POLYSYLLABIC SPREE

A hilarious and true account of one man's struggle with the monthly tide of the books he has bought and the books he has been meaning to read, here is another collection of 14 months? of Nick Hornby essays from the Believer magazine to collect in this series we have acquired. 'Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we play cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other artform had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception - Blonde on Blonde might mash up 'The Old Curiosity Shop', and every now and then you can get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future 3 might land a lucky punch on Rabbit Run - but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.' Discussed in the book is Dickens's retort to minimalism, edible poems, the pros and cons of Salinger, the Dewey Decimal v. Trivial Pursuit system of organising a library, Britons in Los Angeles (indoor and wrapped in cold flannel), Mick Jagger's projected envy of Jonathan Lethem, the phenomenon of forgetting every book you've ever read, the effectiveness of blurbs, the shoddy memories of reappearing heroes, the death of pub culture, and the exact point at which innovations stop looking like mistakes are all included. With excerpts from the works by Chekhov, Tony Hoagland, Dickens, Patrick Hamilton and Charlotte Moore. 144pp, paperback to dip into and collect with the others in the series.