My reading momentum continues...
The latest notch on my reading list is Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. Hornby is probably the king of Brit-Pop-Lit... offering up very palatable and entertaining novels. Having read two of his previous works (High Fidelity & How To Be Good), he is someone I turn to when I am looking for something with a bit more substance but not serious literature. If you've haven't read Hornby, you may have seen one of the big-screen adaptation... the aforementioned High Fidelity along with About A Boy or Fever Pitch... and, although I didn't know it before starting this post, I guess it is no surprise that a movie version of this book is in the works. Oddly enough, I haven't seen any of these movies! Go figure?!
You can always count on Hornby being quite funny... so guess the subject matter of this novel... suicide! Hurray! Yes, quite a challenge to squeak out laughs on that subject, but Hornby manages to do it. As the novel starts, we meet a washed-up morning television host as he is ready to take a leap of a popular suicide London rooftop... but before he can do it, he is interrupted not once, not twice... but three times! The foursome end up talking... which pretty much distracts them from their intention to end it all... and ultimately take the "long way down" ... the stairs down the building. So you can see the humor, right?!
We follow these four very different principal characters over the next 90 days as they form this odd little "club" as they come to terms what brought them all to the same rooftop. So, it all gets semi-philosophical and utlimately life-affirming. The movie pitch probably was taken right from one of the blurbs on the back cover... "It's like The Breakfast Club rewritten by Samuel Beckett."
So I guess I'll leave it that. I know not much of a review... but just a little taste if you are looking for something easy to read, different, and entertaining.
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