Rating: 
Summary: fantastic topic but a bit disappointing
Review: Nick Hornby's previous novels were very entertaining. When I read the blurb of this one, I couldn't wait to read it. The theme is very exciting and thought-provoking. However, I found it a bit slow in parts, and jerky in others. I particularly found the character of GoodNews believable and likeable, but he, too, petered out towards the end. However, I must admit that there were 3 places where I really did laugh out loud. Not great literature but a pleasant read.
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Summary: Too Much Reality?
Review: I didn't much enjoy Nick Hornby's "How to be Good." However, unlike some of the other reviewers, my issue with the book isn't that Hornby's characters are unrealistic--I thought his characters were believable and the situations entirely poissible. David's deelings with Goodnews are just a slightly more extreme form of a midlife crisis, but that doesn't mean that it's preposterous. I simply found the book to be very depressing, something I would not condemn a work for except that the reviews plastered on the back cover praise the work for its humor. There are funny moments, particualarly in Kate's attempts to handle her husband and daughter as they gang up on her, but overall the work is a rather upsetting look at a modern marriage. Although I didn't enjoy the book, I think the problem doesn't lie in Hornby's writing, but rather in what I felt was misrepresentation of the book's content by the publishing company.
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Summary: How to be good? Become Nick Hornby!
Review: Straight off, I was very excited for this book. There are some writers that I gobble up like candy. Hornby is definitely one of them. Through out the book he is posing the question of what really is true goodness. Is it having a beneficial occupation? Is it putting other people's well being before anything else? What takes away from your acts of goodness?Well, we don't necessarily get any answers to these questions, but we get to see all the different view points. This is a well written novel that attacks society's views on right and wrong.
Katie is our storyteller and she tells it with all the natural confusion and venom that someone in a loveless, lifeless, hate filled marriage would. Here is another character, though, that i don't 100% sympathize with. I am not sure if she is really a protagonist. It appears that the relationship has obviously gotten away from Katie and David. They have divided their lives between David being angry, hate filled and sarcastic, meanwhile Katie can feel like she is great person simply becacuse she is a doctor. Nevermind that she has let things escalate in her marriage to the point where she feels like she has to have an affair and, without warning tell her husband she wants a divorce. It even seems that perhaps if we were able to hear David's side of the story completely, we would know not all of his actions were done out of hate. She sees his unwillingess to divorce as a way of his controlling the her and being manipulative. Really, though, it appears to be based on the fact that he still loves her and finds their relationship something worth salvaging. Taking into account that, thanks to a faith healer, David becomes "good" and made the changes in himself that Kathy desperately wanted, she should be happy. However this goodness only drives them further apart. David becomes irrationaly good, neglecting the needs of family and dividing the children between the two of them, and partly showing Katie that her job is not enough to make her "good". Without telling everything, there is much focus on relationship, marriage, and what really constitutes a separation. Can David and Katie work it out or is giving up something they have already done? This is Hornby being quite good. I read through this novel in about 10 hours, and feel like there was plenty to absorb. The speed with which I read this book, given all that there is to think about, really shows how well written it is. I do think that Katie voice is a bit more masculine than most women, and she did remind me of other Hornby characters, but that does not stop this from being a good, no, a great book!
Rating:
Summary: Written with an honest confusion
Review: The heroine of this book is written in a very true voice (as a woman I recognised myself and my life almost instantly) and the author is clearly trying to write from a place of intellectual honesty - but his own confusion and unwillingness to make an ideological leap hold things back just as, in the end, the heroine holds her husband back...tenuously and doubtfully. Clearly Hornby has come to see, as many of us left of center have seen, that the "feeling and compassionate, tolerant" left is spinning out of control into a sort of hypocritical and infant fascism...but he doesn't know what to do about it...so he treads water, and the book does too. It was well worth reading, but in the end the author didn't quite have the cujones to take a firm stand...so there is a wishy washiness to it.
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Summary: How to be good is Good
Review: I have to read more of Hornby's works now that I finished How to be Good. It is very funny and enlighting - really grasps relationships, life, pop culture, and etc. I would highly recommend this book. Fast read.
Rating:
Summary: An Affair: Sticky Subject, Great Writing
Review: Katie, the heroine, was an epitome of a person that recognized problems in her marriage, wanting to change, and having the capacity to change but not having the courage to follow through because of the possible ramifications. This was the kind of problem, Katie, a mother of two preteen children faced in her life. In addition to this was the inability to escape for a couple of hours a week to enjoy good music and good book. Then there was a husband, a local columnist, who directed his cynicism towards the society and Katie herself who was cynical to her husband. Naturally there were conflicts of opinions, disagreements with ideals and clash of goals between the two.
While reading this book, I thought, these are the kind of problems many people are faced with in their lives, especially people in long-term relationships. So I ask, why chastise Katie for having an affair? That is where Nick Hornby came in to show us his talent as writer. Instead, you want to love and love Katie, and wished she stole peaceful moments alone.
How To Be Good cleverly showcased Katie and her naked honesty about her life in a troubled relationship, and how she managed to with pull things together was commendable but disappointing to those (readers like me) who wanted her to have more.
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Summary: Not Great Hornby - Read the othe two novels instead
Review: I have to agree with many of the reviewers' comments - Hornby has bitten off more than he could chew. There are no sympathetic characters, and Katie the Doctor is particularly whining. Hey Nick, why don't you create another intelligent female character like Laura from High Fidelity. There are some funny bits and wonderful dialogue, but the first two novels have so much more heart and soul.
