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I like High Fidelity--or at least I liked it when I read it in '97 or thereabouts. What am I doing wrong?
I'd say a big part of the animosity, especially amongst British readers, is that it's a very average bloke-ish look at music fandom, not just in terms of being a straight white middle class male protagonist but also a certain skepticism against anything too artsy or high minded - remember the bit where he talks about having read a few big books and goes "they're about girls, right?" or something to that effect.
Another aspect is it's a book about a manchild finally getting it together that's super generous towards its manchild protagonist and views his previous terrible behaviour in relationships as just, like, steps in his self-actualization journey. Hornsby himself is quite scathing about this aspect of it these days.
Being honest though I read HF as a #teen and with no frame of reference for the relationship stuff I was just excited to read a novel featuring top5 lists and references to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys and depictions of that most impossibly glamorous of lives, working at a record shop.
"Sabbath's Theater" was 1995(!) I would've voted for that.
It was in the longlist but had to drop it to get to 50, alongside final novels by Iris Murdoch and Patricia Highsmith.
― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 26 September 2021 10:14 (two years ago) link
Melancholy is one of several amazing Fosse novels, although maybe not your obvious Fosse starter with its complicated conceit - a fictionalized first-person biographical story of a tortured Norwegian old master painter, boring inside his mind at his most fraught, around the time he was admitted to the asylum.
― abcfsk, Monday, 27 September 2021 12:22 (two years ago) link
I was hoping Patrick McCabe's "The Dead School" would have been included. I think its his best.
Otherwise, I am voting for "American Tabloid".
― Saxophone Of Futility (Michael B), Monday, 27 September 2021 13:50 (two years ago) link