Juliet, Naked

There are a few authors who are likely to appear on this site frequently.  While I will attempt to review series as a whole rather than individual books within them, there are several authors whose work I will seek out regardless of whether they are part of an established series or not: Timothy Zahn, Laurie R. King, Nick Hornby, and others.  Given that Hornby inspired this blog to begin with, it's hardly surprising to find another of his books on the list, and I figured it was a good choice to re-start the blog after a hiatus.

Juliet, Naked was a relatively short book as far as most of what I read is concerned. I got it in audiobook format from Audible as a promotional offer.  With typical Hornby style, your initial reaction to most of the characters is that they're selfish and unlikable, but you very quickly identify with them to the point where you see a lot of yourself in each of them and can share in their desires and motivations.  Who hasn't been a tad too obsessed with some musician or band before?  Or wanted more from an artist of some sort than they've actually released be it books, music, film, television, etc?  The underlying relationship angst plot is typical Hornby and still comes off as believable and not as tired as one might expect from the trope, Hornby having the ability to give different voice to the characters in each book such that their perspective changes your understanding of each of their situations.  Hornby's love of music is evident as well, as his description of the music in the book left me wishing some of the songs were actually available to be heard.
A common thread to the people in Juliet is failure.  While Tucker Crowe, (presumably largely inspried by people like Bob Dylan, Jackson Brown and similar singer-songwriters) has a committed cult following, he's a failure at life in his own eyes, the realization of his utterly pathetic fatherhood leading him to giving up his music career.  Annie (probably the main protagonist) feels she has wasted her life with her boyfriend Duncan, who realizes he's wasted a lot of his own life obsessing over Tucker Crowe.  It's Hornby's special wit which allows him to find the humor in all the failure and allow the book's bleak subject matter leave the reader with humor and satisfaction (and perhaps take a sharper look at some of his own behavior) which is what keeps me coming back to his work.
Juliet was the first Hornby book I'd read (listened to) in a while.  It had been several years since A Long Way Down which seemed to be an important book to me at the time, but has faded significantly since.  After Juliet, I went on to read Slam and while it had similar themes of relationship (failure,) parenting (failure) and such, it didn't strike the same tone with me, perhaps because the characters were much younger (teenaged.)
I'll anxiously await Hornby's next book, and in the meantime, perhaps I'll go back to A Long Way Down and see if it still carries the same gravitas it did when I last read it in 2005 or so. Apparently treating failure with humor is the key to my enjoyment of a work, as Hornby books are always enjoyable and one of my favorite current TV shows is The Venture Bros., the all-encompassing theme of which is failure. I wonder what that says about my outlook on life?

Planning/Format

So, I intend to roughly follow Nick Hornby's format. Although his was a monthly column, I will try to update more or less daily, as this will allow me to cover more books and have a better memory as to each that I read. I will also post periodic updates of the books that I purchase. So, for the first of those, I will list the books that I bought in my two most recent trips to Half Price Books:

• Nick Hornby: The Polysyllabic Spree
• Nick Hornby: Shakespeare Wrote for Money
• Timothy Zahn: Night Train to Rigel
• Timothy Zahn: Cobras Strike
• Vikram Seth: Beastly Tales

The two Nick Hornby books are pretty much the same--The Polysyllabic Spree is described below, and Shakespeare is basically a same-again sequel. Night Train to Rigel is the first in a series of Timothy Zahn books to which I already own the second book, and Cobras Strike is actually a book I've already read in a collection called Cobras Two which, no doubt, will be discussed later in this blog. Zahn is one of my favorite authors, since I discovered him in one of the few Star Wars books that are worth reading, Heir to the Empire and its progeny, which introduced the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn. The Vikram Seth (author of A Suitable Boy) book is written in couplets, which intrigues me. I'm not generally one for poetry, but these are actually stories written in verse, like the old Latin poems that I translated in college. Not enough people write in verse any more, so I'm hoping that this will be good, and even if it's not, it is something that I bought with an eye towards a gift for my father.