Nick Hornby’s Nonfiction Picks

Wikimedia Commons/Joe Mabel

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


For a special section in our May/June issue, we asked some of our favorite writers about their favorite nonfiction books. Here are novelist and essayist Nick Hornby’s answers:

Mother Jones: What nonfiction book do you foist on friends and relatives?

Nick Hornby: Historically: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. It was one of the books that taught me how to write—not that this should be of any interest to friends and relatives. I give it to them because it’s beautiful, funny, and tough. More recently: Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution, which is the best, and most enjoyable, book about movies I’ve read for years, and maybe ever.

MJ: What work of nonfiction have you reread the most, and what’s the allure.

NH: I’m really not a big rereader—I’m too aware of my own ignorance. I’ve read Greil Marcus’ chapter on The Band in Mystery Train more than twice, however. It’s one of the pieces of writing that made me such an Americophile—and it’s just so smart and fizzy.

MJ: Can you think of a nonfiction book someone handed you as a kid that left a lasting impression?

NH: I can only recall being given dictionaries and encyclopedias. I can remember my father gave me a huge history of football for my 12th birthday—I used to read that a lot. I can remember thinking it was cool that something I was interested in even had a history. Most things I loved didn’t.

MJ: What are the best music-related memoirs you’ve ever read?

NH: Dylan’s Chronicles is easily the best rock ‘n’ roll memoir ever written, as far as I’m concerned. There aren’t many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from, and why he thinks the way he does, then that’s the one. For stories you need The Dirt, the book about Motley Crue.

MJ: Who’s your Tucker Crowe? Not trying to suggest that you’re an obsessive, pathetic music nerd, but is there any (obscure?) musical figure you find endlessly intriguing? [In Hornby’s latest novel—Juliet, Naked—a key character is unhealthily obsessed with Crowe, a reclusive ex-musician.]

NH: I’m not even sure I was writing about music—I was thinking about writers as much as I was thinking about musicians, but more people are interested in music than they are in literature. Salinger was still alive then.

MJ: Which living nonfiction writer would you most like to share a pint with? What would you most like to ask them? Ditto for living musician.

NH: David Kynaston, author of the recent, and astoundingly good, Austerity Britain and Family Britain. He’s writing a sequence of books that will
take us up to 1979, and it seems to me that he knows more about the recent history of this country than anyone alive. I’d like to ask him where we’re going. Living musicians: Bobby Womack must have some stories. He embodies almost the entire history of R&B.

Follow Michael Mechanic on Twitter.


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate