I’m about half-way through Ten Years in the Tub, and I’m realizing that it’s a lot like a collection of poetry or the dictionary — you really shouldn’t read the whole thing all at once.
Each chapter is a monthly article from The Believer (which is still a magazine and Nick Hornby is still a contributor), and the articles span from 2003 to 2013, so reading several of them at once is a lot like fast-forwarding through the reading habits of a British novelist, unapologetic football fanatic, and guy who’s trying to quit smoking.
The problem is the articles are good. Too good. I feel guilting reading a whole year’s worth of articles in one sitting, like I’m like a rich boy stuffing little, expensive bonbons of humor into my mouth. Sarah has to come into the office and nanny slap them out of my pudgy hands. “Your mother will be just horrified if you spoil your dinner again!”
I mean. It’s not that I need to worry about my waistline in whatever metaphor I’m concocting here — my blood sugar won’t actually spike if I read the whole book in one go — but the articles are written in a style that is best consumed month-by-month: Short and sweet and each discussing four or five books that I might conceivably want to read. That’s how you avoid the literary spare tire.
Here’s another way of putting it: Even if your pastor writes absolutely fantastic sermons, you wouldn’t want to listen to 12 of them in a row. You’ve got to space that shit out.
I did get a really good idea while reading Ten Years in the Tub, though. Well, Nick Hornby had a good idea and I am brazenly stealing it:
Make a book list of books that have years in the title. Like, one book that has “2024,” one that has “2023,” etc. The books can be about anything, fictional or non-fictional; every genre is fair game. Then, what you do is start in the present and work your way backwards until the year you were born.
Bam! It’s a reading list as arbitrary as the one I’m currently tackling. Plus, us old folks, who are way better at reading than you goddamned youngsters with your TikToks and vape pens and functioning friend groups, will have longer reading lists, while someone who is, say, 3, will have a pretty easy time of it. (Little Suzy will just love Gravity’s Rainbow! Get her started now.)
I’ve begun compiling my list already, starting with the year of my birth. (What year is that, you wonder? I’ll never tell!)
Apparently there was a baseball strike in 1981. Who knew? The Dodgers were probably upset that I had just been born and wasn’t yet old enough to understand the rules of the sport, so they refused to play. “We should wait,” their manager informed the league in writing. “Wait until the Toad is old enough to come and watch.”
Only after realizing that I was both in rural Nebraska (statistically the farthest from away from any professional sport franchise one can be in the lower 48) and in an incubator did they finally relent and agree to take the field. And, even then, grudgingly. “Make sure someone is taping this,” they said.
And they did.
I’m going to keep with it, though. I’m going truck right on through Ten Years in the Tub, and by the end of it I’m going to be carrying more articles than a coffee table at a dentist’s office.
I will, however, be starting another book as well. This one was selected from THE LIST completely at random and ahead of schedule (simply because I like having an audiobook to listen to while I’m bumbling around, and Ten Years isn’t an audiobook):
It’s Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, an author that I know a bit about but haven’t read. As I recall, Rushdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses that upset a lot of religious fundamentalists who threatened his life, the lives of his publishers, and the lives of anyone who gave the book a favorable review on Goodreads (anything above 3 stars). Things got so bad that Rushdie went into hiding, where he got so good at Nintendo they made a little video about it. (Not joking.)
He seems like a literary try-hard. That’s harsh, but just look at that picture of him on that cover — it’s like the photographer was snapping his fingers going, “Salman! Over here, Salman! Look at the camera!” but Salman Rushdie was distracted by a rogue moral allegory that went scampering by.
I haven’t read The Satanic Verses, but I’m pretty sure I have a copy floating around. I think I bought it used because I liked the title and it was cheap.
I suppose that doesn’t matter much, because Midnight’s Children is a totally different book, and it’s a book that faced no strong religious or political backla . . . wait, the Indian Prime Minister said what about it?