Two books to review

A Long Way Down is the fifth novel by my favorite author, Nick Hornby. While it doesn’t rank with the greatness of his first three; Fever Pitch, High Fidelity,, and About A Boy, it has a charm all its’ own. The premise is somewhat morbid: What happens when four sucidial strangers bump into each other at the exact moment they most need one another - on the roof of one of London’s most infamous suicide spots? While that’s obviously a bit of a contrievience in and of itself, Hornby takes some additional literary license throughout the novel to put the characters in a series of highly comic scenarios. The thing is, I didn’t mind one bit. It all works, and I laughed constantly while reading.

Meanwhile, in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman has collected a series of essays he’s written on a myriad of popular culture subjects. From his hatred for John Cusack to his love of “The Real World”, every essay is an absolutely hysterical descent into what made/makes America tick in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.