Okay, so I am late to the party in reading this book, but I think Hornby himself would appreciate that fact. Here are the reasons why you should buy (I say buy instead of read because it is partly about buying books you never read):

1) All of the proceeds from the book are split between 826NYC, a writing center for children, and Treehouse, a London-based charity for children with autism (Hornby has a son with autism)

2) Hornby is funny as hell

3) He is a also a writer who knows how to get to the heart of the matter (“We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.”)

4) and has a tender heart

5) it’s partly about writing (“But there comes a point in the writing process when a novelist–any novelist, even a great one–has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke, and entertain the reader.”)

6) reading about reading is an interesting concept