Hornby on Reading

I have New York friends who ask me why I remain a fan of Nick Hornby's. It's partly because he expresses sentiments like this one, which I don't think many of my Yankee friends could bring themselves to endorse:

I am not particularly interested in language. Or rather, I am interested in what language can do for me, and I spend many hours each day trying to ensure that my prose is as simple as it can possibly be.

But I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes, and I certainly don't have the patience to read it.

Read the whole thing.

(Addendum: The New York friends aren't all adamantly opposed to Hornby, but there is a sense among them that he's not a serious critic -- I don't think he would claim to be -- and that he's often too flippant or unclear about what he says. For instance, one friend, and I think she's right, has already e-mailed me to say that his "not particularly interested in language" comment cited above is both technically inaccurate given what follows and dangerously soft-headed in the era of President Bush's unintentional but still formidable assault on language as a potent communicative tool. Unintentional in the sense that he's not anti-language so much as language-deficient himself. He might daydream about being T.S. Eliot, for all we know, the same way I might daydream about being Derek Jeter; doesn't make me a clutch hitter.)

(Via Normblog)