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trin's review against another edition
4.0
Memoir of Nick Hornby's life with football. Really, this is a book about fandom—Hornby could just as easily be talking about internet TV/book/movie/band fandom, except there's less gay sex and a lot more of people punching each other. The point is, this book, which would seem to be very much for the masculine sports fan, is actually scarily-relatable: Hornby talks about using his fannish obsession as the best and easiest way to make friends, about how he gets nauseated right before matches (please tell me I'm not the only one who feels sick to her stomach before a new episode of her favorite show), about the horrible panic he feels at the thought of missing a single game. The parallels go on and on; Hornby has, he says, measured out his life in football matches, and if I were to write a memoir, I could just as easily map my life so far over key episodes of whatever I was then-obsessing over on TV. It's a little freaky.
So what have I learned from this? Obviously that I need to find an obsessive sports fan to date. We'd be sympathetic to each other's obsessions, and could help one another nurture them, but since they wouldn't overlap, we wouldn't have to worry about, say, him having to stay home with our hypothetical child on game day, or me having to miss any of the season premiere because a pipe burst. PERFECT. Now why isn't there a dating service for people like us?
So what have I learned from this? Obviously that I need to find an obsessive sports fan to date. We'd be sympathetic to each other's obsessions, and could help one another nurture them, but since they wouldn't overlap, we wouldn't have to worry about, say, him having to stay home with our hypothetical child on game day, or me having to miss any of the season premiere because a pipe burst. PERFECT. Now why isn't there a dating service for people like us?
gracefullypunk's review
5.0
The life of a fan, put out there from an Arsenal supporter. Many of my football crazed friends refuse to read this book due to its use of Arsenal, but the Gunners are just a backdrop to the main point of the book--what it means to be a fanatic. And whether you live with one, are one, or are a combination of both, this book will leave you exclaiming yes! more than a few times. Hornby combines growing up with the life of a fan, and somehow manages to make us believe that it's ok to not quite grow up all the way, because being a fan means having the ability to both set aside real life and to be able to cope with it.
And, if you've seen the movie, be aware--the book is nothing like the film about the Red Sox. There is no love story outside his love for football. This is about a life, not a season. And any fan will understand.
And, if you've seen the movie, be aware--the book is nothing like the film about the Red Sox. There is no love story outside his love for football. This is about a life, not a season. And any fan will understand.
daddyfingers's review against another edition
Will finish later. It’s a temporary DNF.
jl27's review
2.0
I love soccer. So much. I also love Nick Hornby's other work an awful lot, but this book was just not something I enjoyed, and it kind of makes me sad to admit that.
guppyur's review
2.0
I came to Fever Pitch in a slightly roundabout way. I'm seeing someone with a couple of Nick Hornby books on her shelf, and feeling I had read some rather poor books recently -- and that few of my ways to book recommendations were leading me to books I enjoyed of late -- I had been thinking of giving Hornby a go. I still procrastinated it for a while, but I was thinking fondly, recently, of my experience with Jonathan Tropper and I happened to see something online comparing the two.
So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.
The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it "soccer" and not "football," please don't bother. The English coined the term "soccer" in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use "football" elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)
Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.
So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis -- "I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession" -- and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.
Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as "a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes," I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.
On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.
I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.
So I looked up Hornby on Amazon's Kindle store, and resolved to sort by highest customer rating and read whatever bubbled to the top. I didn't expect it to be Fever Pitch, at least not once I understood that it wasn't a novel and was therefore not quite what I was hoping for. But, I decided, what the hell. My own judgment wasn't leading me to good choices lately anyway.
The result was mixed. Fever Pitch isn't a complete autobiography of any sort. It's a memoir about being a soccer obsessive, and specifically an Arsenal obsessive. (If you're mentally upbraiding me for calling it "soccer" and not "football," please don't bother. The English coined the term "soccer" in the first place, and sneering at it is an ugly, particularly tribal sort of anti-American derision. I use it here where I might use "football" elsewhere because it permits no confusion and because the bulk of my Goodreads friends are American.)
Hornby is not a soccer fan in the same way you might imagine if you aren't well acquainted with the game. He is a die-hard, the sort for whom soccer results are deadly serious and apt to overshadow any other news, good or bad. He comments early on that the book is therefore primarily for either obsessives like him or people on the outside who want to know what it's like to live with such an obsession. I am neither, really. I count myself a soccer fan, and support a couple of teams in different leagues. I appreciate a beautiful play as much as anyone, and a victory for my side does put me in a better mood. But I don't live and die by results and I don't have or want the sort of recall necessary to remember the squad from a decade ago or the particulars of a match from someone else's Cup final. I lack both the proximity and the distance he describes.
So here is where the trouble begins for me. The book is not long, some 270 pages or so, but it's consumed, as I now know Hornby to be as well, with details. It makes it a bit of a slog at times, lacking the obsession (particularly with Arsenal, who are not my team) to really care about minor details. Hornby has an essentially simple thesis -- "I am a diehard Arsenal supporter and here is evidence of my obsession" -- and he runs into a fundamental contradiction. I don't care enough to want to read all of these match details, but did he not feel compelled to include all of them it would undermine his own thesis. The result is that I enjoyed myself a fair bit for perhaps 50% of the book, and then I was ready to be done.
Another recurring issue for me, and I will have a caveat about this in a moment, is that Hornby is an unrelenting homer. He has to be for the book to make any sense, but it's aggravating nonetheless. Here comes the caveat: if I remember correctly, this book was written around 1991, long before I paid any attention to professional soccer. Hornby is convinced that Arsenal are universally hated and perennially cursed with terrible fortune. Perhaps it was true then; I really don't know, but I doubt it. But Arsenal have finished very near the top of the league for years now, manager Arsène Wenger is famous for doing very well with a more limited budget than his peers, and among the people I know they draw far less hatred than Manchester United, say, or Chelsea. Hornby endured years of failure and Arsenal have won the league only three times in his life. Cry me a fucking river. To this West Ham supporter, whose team has never, ever won the league despite its storied history and famous academy system, this seems like an awful lot of whining. Hornby names West Ham as a much-loved club even among fans of other teams; in my time supporting them we have been among the most universally-reviled sides in the English system. Perhaps my own homerism is clouding my judgment, but having seen them written up alongside a lot of generally neutral descriptions by thoroughly unaffiliated writers as "a bunch of cheating Cockney bastards nobody likes," I really don't think so. Again, of course, a lot can and has changed since 1991. But the persecution complex wears a bit thin.
On a technical level, the book is executed well enough. Hornby strings together a sentence just fine, and he is candid about the many ways in which his behavior and thought processes are thoroughly ridiculous.
I feel okay about Fever Pitch, but I don't know that I can recommend it to a general audience. If you have an interest in soccer it's an interesting look at a true obsessive, and makes me feel better about my own interest in the game. It also tells me very little about whether I ought to read Hornby's other work, which comprises mainly novels. A mixed bag.
zoefruitcake's review against another edition
1.0
I read this as part of the Reading Ahead challenge which required a book about a sport to be read.
Well known as I am for my dislike of all sports I struggled to find something I thought I would find interesting and decided on this because I had enjoyed everything else he had written and I expected it to approach the subject from an engaging angle.
Unfortunately, I was very wrong and no part of this book was in the slightest bit interesting, engaging or entertaining to me and I suspect no one else who doesn't have a deep interest in football
Well known as I am for my dislike of all sports I struggled to find something I thought I would find interesting and decided on this because I had enjoyed everything else he had written and I expected it to approach the subject from an engaging angle.
Unfortunately, I was very wrong and no part of this book was in the slightest bit interesting, engaging or entertaining to me and I suspect no one else who doesn't have a deep interest in football