Free More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby

enough for one, but the care and thought that have gone into every line of Half a Life are indicative not only of a very talented writer, but of a proper human being.
    And now Strauss has got me at it. I was going to end with a very good, if overcomplicated, joke about Dickens and a pair of broken Bose headphones, but I’m no longer sure it’s appropriate. So I’ll stop here.

FEBRUARY 2011
BOOKS BOUGHT:
    Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste —Carl Wilson
    Will Grayson, Will Grayson —John Green and David Levithan
BOOKS READ:
    The Anthologist —Nicholson Baker
    Brooklyn —Colm Tóibín
    Madcap: The Life of Preston Sturges —Donald Spoto
    Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste— Carl Wilson
    I t’s a wet Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on a sofa reading a book. On one side of me is my eldest son, Danny, who is seventeen and autistic. His feet are in my lap, and he’s watching a children’s TV program on his iPad. Or rather, he’s watching a part of a children’s TV program, over and over again: a song from Postman Pat entitled “Handyman Song.” Danny is wearing headphones, but I’ve just noticed that they’re not connected properly, so I can hear every word of the song anyway. On my other side is another son, my eight-year-old, Lowell. He’s watching the Sunday-morning football-highlights program Goals on Sunday . I’m caught between them, trying to finish Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist .
    â€œLook at this, Dad,” Lowell says.
    He wants me to watch Johan Elmander’s goal for Bolton at Wolves, the second in a 3–2 win. It’s one of the best goals of the season so far, and at the time of writing has a real chance of winning the BBC’s Goal of the Month award, but I only have thirteen pages of the novel to go, so I only glance up for a moment.
    â€œClose the book,” Lowell says.
    â€œI saw the goal. I’m not going to close the book.”
    â€œClose the book. You didn’t see the replay.”
    He tries to grab the book out of my hand, so we wrestle for a moment while I turn the corner of the page down. I watch the replay. He’s satisfied. I return to The Anthologist , football commentary in one ear and the Postman Pat song in the other.
    Would Nicholson Baker mind? I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t choose for me to be reading his work under these circumstances, and I’m with him all the way. I’d rather be somewhere else, too. I’d rather be on a sun-lounger in southern California, in the middle of a necessarily childless reading tour, just for the thirty minutes it’s going to take me to get to the end of the novel. I would savor every single minute of the rest of a wet English November Sunday with three sons, just so long as I was given half an hour—not even that!—of sunshine and solitude. I hope Baker would be pleased by my determination and absorption, though. I wasn’t throwing his book away by submitting it to the twin assaults of Postman Pat and Goals on Sunday . I was hanging on to it for dear life.
    It’s a wonderful novel, I think, unusual, generous, educational, funny. The eponymous narrator, Paul Chowder, is a broke poet whose girlfriend has just left him; he’s trying to write an introduction to an anthology of verse while simultaneously worrying about the rent and the history of rhyme. Chowder loves rhyme: he thinks that the blank verse of modernism was all a fascist plot, and that Swinburne was the greatest rhymer “in the history of human literature.” Indeed, The Anthologist is full of artless, instructive digressionsabout all sorts of people (Swinburne, Vachel Lindsay, Louise Bogan) and all sorts of things (iambic pentameter) that I knew almost nothing about. Chowder might be an awful mess, but you trust him on all matters relating to poetry.
    I developed something of a crush on