It doesn’t really matter if his theory is true - his voice on the page is so charming and affable, you are willing to go along with the conceit.

… Dickens worked that way.”įor the rest of this slim volume, Hornby doubles down on his thesis that no other artists have ever produced “such a staggeringly enormous body of work” even as he acknowledges in the next breath that someone might invoke the examples of Wagner or Picasso. “When I read about the boxed set,” Hornby writes in the introduction, “I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. What prompted him to link the two in this extended essay was the 2020 rerelease of Prince’s 1987 album, “Sign o’ the Times.” Unlike the typical boxed set treatment of an iconic album, which might throw in a couple extra demos or live tracks, “Sign o’ the Times” included 63 songs that weren’t on the original album. He s become a good person, too really good. On the face of it, they are an odd couple - a white 19th century British writer and a Black 20th and 21st century American musician. A brutally truthful, compassionate novel about the heart, mind, and soul of a woman who, confronted by her husband s sudden and extreme spiritual conversion, is forced to learn how to be good whatever that means, and for better or worse But now David s changed. Now he has yoked together two more objects of his intense fandom, Charles Dickens and Prince, to explore the similarities between creative geniuses separated by an ocean and nearly 150 years. Nick Hornby has been writing about pop culture since the 1990s, most famously his obsessive love of soccer in 1992’s “Fever Pitch” and of music in “High Fidelity,” three years later. “Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius,” by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books)

Nick hornby how to be good review