Reading literary criticism for amusement

The best reason to buy Believer magazine has long been Nick Hornby's column. Each month he lists the books he has bought and the books he has read  (a good exercise for all of us who tend to buy more books than we can possibly read) and then writes about those read.

To most people literary criticism is not a comic art form, but it is to this British novelist, who dissects books of all kinds briefly with both wit and insight. The first fourteen columns he wrote for Believer, dating from September 2003 to November 2004, were collected in the slim book The Polysyllabic Spree, printed by the magazine.

The challenge for those of us who write about books is to write about them in such a way that people who might never have an interest in a book will nevertheless read and enjoy a review of that book. That has always been my goal in this blog. Hornby actually accomplishes it, at least most of the time. An example is the column in which he writes about On and Off the Field, a book about cricket by Ed Smith. Hornby acknowledges that most readers of his column are Americans who care nothing about cricket, but since he loves the game and the book, he writes about it first one month saying, "you have to wade through the cricket to get to the Chekhov and the Roddy Doyle." You still may not have an urge to either read Smith's book or sit through a cricket match, but you will love what Hornby has to say about both.

Hornby has diverse reading tastes, as his inclusion of both a book about cricket and Anton Chekhov's A Life in Letters might suggest. He reads older books by the likes of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins and John Buchan, as well as contemporary ones. Sometimes he goes on a binge, such as a month devoted to J.D. Salinger or another to Dennis Lehane. Mostly he seems to just pick up books at random, some recent purchases and some he has had on his shelves for awhile.

What confuses me is that as a writer of a popular book review column, publishers must send him loads of books they would like for him to comment on, yet there is little mention of this. Each month he just lists those books he has purchased. sometimes even explaining where and how he purchased them. So what happens to all those unsolicited books that come in the mail?