Rating: 
Summary: How To Be Bored
Review: I will preface my review of this novel by stating I love Nick Hornby's work. I thoroughly enjoyed About a Boy, Fever Pitch, and High Fidelity. How To Be Good spends most of the time in the mind of Katie Carr. Throughout the book we come to know how unhappy she is about her husband's misadventures. This is Hornby's first novel that is primarily about a female character. Now some may say that this book does not live up to some of his previous works because he does not know how to write a female character, I tend to disagree. It is the story itself that fails to satisfy the reader.
The book is well written and the only shortcomings I have is that the story is not engaging. While I was reading I kept waiting for something to happen that was actually interesting. The odd behavior of her husband in the book is amusing, but from her perspective it takes all of the humor out of it. I still enjoyed Hornby's writing and ultimately How To Be Good fails in one area, it does not stand up to Horby's other works.
Rating: 
Summary: Truly Bad
Review: If you finish this book then it is a tribute to your perseverance. It is a turgid, boring novel where the characters are just wooden props that are pushed about to help present the writer's 'clever' ideas. As well as suffering Hornby's trite insights into the dynamics of a failing marriage, we are served up his views on the ethics and morality of middle class Britain: it's painful to read these shallow observations dragged over 300 patience testing pages. If this was a first novel submitted to an editor he'd write back saying that the work shows promise, and that he'd be happy to consider the next book. Unfortunately for us Hornby is an established writer, and this diatribe has been served up to the reading public. The book has achieved some outstanding reviews from critics. For example, the UK's Sunday Times call it "a biting clever novel of ideas... profound, worrying, hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive." Well bite me; I'm worried about anyone who thinks this is a decent book. It's a case of the Emperor's clothes: Hornby's other books were so good, it's hard to believe that he knew how to be this bad.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Satire For The Times
Review: Meet an average 40 something British couple with marital problems. She's a doctor with decidedly liberal leanings and is considered the "good" one in the marriage only now she's having an affair. He's a columnist known as "the angriest man in Holloway" and makes a living by ranting about everything and everyone - he's not easy to live with. To annoy his physician wife he decides to see a faith healer known as GoodNews about his bad back and ends up coming away a changed man. He forgives his wife and decides to give away many of their possessions (including his son's computer because they don't need two). He starts a community program to encourage his neighbors to take in homeless teenagers and basically begins to try and convince his wife that it's their duty to change the world and make it a better place. She's now forced to decide just how good do you have to be in order to be a good person, she doesn't want a homeless kid in the house and she's worked hard for the things they have but how do you say no. I read this book right after reading Carol Sheild's Unless and I thought this was a much more truthful look at what it means to be good and how much self sacrifice is too much.
Rating:
Summary: More Puzzling Than First Appears
Review: This is a different, and in some ways better, book than Hornby's other work. While his other books are more consistently entertaining, this book strives for, and once in a while hits, a higher mark.
Rating: 
Summary: How to be Mediocre
Review: This is the first Nick Hornby's book I've read, and even though I'm giving this book 2 stars...it won't be my last Nick Hornby book. I say this because ultimately Hornby's a funny writer (with better material out there) and "How To Be Good" starts off like a charm; a middle age man confronts his selfish consuming vain ways, with the help of bum/guru, and tries to make the world a better place, even if that means making his family miserable. In curious form, the narrator is the man's wife.
Over the course of the book, what starts off like a sure fire concept seems to get muddled and confused. Slowed down by Hornby's love of pop culture references, the book wades though social experiments like Adopt a Bum that arn't funny, end up being too predictable, and go nowhere. In the end, the family grows to appreciate each other but it was too little too late for me.
Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed it...I think
Review: Well, I loved "About a Boy" and I enjoyed the film of "High Fidelity" (I've yet to read it) so I was excited to find this novel by Nick Hornby. As always, he is surprising and dark, bitter at times, cutting, funny...it's a novel that is difficult to pigeon-hole. I really enjoyed it, I think. It's one of those books that one keeps rolling over their tongue and around their brain for days afterwards. It definitely made an impact and had some very interesting insights into society. Perhaps I get upset too easily but I often wanted to shout some sense into the lead character (whose observations are teribbly funny, but often fatally short-sighted) but I believe that's the point. I have to let this one percolate in my brain for a bit. Parts were wonderful, but as a whole I wasn't crazy about this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: How to ... be hooked !
Review: You are young, you get married, you have children, arguments and sexual chemistry together ...and the years go by...How to be Good ...is the story of any couple, and reading it gave me chills down my spine because it was so damnably relatable! When the romance gives way to reality and the business of making a marriage work, no author could have done it better. There is no constant in life but change and the novel depicts this beautifully. What is frankly more amazing is how a middle aged male author could get into the mind of a female protagonist so well, so lucidly and so insightfully...Nick Hornby must be having a lot of meaningful conversations with REAL wome, real wives, real mothers...no wonder this book is the product of that !
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