Dinner for Two
by Mike Gayle
Rating: 8 out of 10

Mike Gayle is my second favorite contemporary British male author after Nick Hornby. In fact, after Hornby’s last two efforts, Gayle’s appeal is increasing to me. I’ve read 3 of his 4 novels now, starting with My Legendary Girlfriend and following that up with Mr. Commitment. I skipped over his last book, Turning Thirty, but I am ready to read it now, especially considering I’ll be doing that in December.

Dinner for Two is his most recent book and is about a guy, Dave, who has been married for 3 years and his biological clock is starting to tick. His wife isn’t too hip on the idea of kids. Dave’s magazine writing career takes a small turn as he goes from writing for a serious music magazine to writing an advice column for a teen magazine. That career change alters his life forever. He receives a letter from a girl who claims she is his 13-year-old daughter. What transpires is a great story about relationships - relationships between husband and wife, between parent and child, between friends.

Gayle captures the male mind very well, finding us in our insecurity and helplessness, our pride, our concern for our spouse/girlfriend/significant other. So many times while reading the book, I related to Dave and his experience with his wife, Izzy. It’s always so great to find an author who truly knows what it is like…it makes you feel that your experience is similar to others out there.

While I doubt Gayle will ever win a Pulitzer for his novels, he writes in a way that is accessible to common readers…a way that people can truly relate to and understand. Not only that, but his writing is timely to me as a person. For example, an excerpt from the chapter, “select”:

“It’s eight o’clock on the following Friday night and Izzy, our friends and I are standing in our local video shop: Blockbuster on Fortis Green Road. The shop is full of people like us: a slightly older crowd for whom staying in and watching a video has become the new going-out-clubbing-and-drinking-too-much.”

That passage is real life - such a true snapshot of daily life. While much of the book is about Dave and his newfound daughter, I found myself gravitating toward the chapters where he interacted with his wife, Izzy. Their relationship is really great, one that I think that people would be lucky to have. They love and respect each other without condition and I admire that in a couple. It’s too rare of a thing. That’s why I liked those chapters so much: the stuff in-between the huge events of our life is really what makes up the volume of your experience. Day-to-day life and how you deal with it is what matters. Gayle is an author who realizes that and I have a great respect for authors who can convey it in an interesting way.

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How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
by Toby Young
Rating: 7 out of 10

I was recommended this book by Amazon.com because of my affinity for all things Nick Hornby (and all things British for that matter). I’ve had it for quite a while (I even started it about 8 months ago, but only got about 4 pages in) and I decided that with the book project, I would have to just read it.

Despite the absolute vanity and sophomoric behavior of the author, Toby Young, I really liked this book.

Young is a freelance journalist who worked for a stint during the late 1990’s for the prestigious glossy magazine, Vanity Fair for the famous editor, Graydon Carter. How Young ever got his invitation to work at the magazine is beyond me, but I’ve never read any of his stuff besides his book, so I’m not really one to judge.

Anyway, despite his boorish behavior and absolute disregard for normal social mores (I believe that if I were English, I would call him a “tosser”), Young manages to come across as intelligent and well-spoken, even if his actions would suggest otherwise. What I liked about this book was how Young (who was, in a way, a gossip columnist, in a really swanky magazine) managed to maintain his integrity to an era of journalism that he admired (the Roaring ’20s) in an era of journalism that shunned everything that he held dear to that time in history.

There really no doubt that at the end of the day, Toby Young is a cad. However, you can’t help but sympathize with him…it seems like he can’t really change that.

I really thought he was a pretty good storyteller and I enjoyed the book.

I’m jumping over Sacred Marriage right now and I’m going to start on Silent Bob Speaks. I want to get somewhat ahead of the game this month and I know that it will be a pretty quick read. Plus, we are thinking about reading Sacred Marriage for our Young Adult class at church. I’m still going to read it even if we don’t, but just in case we do, I’m going to wait.

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A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
Rating: 7 out of 10

The first book of my new year-long book project is finished. I read A Long Way Down in about 4 days during my break from work (I took off the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s, including my birthday). It was a pretty quick read, moving along at a nice quick pace with interesting (although almost completely unlikable) characters who were all connected by a common theme.

They had all 4 met on the top of a building on New Year’s Eve with the intent to kill themselves. These strangers form an unlikely friendship and give each other motivation to NOT off themselves.

I don’t know what it is, but Nick Hornby’s last two efforts haven’t been that great, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s because the stuff that I connected with in High Fidelity and About a Boy is just missing from his latest efforts. I think that he has tried to stretch himself and write about characters that he didn’t really have much personal experience with (in his previous effort, How to be Good, the main character was a woman), and I just haven’t felt the same connection to the characters.

That being said, I liked the book (albeit not as much as the aforementioned two) and I will continue to look forward to his novels when they come out. We will see what I think of the other Hornby book that I have scheduled to read this year…Songbook. But the plan is not to read that until much later this year, so we’ll see.

I’m going to rank my books that I read this year on a scale of 1 to 10 (and I may include halves too, but I haven’t decided yet.

So I give my first book of the year, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby: 7 out of 10

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