Ten Years in the Tub (33 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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I'm a reader for lots of reasons. On the whole, I tend to hang out with readers, and I'm scared they wouldn't want to hang out with me if I stopped. (They're interesting people, and they know a lot of interesting things, and I'd miss them.) I'm a writer, and I need to read, for inspiration and education and because I want to get better, and only books can teach me how. Sometimes, yes, I read to
find things outâas I get older, I feel my ignorance weighing more heavily on me. I want to know what it's like to be him or her, to live there or then. I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provideâfilm can't get in close enough. But the most important reason of all, I think, is this. When I was nine years old, I spent a few unhappy months in a church choir (my mum's idea, not mine). And two or three times a week, I had to sit through the sermon, delivered by an insufferable old windbag of a vicar. I thought it would kill meâthat I would, quite literally, die of boredom. The only thing we were allowed for diversion was the hymnbook, and I even ended up reading it, sometimes. Books and comics had never seemed so necessary; even though I'd always enjoyed reading before then, I'd never understood it to be so desperately important for my sanity. I've never, ever gone anywhere without a book or a magazine since. It's taken me all this time to learn that it doesn't have to be a boring one, whatever the reviews pages and our cultural commentators tell me; and it took the Polysyllabic Spree, of all people, to teach me.

Please, please: put it down. You'll never finish it. Start something else.