[Barry the Sprout]

Originally posted by Grojlach: I've *coughcough*seenthemovie*coughcough*. Had a very good soundtrack as well. The only Nick Hornby novel I've ever read was How to be good, but even though it had some nice moments, it was a little bit dissatisfying on the whole; as if this entire movie-thing (his About a Boy has also been turned into a movie recently) has gone to his head and he simply decided to focus on writing novels just waiting to be used as a future Hollywood-friendly movie-script. Too gimmicky, too much "Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts"-romantic-comedies-kind-of-humour, too many predictable twists. Nice if it floats your boat, but I wasn't really impressed by it.

I've read How to Be Good and I agree - it was a bit tired and generally a bit strained. His normal stuff is less fiction based in many ways. High Fidelity is taken up so much with the music and large quantities of witty observations about life in general that it actually reads like an autobiography, and of course Fever Pitch actually is an autobiography. They're the better ones by him I think.