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Summary: funny and heartbreaking insight into marriage and spituality
Review: I was very surprised that Mr. Hornby could write a book like this from a woman's point of view. The couple in this book are in deep trouble with their marriage. The husband, David is a cynical man who seems to have complaints abpout everything. He writes a small column in a English newspaper where he lives called "The angriest man in Holloway". It even has a picture of him scowling. He writes about old people and their "antics" on public transportation. How they never have their money ready for a bus ride, they never use the seats set aside for them in the front, and the most hilarious, why they stand up ten minutes before their stop only to fall over in an "alarming and indignified fashion". I know it is completly "politically incorrect" to laugh at others misfortune. I was actually enjoying the hilarity of this man taking the time to think and write about these things with such seriousness. He also gets his friends in the act with complaining about things like the decsion making process at Madame Trussaud's. Of course they think he is fall over funny and laugh and laugh. The author explains the friends are laughing with him not at him.I belevie they are unaware of how deep his anger is and how it shows itself in private with hi family, particularly with his wife. His wife, Katie, is a doctor who explains frequently that she is a good person and can't understand how she got into her marital mess. She does have an affair with a man only because he pays attention to her and gives her what she does not get from David. Positive reinforcment and tenderness. all the time she does still want her husband but she hates the fights they get into and how they seem to know excatly how to "get to each other". They also have two children who are caught in the middle. They seem to do what, I remember from personal experience, is to ignore the parents and hope things will get better. Then they become more vocal about the situation and start to behave with anger and hurt. They also ask questions which in most cases are ignored or explained away by the parents. Enter "DR. GOODNEWS. This guy is a piece of work. David goes to this guy, he finds in an ad, for his constant back pain.Modern doctors where unable to help him so he gave up on them. Miraculously David is healed by this DR. GOODNEWS using his hands. He then send his daughter who has cronic eczema. He also heals her. Somehow this DR. ends up moving in with the family. He actually helps David to become "spiritually enlitened" which not only end his anger but sends his family on an unbeleivable emotional odyssey. This book is hilarious despite the almost sickening relationship between David and Katie.I highly recomend this book to anyone who enjoys this kind of humor and insight into marriage.
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Summary: Very good take on NIMBY liberals
Review: This book is a very good take on NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) liberals- they believe that asylum seekers should be let in, just not to my street. Sure we want to do something about the homeless - just make them go away. The narrator in this story is in an unhappy marriage. Her husband is not very nice to her, but is that really grounds for a divorce? She seems to pride herself on what a good person she is - she is a doctor after all, and has to deal with boils and other icky things. Yet she does things that good people are not meant to do - like have affairs. Of course she can justify this - if only her husband was not so angry, if only he was good... This is very much a 'be careful what you wish for' story - her husband very much becomes less angry and more good. Exactly what she wanted. Only she can't stand his new incarnation either. The funniest bits of the book for me was the narrator having to re-examine herself, and modern day peer pressure. There is a scence where her husband empties out her purse and gives her money to a beggar. She is angry with him, yet realises that to the public watching, berating your husband for giving money to a homeless person makes you look very bad. There is also the scenes where her husband and DJ Goodnews (the apparant bringer of her husband's new found goodness) pursuade people to take the homeless into their spare rooms, and can't understand when things don't go according to plan. How much of many liberal's attitudes are really just talking the talk, but not walking the walk? How much is just saying the right thing to sound like a good person, yet not something you would be able to put into practice? I think that this is what Hornby is asking, and doing a very good job of making us think.
Rating: 
Summary: High Banality
Review: What on Earth has happened to Nick Hornby? In all of his previous books - fiction and non-fiction - Hornby had showed himself to be possibly the best writer of his generation. No-one else quite captured the 90's 'lad' culture nor the sense most men have of never quite wanting to grow up and join the adult world. Hornby's other books should be read by future generations as the best way of learning just what it was like for many people in Britain at the turn of the century. This latest book, however, is an utter disappointment. A turgid, pointless lump of a book, it fails to engage the reader on any level whatsoever. The central idea - of what it means to be a good person - is very intriguing, and the method Hornby uses to try and explore this - a family where one member undergoes a dramatic personality change - is a great idea. Sadly, Hornby does absolutely nothing worthwhile with it. He begins on familiar territory - the ennui of the middle-class North Londoner - and successfully draws you in with a well-crafted description of a marriage that has reached a stalemate. The rest of the book, however, mires itself in the most banal, unfunny stereotypes imaginable. The charitable characters are the worst possible self-righteous preaching types, and the central character is so spineless that she never brings herself to confront any of the contradictions being thrown at her. If Hornby is trying to use such extremes to make a point, he fails, as none of his characters really do anything meaningful after the initial premise is set up. If he is playing it all for laughs, it fails, as Hornby simply repeats the same tired scenarios until the reader is beaten into submission. Ultimately, Hornby cheapens the important issues he believes he is exploring, wastes the reader's time, and has probably left his publisher wondering why he paid so much money for a book that would have been tossed in the reject pile if it had been by anyone else. I suggest donating all copies of this book to the homeless to be used as bedding, and hope that Hornby will write his next book to engage the reader, rather than to fill up pages with random words.
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