Rating: 
Summary: Thumbs down from a Hornby fan
Review: Among my favorite reads are "About a Boy" and "High Fidelty." And, truthfully, Hornby writes just as well in "How to Be Good." His characterizations provoke reaction, the depth of Katie's thoughts are very real, and the wry, sarcastic humor is on target.Even so, I did not enjoy this book. Finishing it was just a hair less than a struggle. I don't necessarily read to feel good all the time (though that is among the reasons), but this book _really_ doesn't make the reader feel good. It's downright depressing and frustrating. I wanted to shake Katie so many times; admonish her for not standing up for herself more. Then again, I also wanted to shake her for relying so heavily on her profession to make her "good." It is highly annoying. But I suspect that is part of Hornby's point, so I won't go any further down that road. A talented writer, yes. An interesting, though somewhat dubious storyline. Worth your time? Perhaps. Unfortunately only you can answer that question.
Rating: 
Summary: By one of world's best authors...
Review: ... yet sadly one of the worst novels I have ever read. Unbelievable (in all the wrong ways), shallow and, untimately, pointless. Read anything else by him instead.
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: Good Satire For The Times
Review: Meet an average 40 something British couple with marital problems. She's a doctor with decidedly liberal leanings and is considered the "good" one in the marriage only now she's having an affair. He's a columnist known as "the angriest man in Holloway" and makes a living by ranting about everything and everyone - he's not easy to live with. To annoy his physician wife he decides to see a faith healer known as GoodNews about his bad back and ends up coming away a changed man. He forgives his wife and decides to give away many of their possessions (including his son's computer because they don't need two). He starts a community program to encourage his neighbors to take in homeless teenagers and basically begins to try and convince his wife that it's their duty to change the world and make it a better place. She's now forced to decide just how good do you have to be in order to be a good person, she doesn't want a homeless kid in the house and she's worked hard for the things they have but how do you say no. I read this book right after reading Carol Sheild's Unless and I thought this was a much more truthful look at what it means to be good and how much self sacrifice is too much.
Rating:
Summary: How To Be Good could have been better...
Review: First, I have to say that I love Nick Hornby. When I read "About a Boy" I knew that if I opened the book and there were two pages of words facing me, at least one of those pages would make me laugh. Out loud. And I cried. It's one of my top 5 favorite novels. And "High Fidelity"? Forget about it. Hilarious stuff.
But "How to be Good" missed the mark for me. I felt the characters were unbelievable. David's transformation... GoodNews' 'healing powers'... and the constant contradictions that made up the main character, Katie. She thought one thing and would say another. She'd say something and you knew that she thought the opposite. I know that REAL people have contradictions and I don't expect characters in a book not to have them, but it was simply too much in this story.
It frustrated me that the affair situation never really felt resolved. I also couldn't come to terms with the fact that she didn't really like her kids. And the ending... the very last line? What a disappointment. Here's a story about a sad, deeply troubled family. There was very little humor (or at least laughter on my part) and the ending was so sad. Not even sad, really. Just, "Blah."
I must've liked it enough to finish it. I think I was hoping for redemption. Not the kind that Katie was seeking... but some sort of ending that was either happy or tragic ... or maybe they would experience some sort of growth. Give me something ... Make me laugh or cry or say "Ah-hah! So THAT is why they went through all this!" But in the end, it was, well, boring. I should have given it one star, but I really do think Nick is incredibly talented. I guess we all have our off days (or stories, in the case of a writer). Would I recommend this book to anyone? No, not at all. Would I buy another Nick Hornby book? Absolutely.
Rating: 
Summary: How to ... be hooked !
Review: You are young, you get married, you have children, arguments and sexual chemistry together ...and the years go by...How to be Good ...is the story of any couple, and reading it gave me chills down my spine because it was so damnably relatable! When the romance gives way to reality and the business of making a marriage work, no author could have done it better. There is no constant in life but change and the novel depicts this beautifully. What is frankly more amazing is how a middle aged male author could get into the mind of a female protagonist so well, so lucidly and so insightfully...Nick Hornby must be having a lot of meaningful conversations with REAL wome, real wives, real mothers...no wonder this book is the product of that !
Rating:
Summary: Wow...
