An ambivalent reader

"I suppose I wanted to talk about the act of reading, and all the guilt that surrounds reading, which is something I’ve thought a lot about over the last few years," he says, leaning back in his chair and taking a drag off another cigarette. "Partly from being a writer and seeing how people apologize all the time for not having read you, or not having read other books by other people, and I just felt sad about it, really. Not because people weren’t reading books, but because they had this terrible ingrained knee-jerk reaction to all things connected with literature. I do like to read, but, you know, it’s hard, and I do like watching telly, and I do like sport, and reading has to fight for its place within that. So it was a reading diary in the sense of not only writing about the books I was reading, but what it’s like to try and read when you have other things going on."

A Nick Hornby interview in LA Weekly.