How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The first two pages of this book are hilarious, and the narrative stays consistently amusing beyond that point. The characters’ limited perspectives are so wonderfully flat and self-centered! Not a single character in this book desires to actually be good, not if it interferes with their self-righteousness or their conception of what, exactly, the term entails. Katie Carr is a wonderful unreliable narrator, funny and sarcastic and a seeming projection of the mind of every guilty liberal stuck on his or her First World problems.
How To Be Good is a highly polished mirror held up to society with the same cold, sharp objectivity Hornby can bring to seemingly any type of character, along with his gift of the over-warm, squishy embarrassment of everyday life delivered perfectly on the page with uncomfortable accuracy. The in-depth examination of what it is to be good, and be human at once really hit home for me, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in a smart novel guaranteed to make you examine one’s own state of “Good-ness”.