Nick Hornby's "Housekeeping vs. The Dirt"

Great. Just great. Totally un-intellectual and never above itself, often below (he quotes thusly from Philip Larkin's letters: "I think this poem is really bloody cunting fucking good." "Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss. I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies and generally misbehaved myself.""Katherine Mansfield is a cunt.") and just generally a lot of fun, as you can see.

Everybody should read his column in the Believer but then I guess that would mean that people were actually reading that magazine, which is just too inconceivable, as Hornby himself points out. I actually laughed a few times while reading this book, which I don't usually do even when I think a book is funny.

There's lots of stuff about how the UK isn't like the US, which is true but only noticeable to them and to us: to everyone else, we're basically the same game, and all of us are right. Also included: rants against fiction about literature, matters literary and the literati; constant sarcasm and irony; ready admissions that he just didn't finish a book because it was too boring or maybe over his head or that he never even started it.

All this and much, more more abide inside the Euro-flap covers of this delightful book, praised to the heavens or their secular equivalent by every left-wing progressive news source from here to there: the back has blurbs from Salon.com, the Boston Globe, NPR, the SF Chronicle, the Austin Chronicle, and of course, of course, the Guardian.