One of the things I like the most about my job is that, for various reasons, I get to see and hear and read stuff before everyone else. Why this should be quite so pleasurable I don’t know: it’s hard to brag, when the person you’re bragging to has invariably never heard of the book or movie or album in question, what with it not having come out yet. I suspect that it’s because I’m both weak-minded and pig-headed, and thus will always react in some way to any chatter surrounding the arts. I like being able to decide for myself, in relative silence.

Anyway. Four things I’ve enjoyed recently that will be coming your way soon:

1) 500 Days Of Summer
I saw this at Sundance, and I would happily watch it again. It’s a romantic comedy for younger people, and yet it completely failed to exclude me: it had great jokes, a good soundtrack, terrific performances, a fresh and imaginative sense of visual style, and, unlike just about every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last twenty years, it’s true.

2) Ben Folds Presents: University A Capella
I’d be surprised and delighted if I heard a better album than this in 2009. Ben Folds has recorded a whole bunch of top-notch university choirs who’ve been singing his songs a capella as part of their repertoire, and the results are just fantastic. Some of your favourite Folds songs – ‘Jesusland’, ‘Brick’, ‘You Don’t Know Me’, ‘Landed’ – have been re-arranged so that instruments and percussion are replaced by the human voice, and I’m completely addicted. And the lead vocalists put every single Pop Idol entrant ever to shame.

3) One Day – David Nicholls
A big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable on-off love story that sprawls over a couple of decades. Nicholls is brilliant on the details of the last couple of decades of British cultural and political life, as lived by people who danced at the Hacienda or the Wag Club and who couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be anti-Tory stand-up comedians, or coke-addled Soho movers and shakers. ‘One Day’ is coming out in June, and is therefore the perfect beach read for people who are normally repelled by the very idea of beach reads.

4) Butterfly – Sonia Hartnett
I read Butterfly a while back, but I now see that it was published on April 2nd, so you could actually go to a bookshop and buy this book. That kind of defeats the point of me including it in this list: you could make your own mind up, and we don’t want that. Anyway, you should buy it, because it’s beautiful. ‘Butterfly’ is a dreamy, lyrical, sad novel about the relationship between a lonely girl and her equally lonely next-door neighbour in the Australian suburbs. It’s exquisitely written – you end up re-reading sentence after sentence – and unforgettable.

Favourite songs of 2008:

Make The Road By Walking – Menahan Street Band
You Don’t Know Me – Ben Folds and Regina Spektor
Great Expectations – Gaslight Anthem
Chasing Pavements – Adele
Cleveland – Luke Doucet
Magic – University of Chicago Voices In Your Head
Hang On – Dr Dog
Did You Miss Me? – Lindsey Buckingham
Murder In The City – Avett Brothers
Run Run – Those Dancing Days

Favourite albums:
Little Joy
Vampire Weekend
The ’59 Sound – The Gaslight Anthem
Thing Of The Past – Vetiver
49.00 – Paul Westerberg

My favourite books of the year were all non-fiction, and two of them have
not yet been published in the UK, although they’re on their way, I think:
David Carr’s ‘Night Of The Gun’ (if you only have the time or energy for one
addiction memoir, then this should be it) and Elizabeth McCracken’s
heartbreaking but thoughtful ‘An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My
Imagination’. But Mark Harris’s ‘Scenes From A Revolution’, the best book
about movies I’ve read, is available somewhere near you now. The best novel
I read this year was Penelope Mortimer’s bleak and exquisite ‘The Pumpkin
Eater’, which was published in 1962.
 

  http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/living-with-music-a-playlist-by-nick-hornby/

…I’m on here, but Entertainment Weekly’s “New Classics: the 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008″ isn’t such a bad list, honestly.

www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html

 It finds room for Adrian Nicole Blanc’s brilliant Random Family, a book that anyone who lives in a city should read; it recognises that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both published in the last couple of years, don’t need to sit around and wait for the praise they deserve. Gilead, Birds of America, The Secret History, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Clockers and Mystic River are all present and correct.

Like any list, though, its omissions are startling, so I have chosen another thirteen that really should have been included. Why thirteen? Because that would be enough to push High Fidelity down to 101, and I can then claim impartiality.

1. The Giant’s House – Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler
3. Empire Falls – Richard Russo
4. This Boy’s Life – Tobias Woolf
5. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
6. What A Carve-Up! – Jonathan Coe
7. The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
8. The Blind Side – Michael Lewis
9. Spies – Michael Frayn
10. Feed – MT Anderson
11. The Railway Man – Eric Lomax
12. Revolution In The Head – Ian McDonald
13. The Van -  Roddy Doyle.

I put my friend Roddy Doyle last only because he’d be the one to get the
most pleasure out of shoving me off the bottom – that’s how literary
friendships work.

On further reflection, I now see that these are my thirteen favourite books
of the last twenty-five years. Whoever compiled that list is insane.

God, Please Let Me Go Back – Josh Rouse
To The Dogs or Whoever – Josh Ritter
Girls In Their Summer Clothes – Bruce Springsteen
Monkey Man – Toots and the Maytals
Aftermarket Blues – Adam and Dave’s Bloodline
Chelsea Rodgers – Prince
It’s Only Money, Tyrone – Marah
Mansion On The Hill – The National
Versatile Heart – Linda Thompson
Slippin’ Around – Detroit Cobras
Melting Pot – The Roots