"How to Read" by Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby’s philosophy about reading is if you are not enjoying whatever you are reading stop reading it and put it down. It doesn’t matter if it’s highly acclaimed by critics or on a list of the best books of the year, if you are not enjoying it it’s not worth it. I think this is great advice and I completely agree. A book should not be difficult to read. I love what Hornby says about the prose of a book and how it should not be super difficult to read and that when he is writing he keeps it as simple as possible because he believes that the words are not as important as the world that he is describing. I basically agree with everything that he was saying. I definitely have the same mentality when I’m reading a book, even if it is for school. If I am not enjoying it I probably won’t finish it and will end up using sparknotes or something. For example, for school one year we had to read the book Lord of the Flies. That was extremely difficult for me to read and I did not finish it, I just was not interested in how a group of stranded boys were surviving and going crazy. The whole story was just too weird and boring for me. Sophomore year we read the book Last Days of Summer. I loved reading that book. It’s hard for me to explain why the book was so good. It was hilarious and by the end I was laughing and crying at the same time. I think it was really well-written, not because it had big words but because it was written all in letters from a boy to his hero and I had never read anything like that before. I think it’s important for us to really be “sucked into” a book and I definitely was in the Last Days of Summer.