Rating: 
Summary: I liked it
Review: I've read High Fidelity and About A Boy, and they are both two of my favorite books. Therefore, I was surprised by the serious tone of How To Be Good. Yet, after I got over the initial shock, I found that I was enjoying this novel. It's not as funny as High Fidelity or About A Boy (I can't imagine a movie based on this novel), but as a study in marriage, and in what it truly means to be charitable, it's highly entertaining. Actually, I can see this book as Rob and Laura (the main characters of High Fidelity), 10 years into their marriage, if Rob were to spontaneously decide to stop being cynical take up spirituality. My one gripe with the book is that Hornby's casual, slightly detached tone is better suited towards a male rather than a female. I didn't quite believe that the person telling this story was a woman. But that's my only issue; otherwise, the book was rather good.
Rating: 
Summary: One Thing To Remember
Review: Every decent book leaves the reader with at least one idea, memorable character or imprinted feeling. What I found unforgetable in this particular volume, was Hornby's description of how love disintergrates in a marriage. Not a dramatic betrayal, a sudden illumination, but a slow progress of decay that leaves people numb and enervated. Hornby writes about the "language of hurt" that couples develop. How we use our intimate knowledge of one another to jab and prode and scorn.
There is much more in the book, such as, the character of Goodnews who provokes both hope and skepticism. There is humor and wit and wonderful insights. But for those who have know the truth of how loves dies, this book is a bitter sweet chronicle of the vagaries of the human heart.
Rating:
Summary: Stick with boys, Nick
Review: I have read and loved all of Nick Hornby's books for their honest and hilarious look into the minds of committment-phobic men. This book was a huge disappointment, maybe because loutishness is not quite so funny on a woman. I have read reviews calling this book "hilarious," but didn't find it funny at all. Page after page of this woman complaining about her husband and children was just depressing to me.
Rating:
Summary: yawn. snore. How to be Bored.
Review: Nick Hornby has shown that once you get famous, you can get anything published and favorably reviewed by the media mafia. This book was truly boring, hard to believe it was written by the author of High Fidelity. Reminded me of having to sit through a two hour sermon.
Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: It takes a bit of effort to get into this book, but it's worth persevering. Hornby seems to pick up steam as he goes along. The satire gets funnier and funnier the deeper you get into the book. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Go on! It is OK to be Bad!
Review: These people are people you already know. In fact, you have met them. They are your next-door-neighbors, your doctor, your tennis partner. Nick Hornsby creates ordinary humans in all their brilliance. But no matter how much I recognized these charcters as people I knew, they were people I didn't want to know any better. They are the ones who are so inwardly focused that the only way they can relate to other humans is by how much benefit can be sucked from the relationship. These are the people who want to be patted on the back by other, like-minded people, for how Good they are. Ahhhh! I was so annoyed by these people and their strange feeling of superiority and their guilt for the same feeling that I desperately wanted to be Bad just so I wouldn't end up like them.
Rating:
Summary: More than Good enough.
Review: "I'm a good person. In most ways," narrator Katie Carr observes in Nick Hornby's 2001 darkly-funny follow up to HIGH FIDELITY and ABOUT A BOY (p. 60). HOW TO BE GOOD is Hornby's first novel written from a woman's viewpoint. After twenty years of marriage to David and raising her two children, "soul-dead" (p. 281) Katie Carr first has an affair and then moves out of the family house. But when her husband is converted from "The Angriest Man in Holloway" into a modern-day saint by GoodNews, a dreadlocked healer, Katie falls into a spiritual crises of her own. On his ethical romp through the Carrs' lukewarm marriage, Hornby asks his reader what it means to live a good life in middle-class society, even if it means sharing our homes with the homeless, and giving away the children's computers. Witty, intelligent, and full of emotional warmth, Hornby's novel is always more than good enough. G. Merritt
Rating: 
Summary: Hornby reaches a new level
Review: In this novel, Nick Hornby graduates into a new class of talent. While previous efforts such as _High Fidelity_ and _About a Boy_ were hilarious and rung so true in the details of human interaction, things always seemed to work out a little too neatly and the answer to his narrator's problems was just a little too easy to arrive at. In _How to Be Good_, Hornby's Dr. Katie Carr grapples with more serious problems of how a truly liberal mind can never find peace, the prospect of arguing against something that seems infallable, and of course there's self-righteous neo-beatnik thrown in for fun. :) Katie's problems are real and for the first time, Hornby seems okay to explore the hysterical nuances of a topic without there being any real solution at hands. Things get better for our narrator...but the problem never really goes away. The only negative thing I could say about the book was that although I applaud Hornby's efforts to break out of his type-casting as the "master of the male confessional," I didn't always find Katie believable as a female. At times she seemed like Hornby's male characters, minus the appropriate pieces. All in all, though, a great step for a great novelist.
Rating:
Summary: A "bad" book from a "good" author
Review: Hornby has nothing to say and rambles on and on to no effect. "How to be good"? A simple question to answer - treat others with respect and keep your sense of humour. Why do it? Because we all want to live in a civilized world. What's so hard to understand about that? The fact that he needs to write this daft book questioning the whole thing points to a crisis in Hornby's own life, not in our society. A poor relation to High Fidelity, which was witty, detailed and accurate. I personally don't believe in faith healers and I don't believe that an intelligent, educated person would have the kind of spiritual conversion that David has had. Once the novel became fantasy rather than reality, I found that I couldn't really care about the characters and skim-read the rest of the way to the end. Still, some good bits of writing, and I sincerely hope Nick cheers up before his next novel!
Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: Definitely buy and read "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity", but give this one a pass. It's awkward, boring and tough to get through. The characters are ridiculous caricatures, whereas the characters in Nick Hornby's earlier novels were wonderfully real. What a disappointment.
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