Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down. Read by Scott Brick, Simon Vance, and Kate Reading. Penguin Audiobooks, 2007.

Listened to this on a trip to South Dakota with my boyfriend, through the Badlands and camping in the Black Hills. Probably a bad match—the landscape doesn't really absorb the wet urban feel of this London novel. Oh well.

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is one of two books that I claim aren't as good as the movies made from them. (The other is Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors, mostly because as a hack writer he's simply unable to understand and create reader sympathy for any of his characters; they remain caricatures from start to finish, and the guy who wrote the screenplay for RwS did a great job of inserting brief moments of emotional resonance that Burroughs couldn't recognize if it was announced with trumpet fanfare.) I don't recall why I feel this. Something about the ending of the movie being different from that of the book? Some character cut out I felt was inessential?

It's probably an unfair analysis. What I like most about Hornby is how he's able to achieve emotional intensity and profound realizations in a language that never stops being colloquial and chatty, and the result is never cheesy or forced. Because I listened to an audiobook, I don't have any examples of this for you, sorry. Can you trust me?

In many ways, Hornby is a great model of a writer, like, career-wise. Or maybe a better way to say it, one more clear, is to say that I'd like very much to be the kind of novelist he is. I'd like to write stories about people living in the world today, middle-class people, sure, fine; I've never tried to present myself as someone who wrote passionately about the working classes, or about foreign or oppressed cultures. And I'd like those stories to show people reading them ways to go about living in the world today, and I'd like them to be nice, easy reads that do their job for the 10 or so hours people spend flipping its pages.

It doesn't sound like a very ambitious thing to wish for. Writers my age and probably of my gender seem to wish for brilliance on the level of formal innovation. J. S. Foer being the model writer that comes to mind. But I'm not this kind of writer, and I don't really think that way or come to writing (or reading) that way. I think I've tried a lot of times to be that kind of writer and I'm finding it all frustrating and upsetting and if, as Jim Shepard says, writing is supposed, at the initial stages, to be driven by play, like a kid in a sandbox, then why, I wonder, do I continue to try to write things that frustrate me at every stage of their creation? When was the last time I had fun writing something?

And anyway, I think wanting to be like Nick Hornby is extremely ambitious. I mean, how hard to tell stories anyone can take the time to care about!