Shane Life

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

Finally.

A new novel from Nick Hornby. Most excellent.