How to Be Good

Rating:
Summary: The Unbearable Weight of Goodness
Review: The central character of How to be Good, is Doctor Carr -- in her late thirties, a practicing physician and woman burdened by a marital crisis when the book opens. She wants to leave her cynical, semi-employed, journalist husband, partly inspired to do so by an affair she having with a more attentive lover, Stephen. What happens to keep her in the marriage is the arrival of DJ Goodnews. He is possessed of seemingly shamanistic, curative powers and, in no time, Goodnews has transformed the good Doctor's husband. He ceases to be the locally renown curmudgeon and becomes, instead, a crusader for the poor, one who embodies the liberal spirit of helping those least able to help themselves. The Carr's house becomes a focal point for a block-wide effort to adopt the homeless. Monkey, a tall lanky, young man becomes the special guest of the Carr household. A beggar by day, he is also, as Dr. Carr realizes, the only member of the household earning an income other than herself -- David Carr and Goodnews being absorbed completely in their campaign of doing good. All this is hard on the marriage. Yet, Dr. Carr got what she wished for. Not sure that she likes it, she consults her own Delphic Oracle from an Anglican Church she has, in desperation, visited: Should she stay or divorce?

This is a book about the limits of human kindness and idealism, both within a marriage and within the larger community. Most books that turn a marriage under a micro-scope fail to see how and where that relationship belongs in the larger world. Hornby's plot succeeds in doing just that and providing, along the journey, some very funny moments.

Rating:
Summary: How to Be Good by Nick Hornby Audio Cassette
Review: Half of the pleasure of this recording is the reader's skill. She brilliantly conveys the characters of the book with accents and attitudes that are dead on.
The other half is Hornby's point of view which is both hilarious and humane. He loves his characters enough to be gentle with them even as he is being painfully honest about what people do to each other precisely when they are trying to be good.

Rating:
Summary: A Hornby newbie left wanting
Review: I've seen the movie "About a Boy", but "How to be Good" is my first Hornby read and it left me a bit disappointed. It starts out good enough. Katie, the central character of the novel, wants to divorce her angry husband David. She describes accurately typical marital issues with enough levity as to not leave you wanting your own divorce since much of it should "hit home" to many long married couples. I laughed outloud quite a few times.

But after her husband is changed spiritually by DJ Goodnews, Hornby began to address the title of his book through Katie- the eternal question of how to be good in today's society? How to reconcile your own middle class comfort with all the bad stuff that you know is out there in the world? Katie afterall is a doctor and so is by definition "good", but her husband begins to take it to the extreme and she finds herself questioning her own identity and her definition of "good".

Every person brings their own personal experience to a novel when they read it and mine was that I have been married to my own husband for 13 years now and I have children the exact ages of Katie's children in the novel- a 10 year old boy and an 8 year old girl. So, I had some problems with Katie's personal journey along the way- namely her apparant dislike of her children. Yes, she goes to great lengths to convince her kids that she and their Dad won't get a divorce, but she allows her children to be around all that crazy stuff that happens in the book? It was too far fetched for me to believe. I had to believe that any "normal" mother would have taken her kids and ran for their lives if the husband/father pulled anything like that. She was after all the bread winner of the family, David didn't even HAVE a job after his conversion, so it's not like she needed him around for financial support. Katie was very spineless in that regard and I lost a lot of respect for her. But then, if Katie had acted like I'd have acted, Hornby wouldn't have had material for the book. So, off I hopped back off my soap box to see where he'd take me. Goodnews and David annoyed me to no end with their save the world self-righteousness and I found my 2 favorite characters to be Tom and Barmy Brian! Even the ending left me wanting. Katie and David seemed to find a happy medium to the goodness issue, but the state of their marriage still seemed doomed to me. They were still destined to be unhappy and simply settling. I wanted to feel hope for their marriage and all I felt was sorry for the kids.

I'm sure that Hornby leaves the question of how to be good unanswered on purpose, because when you get right down to it, it's impossible to answer.It's just too subjective for there to be a right or wrong answer. This was why I was hoping for some sort of resolution to the marital issue.

The book certainly does make one question their own needs vs. wants, and whether one is doing what one can for the good of society outside the cozy walls of one's microcosm. It was a nice, easy, and often funny read that simply left me a little wanting at the end.

Rating:
Summary: It inspired me to do something for charity...
Review: ... by giving the book away to the nearest charity store. I received this novel as a Christmas present. It was a short read, at least, but a cringingly bad one. At least it is only a few hours from New Year now, so I can say that the extreme displeasure of wading through this pointless novel will soon be relegated to 'last year'. This book was so badly done I wouldn't know where to begin describing it. Let's just summarize by saying novels usually benefit from having a plot, and slightly credible characters (not women protagonists speaking like 40-year-old men... or little boys speaking like 40-year-old men either). I hope someone at the thrift store can find a use for it. Toilet paper, perhaps?

Rating:
Summary: A shallow gimmick.
Review: I'd have a hard time categorizing this as a novel. It's a cartoon gimmick idea, which Hornby has then tried to stretch into novel length. The trouble is, the gimmick is underdeveloped and not half as clever and funny as the author thinks it is. The entire book is, in short, an insult to any reader's intelligence.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not his best.
Review: I'm a big fan of Nick Hornby, but this book is a little bit of a downer. It's a decent book and it's well written, like his others, but the subject matter is a little depressing. It's worth reading, but don't expect to feel warm fuzzies afterwards.

Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile book to read
Review: This is an excellent read.

The idea of that the narrator is a female never fits quite right (There are several jarring moments when there is no way you can believe it is a female speaking.), but when you set that aside, there is so much to enjoy.

The book constantly questions the idea of 'good'. It never answers the question satisfactorily; I think I would have been disappointed if it had. It doesn't retreat into mouthing what the Bible or the New Age'er would consider good, though both subjects are addressed.

How does a sane person try to do good in this world?

How has the idea that a person must be good affected us?

It's not a likeable book, but it is a book you would read when you're feeling out of sorts and cynical(and have no real, single, solid reason to be)with the world because you can look at these characters trying to sort themselves out in life and see that you're not the only one.

Rating:
Summary: Meandering, unfocused stream of drivel.
Review: How Not To Write. Full of plot holes, weak characters, idiotic set-pieces, unresolved themes, unexplained events, cod-philosophy and contradictions. Hornby begins by drawing a picture of North London life, as he has in the past, and as usual, the set-up is perfectly pleasant and even a bit interesting. Then he tries to get to the point, and the story gets in the way. Why he writes from a woman's p.o.v. is inexplicable. Why he writes at all is hard enough to explain. This book does not remotely approach any sort of examination of any moral theme. Nor is it funny to this reader. His techniques are repetitive, inaccurate and stale. His stereotypes merely serve to alienate and patronise. The lack of direction is not arrested by constant plot-reprieve contemplation. The absence of a central idea is not disguised by simply providing another vacuous vignette of a higher degree of stupidity on the same unexamined theme. Bringing back a minor character who subsequently disappears because they are in fact, pointless anyway, only reveals the despair of a worn-out author. Setting up "jokes" with a trowel from 50 feet and signposting them in dayglo somehow makes them less "side-splitting". Manipulating witless and irrelevant sequences to culminate in a one-liner you wrote in your notebook when you were 18 in front of a Woody Allen movie PROBABLY doesn't work every time, I'm guessing. And all this cannot be reprieved by some white-bread nihilistic, and frankly inane, final passage. This is a bad book.

Rating:
Summary: Good characters, poignant without being preachy
Review: Been a few weeks since I finished it, so I won't do it as much justice as it probably deserves (still, it did get an A). Hornby manages to get away with a very tricky subject by giving everyone some room (it's the issue of 1st to 3rd world). There isn't a clear moral, and different readers may sympathise more with one character than another. He exposes double standards, but doesn't stop there (that's too easy and has been done a thousand times anyway). The protagonist could do more, she's totally aware of this, but she doesn't respond by either becoming a saint, or just shutting it out. Or even just with tokenism. What's really wild is that there is a guru and a saint in the story too. And it's all around a believable family.
 
It's not a powerful and challenging book, although he does give the bleeding hearts some good lines here and there. But it keeps the readers there with the players - it's too easy to lose us by saying the truth about our greed and apathy, we even agree, but we're not about to do 'what we should'. Hornby doesn't stop with 'his' ringing point, he doesn't seem to have one, but he keeps having the conversation, suggesting ideas, kicking things around, not really judging. He allows you to respect different characters who may have opposing ideas - a surprisingly rare thing.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing read on several levels...
Review: ...For starters if you were a fan of previous Hornby gems like 'High Fidelity,' and 'About A Boy,' my bet is that you will ultimately find this to be a crap read. The book spends the bulk of its pages locked up in the mind of the protagonist as she internally tussles back and forth on the merits and negatives of ethics, morals, familial strife and approaching mid-life crisis. Some readers may find such internal dialogue to be somewhat captivating, however, less then 50 pages into the book I found myself highly annoyed by the whininess and lack of pro-active action of our protagonist and practically forced myself to read through the remainder of this novel.

With that being said, the book does improve the further you go with the occassional vintage Hornby moments of subtle humour and crafty dialogue but even these few redeeming moments surely do not justify the time required to slog through this book. While Hornby's prowess as a writer is certainly not in question, his experiment in capturing middle-aged fem angst certainly is. Nice, bold experiment on his part though.