how to be bad

My top three tips for reading Nick Hornby's How to be Good:

1. Stop reading any paragraph over three sentences. They never get any better.


2. Ignore all parentheticals, and skip any paragraph that begins with one.


3. Better yet, save yourself the trouble and skip the whole book. It's 300 pages that begin with an unhappy married couple considering divorce, and end with an unhappy married couple looking out into the cold, dark night. Ugh.

I loved High Fidelity, so it pains me to say it, but this one just ain't worth the time it takes to read it. It was better than staring at the back of the seat in front of me, sure. So I read the whole thing on Sunday while hopping from San Francisco to Denver to Dallas. But when the time came, I couldn't be motivated to cart it off the 737. Hopefully whoever wound up in 18F after me liked it more than I did.

{ 11:03am }