Review: As I read the reviews written by the other readers of this book, a growing feeling of contempt for the ignorance of our time-spirit rises in me. I don't care if I sound arrogant, but I just can't believe that so many people gave this book such poor reviews. The only reason I can come up with, is that pure genius seldomly is understood within the lifespan of the creator.
I'll admit that the storyline in itself isn't a pageturner, but that's not at all the issue. The real storyline takes place within the main-character, who is a brilliant representant of modern man. She sympathizes with the weak, but she doesn't empathize - therein lies the whole difference. We know that people starve to death everyday, that beggars sleep in the streets and that 13-year old girls in Thailand have to prostitute themselves in order to survive. And we care...just enough to sometimes feel a sting of guilt for not doing anything about it. Then we might contribute with a few dollars now and then, or have our old clothes sent to Guatemala and voilá: the guilt goes away. And if it doesn't, it's not worse than we can live with it.
The beauty about this book is that it isn't moralising. It's not trying to tell us that we SHOULD be better people. But what it does tell us is the fact, that we could really make a difference if we bothered to. This book is not a highly academic discussion about morality and ethics, nor is it a shallow attempt to tell the reader to open his/her eyes of the state of the world. It's simply a hysterically funny and precise description of a typical hypocritical mind of the western society, who gets challenged with the knowledge of her own power to change other peoples lives today...if she can be bothered.
Read it, it's hilariously entertaining, funny and intelligent.
If you want to know where I'm coming from, some of my favourite stuff include The Simpsons, Paul Auster, American Beauty, Chess, Luke Rhineheart (Diceman), Shakespeare, old Donald Duck cartoons and Stanley Kubrick.
Rating:
Summary: Not very compelling reading
Review: I have read Hornby's other novels and enjoyed them thoroughly; unfortunately, this one wasn't nearly as funny or interesting. I think the author deserves a lot of credit for writing a believable female protagonist, Katie, who is a complicated character and not based on a stereotype of a "woman". Hornby manages to create a few really honest moments, such as when Katie admits that she is irritated with her kids and doesn't think they're extremely cute--maybe at times that she doesn't even like them at all and feels like smacking them, though she never does. It's rare that these sentiments get expressed at all in fiction or film or in real life, let alone from a male author. And Hornby raises a lot of interesting questions about who is "Good" and who is a hypocrite--these are topics for a lengthy discussion, to be sure, but they felt a bit muddled in print.
I found several of the characters annoying (not unlikable, which isn't even a big deal unless the character is boring--annoying is much worse), which made it difficult to read through the entire novel, and often the arguments made about Goodness and selfishness seemed to err on the side of sentimentality. The tone of the book felt too uneven at times--sometimes it was depressingly bleak, other times too preachy. I realize this may have been brought about by the very nature of trying to answer the many questions raised--the characters have several epiphanies and changes from one side to the other, as well as the issues being extremely complex and not cut and dried.....
Essentially, if you are a reader who wants to get into reading Nick Hornby, I wouldn't recommend this. Read High Fidelity or About a Boy instead. And even if you want to read everything Hornby's written, I'm still not sure you'd want to read it. While it definitely has good moments, I personally did not enjoy it much.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't Stop Putting It Down
Review: I typically finish every book I start, no matter how good or bad it is, hoping to find some redeeming quality or to take something beneficial away from it. "How to Be Good" is one of the handful of exceptions that I've allowed myself.
I really tried to get into this, but I found the characters and the plot not necessarily unlikeable, just totally uninteresting. I have no clue why this book was so acclaimed by so many different sources, and was so bored by everthing about it that I couldn't even bring myself to read more than 1/2 in order to find out.
The characters come off as flat, humorless, and boring. It was impossible to entertain any interest in their well-being or in the plot that painstakingly developed. And after investing so much determination in traversing through the dry realities of the failing marriage of the protagonists, the introduction of the medicine man/faith healer/swami was so fantastical and so inconsistent it was almost insulting. At this point I just became so fed up and worn out that I realized that sometimes, it's just not worth it.
"How to Be Good", despite its title, more appropriately conveys how a novel can just be bad. Period.
Rating:
Summary: More Puzzling Than First Appears
Review: This is a different, and in some ways better, book than Hornby's other work. While his other books are more consistently entertaining, this book strives for, and once in a while hits, a higher mark.
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