Category Archives: Reviews

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the best book about four people not dying that you’ll ever read.

I didn’t know what A Long Way Down was about before I picked it up based on a recommendation. Now that I’ve read it, I’m struggling to describe it. It’s a book about suicide, but it’s not very depressing; it’s also not deeply inspirational–it is very real. It’s a good book, and I think you should read it, and maybe that’s enough of a description.

A Long Way Down centers on four people who each independently decide they would like to kill themselves by jumping off a tall building on New Year’s Eve. Except their individual sojourns are interrupted when the others have the same idea, and they all agree to come down from the building that night. But that’s not really a happy thing; now they’ve even failed at suicide and don’t know what to do with themselves.

It was purely by coincidence that I read this book during Suicide Prevention Week. While I found this book to be an excellent portrayal of deep sadness, it does have its funny parts. That being said, that doesn’t mean suicide is a funny topic, and if you are feeling like ending your life, please seek help. I hesitate to suggest that this book would help you if you were feeling that way, but it might.

Now an aside for writers: Stop what you are doing and pick this book up NOW. You’ll get a look at realistic characters like nothing else. I worship Nick Hornby for this skill. He created four completely individual characters who have very little in common and who feel completely separate.

You’ve got: a narcissistic former TV personality who can’t stop himself from being a screw up; a teenager who is decidedly unhinged and drug-addled; a sad-sack older woman who really needs to get out more; and a wayward American musician who has lost track of his life’s purpose. And it’s amazing.

Another brilliant portion of this book is the way Hornby gives voice to each character, as it is told from four distinct perspectives. This allows the reader to ‘hear’ what a character thinks of himself…and what everyone else thinks of him. It’s genius, and incredibly revealing.

And that says a lot, because I’m struggling to think of much that actually HAPPENS in this book. It never drags–on the contrary, I always looked forward to reading the next page–but an action-filled drama this is not. It’s amazing that so much story could be packed into so little motion. Great swaths of this story take place with people just sitting around a room together awkwardly, and it’s brilliant and perfect.

A Long Way Down is a rather unexpected book, but it provides a great lesson in empathy. In fact, I think that’s the biggest thing I got from this book: the deep and abiding selfishness of suicide. All teenagers and self-absorbed persons should have to read it to learn what this kind of navel-gazing looks like from the outside. It’s marvelous.

A Long Way Down is a great book and I’d recommend it to anybody. I can’t imagine, however, that a non-famous author could ever have gotten this book off the ground–how do you pitch a story about people not dying? Luckily for us, Hornby managed it

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lot of the time when we talk about writing, we say it’s because we “want to get into someone else’s head.”

But that’s not true, is it? A lot of the time, we want to be ourselves, but in someone else’s life. You want to stop being a truck driver who takes the same route to work every day, day after day, and be a prince fighting faeries instead; you want to not be a frazzled mother of three young kids and instead be a footloose woman who can pick up and find herself in countries totally different from your real world; you want to not be a lost teenager in a scary world with things out of your control, because you’d rather be a boy wizard who has amazing friends and literally saves the world.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a rare book that literally puts you inside someone else’s mind. And it’s incredibly disorienting at first, but all the more powerful for this transformation.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a story about a deeply autistic boy, Christopher, who discovers his neighbor’s dog is dead and decides to be a detective like the Sherlock Holmes stories he likes to read, and he writes down everything that happens in a book he began making as a class assignment.

Because he is autistic (and because author Mark Haddon is very good at what he does and has worked with special needs kids), Christopher’s writings are not like anything else. There’s very little emotion, not much introspection. There are math problems. Chapters are numbered with sequential prime numbers. There are very precise drawings of the patterns of the fabric of a new chair.

The presumably non-autistic reader is left to fill in a lot of the gaps in the story, because while Christopher is perhaps the most literal narrator in some senses (describing even the number of holes in someone’s shoe, and the exact color of the beans on the plate), his perceptual lapses means he truly can’t understand some things. But the reader can, making this book a lot more interactive between the character and the reader than most.

It’s hard to relate directly to Christopher, and that’s what makes this book so compelling. You see through his eyes and are frustrated that he misinterprets information that seems so obvious. The people all around him–even his pet rat sometimes!–are more like the reader than Christopher, and you feel their frustration with dealing with Christopher’s many needs, with his seeming dichotomy between a kid who is stunning at some things and completely empty in others.

It’s a lesson in empathy, if nothing else.

This book isn’t an easy read, and it’s not a happy read, either, and I’m mystified by the quotes on the cover exclaiming the “bleak humor” within, because I found nothing funny–just sad. Because as more children are diagnosed with autism and society finds ways to cope, much of what happens in the book is barely fiction for many parents and teachers and caregivers. I can’t imagine the pain it must cause those real parents who have to find strategies to manage real Christophers.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a fantastically written book, but be prepared for something a bit more weighty than your average fare.

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