Read Online Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby - Free Book Online Page A

gig elsewhere first), who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge’s extended harmonica solo. (His mate, meanwhile, rose unsteadily to his feet and started clapping along.) It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn’t have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded—and this happened the last time I saw them play, too—how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn’t and it doesn’t matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I’d gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn’t want to read for about a fortnight afterwards. I wanted towrite, but I couldn’t because of the holidays, and I wanted to listen to Marah, but I didn’t want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature’s dead as a dodo. (In an attempt to get myself back on course, I bought Bill Ehrhardt’s book Vietnam-Perkasie , because he comes Marah-endorsed, and provided the inspiration for “Round Eye Blues,” one of their very best songs. I didn’t read the thing, though. And their next album is tentatively entitled 20,000 Streets under the Sky , after a Patrick Hamilton novel—I’m going to order that and not read it, too.)
    It wasn’t as if I didn’t try; it was just that very little I picked up fit very well with my mood. I bought Flaubert’s letters after reading the piece about Donald Barthelme’s required reading list in the Believer [October, 2003], but they weren’t right—or at least, they’re not if one chooses to read them in chronological order. The young Flaubert wasn’t very rock and roll. He was, on this evidence, kind of a prissy, nerdy kid. “friend, I shall send you some of my political speeches, liberal constitutionalist variety,” he wrote to Ernest Chevalier in January 1831; he’d just turned nine years old. Nine! Get a life, kid! (Really? You wrote those? They’re pretty good books. Well… Get another one, then.) I am probably taking more pleasure than is seemly in his failure to begin the sentence with a capital letter. You know, as in, Jesus, he didn’t know the first thing about basic punctuation! How did this loser ever get to be a writer?
    Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World was a better fit, because, well, it rocks: it’s fast and smart and very funny, despite being about how we have betrayed the Enlightenment by retreating back to the Dark Ages. Wheen wrote a warm, witty biography of Marx a few years back, and has a unique, sharp, enviable, and trustworthy mind. Here he dishes it out two-fisted to Tony Blair and George W. Bush, Deepak Chopra and Francis Fukuyama, Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Jacques Derrida, and by the end of the book you do have the rather dizzying sensation that you, the author, and maybe Richard Dawkins are the only remotely sane people in the entire world. It’s difficult to endorse this book without committing a few cardinal Believer sins: as you may have noticed, some of the people that Wheen accuses of talking bullshit are, regrettably, writers, and in a chapter entitled“The Demolition Merchants of Reality,” Wheen lumps deconstructionism in with creationism. In other words, he claims there isn’t much to choose from between Pat Buchanan and Jacques Lacan when it comes to mumbo-jumbo, and I’m sorry to say that I laughed a lot. The next chapter, “The Catastrophists,” gives homeopathy, astrology, and UFOlogy a good kicking, and you’ll find yourself conveniently forgetting the month you gave up coffee and mint because you were taking arnica three times a day. (Did you know that