SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY

An excellent Christmas gift from S and the last (sniff!) of Nick Hornby’s fabulous “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer (after The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt). Hornby is such a smart and entertaining nonfiction writer, I’ll gladly read his descriptions of just about anything, from soccer (Fever Pitch) to songs (Songbook), but he is, foremost, a reader after my own heart—full of both joy and exasperation at how many books there are in the world, sometimes doubting and rationalizing and restrategizing his course, sometimes following his curiosity, both enjoying and lamenting the way one book can unexpectedly lead you to another and another. Even though I’ve read very few of the books he writes about, I can completely identify with his meditations on reading in general, and I’ll miss his comfortable, casual Believer voice (with its hilarious running-gag allusions to the magazine’s editorial board, “the Polysyllabic Spree, the forty-seven literature-loving, unnervingly even-tempered yet unsmiling young men and women who remove all the good jokes from this column every month”).