Nick Hornby: How To Be Good

Right, so now it does feel a bit like a Hornby overload! Okay, I still like his style and language and the way he describes English mentality but this wasn’t an easy read. I felt really tired reading it, mentally exhausted trying to understand what message the book was trying to convey.

How To Be Good doesn’t exactly tell you how to be good, it touches on various possibilities but puts all of them in such a bad light that you will never feel good after you’ve done them. But in the end I guess it isn’t about you feeling good.

Everyone in the book is good - Katie is doing her good by being a doctor and healing people (yeah, right) and her husband David is being good by giving away his kids’ toys to strangers. The "goodest" person in the whole book is Mr. GoodNews who does good not only by having such peculiar name. Everyone in the book is so good that it makes you feel a bit sick. Which I guess might have been Hornby’s intention. After reading this book the last thing I wanted was to be good…

It's a very sarcastic book which is what makes it a bit of a tough read when somewhere deep in heart you actually want to be good. But interesting anyhow.

So what is the better "good"? Adopting homeless kids or not leaving the husband you can no longer stand? And how do we know we've done something good if we don't know what would happen if we hadn't done it?

My rating: YYYYY