If you're looking for book ideas, a few minor chuckles and a breezy afternoon read, you might want to check out one of two collections of Nick Hornby's Believer columns on his monthly attempt to keep up with the books he buys. Hornby, in what many must think is a justification for his own style, is an aggressive critic of "literary fiction," which he would generally describe as having overblown prose and lacking compelling plots. I have my sympathies. That said, I'd rather wallow through William Gass's gassy, meandering genius than read a single page of Hornby's last book, which is awful. What Hornby really wants to do is attack established literary standards for greatness, in which difficulty trumps directness. He also wants reading to be fun. Of course, part of the fun of reading is ripping something after you've hated it, but he's not allowed to do that because the Believer has a "no snark" policy, which leaves him with only the running gag of tamely and harmlessly taking ping pong ball shot at the Polysyllabic Spree that is the Believer editorial board. It gets old after awhile. I think he also wants to make people feel better about the fact that they don't read all the books they buy, and they don't "get" all the books that the big boys have told him they must in order to be in the highbrow literary club.

The good: I've discovered a number of books from Hornby that I've gone on to read and enjoy. The bad: the man is just a little too folksy for my mean-spirited sensibility. Given, however, how formless and disconnected this ten minutes of morning writing has gone, perhaps I should be a little more generous.