Shakespeare Wrote for Money

Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hornby is clearly running out of steam, but that doesn't prevent the last collection of his "Stuff I've Read" essays from being enjoyable. He discovers the joys of YA fiction (and reads a few of my favorites - Nick Hornby reading genre novels!), gets distracted by football, talks a little more about politics than I care for, and makes it all engaging enough to be worthwhile. As ever, he continues to add titles to my to-read list!

The "September 2006" essay was one I had read in another collection, and it was just as hilarious the second time around as Hornby skates around the fact that due to the World Cup he hadn't read any books that month. A quotation from that essay, absurd out of context but still funny: "And anyway, I was making an elementary error: I was trimming and lengthening the legs of the same ants - and this, I see now, was completely and utterly pointless: three hours of microsurgery on each ant and they all ended up the same height anyway." (Does he write or perform stand-up comedy? This essay seems like it would translate well into that medium, and the persona he builds in his "Stuff I've Read" columns is consistently likable and self-effacing.)