Book Review: How to Be Good

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Nick Hornby novel I've read and I've put him on a list of authors to look for in the used bookstore.

This book was swift and fun to read. I get excited whenever I see an interesting female lead in a novel, particularly one written by a man, and this story's female lead is wonderful. She's witty and clever, as well as selfish enough (in the suddenly apparently selfless world she's found herself in)to be entertaining while retaining relatability. I found her charming and layered.

All the characters in the book are surprisingly dynamic, including the two young children of the main character, Katie Carr, and her husband, David. In many reads, children have little personality and are only there for a foil to work against or tools to make drama. However these children, Tom and Molly, are funny, reactive, and well rounded. They do well in putting the adult's strange world into perspective.

There are some great observations, some great lines. I liked this one particularly:

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already.

The Return of Me

Sorry non-existent readers in the ether! I had disappeared for some time, as I had predicted. It all came on far sooner than I had hoped.

Update on my writing:

I have written a short screenplay that needs more work. It is currently at 15 pages and contains an ending I am somewhat unsatisfied with but at this moment do not know how to change for the better.

I am currently enrolled in a screenwriting class and a fiction writing class. I have written many a short piece for the fiction writing class. Until recently, I had been convinced I was over fiction writing; That it wasn't for me, I wasn't built to wax on about sight and smell and sound and scape in literature.

Things change.

I'm happy in the class and I'm happy in writing. It takes... discipline. Discipline is not one of my greater talents; I have discipline better than some, worse than many, but if I can somehow make myself into a person that writes rather than can write, well, I think it's something I worth striving for. I may construct myself into a person who wakes up at 4:30 am every morning to write for two hours or... who knows what. It's something I'm looking into, considering.

It is one week before NaNoWriMo officially kicks off, and I have designs on winning it (that is to say, complete the challenge). I want to write a 50k word piece of fiction. To have that under my belt. To know I can do it.

I'm not sure what on. Yet. "But," as Betty Draper says "I do have thoughts."