. Comedy ensues. This sort of story's been done before, of course, but one of the neat little twists is the tour Hornby gives us of the musical culture, where respect is earned by stumping people with encyclopedic knowledge of bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, and the undisguised contempt that the music elite, like the elites of all niche groups, express towards the everyday civilian. The pop culture at large permeates every facet of High Fidelity - certain passages don't make much sense unless you know what Rob means when he says, for instance, that someone reminds him of a character from Reservoir Dogs. This, of course, makes the book very much a novel of the 1990s - probably not something to be read twenty or thirty years from now - but unlike similar name-dropping books and movies, this novel is introspective about its own inseparable connection to the transitory. And this cuts to the heart of Rob's problems, because he's let the worship of the impermanent take over his life. "Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable," he muses, "or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?" Like all mass-culture junkies, Rob mourns for the loss of old favorites while simultaneously trying to get his hands on the next big thing. So it is with his love life. Rob could easily come off as a narcissistic jerk, but Hornby neatly pulls off the trick of making us see where he's been sabotaging his relationships with women with sympathy rather than scorn. And the mistakes Rob makes are the mistakes that many men have made, though perhaps not so hilariously. The book is short (another way of putting it, of course, is that it never outstays its welcome) and full of suitably quotable lines. The London setting really makes no difference to the story one way or another (though the British school system continues to confound me: for a while I was under the impression that the "sixth form" was akin to our sixth grade, and thus was in for a shock when Rob's youthful counterpart began indulging in heavy petting). As a comedy, High Fidelity is excellent, though as literature it's basically junk food; but for the eight or ten hours I was reading the book, I was fully under its spell. If we're being honest, how many other books can we say that about? I don't want to seem like I'm damning with faint praise: good comedy is harder by far than it looks, and even rarer is a book that leavens the humor with thoughtful characterization and crisp prose.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Novel by Britain's Most Accessible Novelist
Review: Far and away Hornby's best. Funny, sad, beautiful, real-seeming, a book that fully transcends cultural barriers. I've taught creative writing and contemporary lit. at several universities. Some of the best prose ever written has been published in the past couple of decades. Other favorite contemporary books in no particular order: THE NIGHT IN QUESTION, Tobias Wolff (the richest, roundest, most mature collection of stories by the world's best short fiction writer); ROCK SPRINGS, Richard Ford (easily Ford's best -- it rivals T. Wolff's best short fiction -- and the only one of Ford's books I find particularly readable); THE TAO OF MUHAMMAD ALI: A FATHERS AND SONS MEMOIR, Davis Miller (a remarkable, dreamy, beautiful nonfiction novel --the American equivalent of HIGH FIDELITY and N. Hornby's first book, FEVER PITCH -- by a fairly unheralded American who's quite well appreciated in the UK); THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, Tim O'Brien (jaw-droppingly well written, timeless feeling); TRACKS, Louise Erdrich (for me, the best -- and most real-world mythical -- in her interrelated series of novels). I can't imagine a more powerfully written, life-affirming, entertaining group of books than those I've listed above. Happy reading!
Rating:
Summary: Funny, but don't expect nothing very deep
Review: It's strange what happened with "High fidelity". Everybody talked so much about this book, saying it was excellent, intelligent, funny, etc; the movie was very good; most reviews at Amazon.com praised it as being an instant modern classic of the 90s. Well, I guess I was expecting too much, and, in the end, I was a bit let down. In "High fidelity", Rob Fleming is author Nick Hornby's alter ego. Rob is in his mid-thirties; his friends, his girl-friends, a promising carrer, everything got stuck in his past. Now he's the owner of Championship Vinyl, a store that sells old albuns and records for rock-afficcionados, and his store is not doing so well. And, to top it all, his present girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for another man, older, hairier and who wears leather pants. To face this separation, Rob starts to analyse what went wrong in his life. His mania is to make "Top 5 lists" of everything, and he tells the story in the book by reviewing the "Top 5 toughest break-ups in my life". Along with that, he reviews his relationship with his parents, with the only two co-workers at the store, and with an american folk-singer trying to make a career in London. Nick Hornby writes freely, I felt his narration almost like a speech put into words, and that's nice. But Hornby created Rob as a too much bitter person, and sometimes I got tired of his winning and complaining about everything; that's why I didn't give "High fidelity" 5 stars. What I think is good is that Hornby didn't attempt to analyse male life in the 90s too deeply (that was not the book's proposal, anyway). Hornby just exteriorized his own feelings and transformed them in this book. Grade 8.1/10
Rating:
Summary: Hysterical
Review: High Fidelity tells the story of Rob, a thirty-something record store owner who is growing increasingly unsure of himself. Not only has his girlfriend, Laura, just moved out, and his business started to suffer, he's begun to look retrospectively on his life and realized that his relationships have never really worked out. Confiding in the reader, he takes us on a journey to find out just why that is. High Fidelity, I found, works on a lot of levels -- although they're perhaps levels that you wouldn't expect a novel to work out. As a love story, it's not going to touch your heart. As a tragedy of everyday living, Rob's story isn't going to make you cry (Rob doesn't deserve much sympathy very often -- and he certainly never demands it!). As an epic, well, it's just a story of an everyday guy. But High Fidelity undeniably strikes a chord. It's contemporary and legitimate and everything a modern novel should be. It deals with issues of growing old, when to start a family, our own insecurities (and the insecurities in others we often don't see), measures of success, money and relationships, friendship... all the good stuff. And it's one helluva ride getting there, too. Hornby's prose is wonderful -- brisk and hilarious. Hornby has a good eye for the ironies of everyday life, and the ironies of Rob's life. The story's told in the first person perspective, which is handled flawlessly. Everything's pure Rob, and as anybody who's seen the movie (which rightfully, stays true to its source material) knows, he's quite the interesting person to be around. It's a novel that's hard to critisize. If you're not a fan of contemporary writing and stories about modern urban society, you're not going to like this. There's little I would call timeless or objective about this novel. It's not Romeo & Juliet. But if you're looking for something contemporary, something hilarious and touching, you're not going to find a better novel than this one. Matty J
|
