{"id":1187,"date":"2015-02-27T07:58:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T13:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/?p=1187"},"modified":"2015-02-27T07:58:54","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T13:58:54","slug":"wifis-fiction-of-the-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wifis-fiction-of-the-week\/","title":{"rendered":"WiFi’s Fiction of the Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_20150227_075307[1]\"<\/a>Did youknow that the Help@Ames beta likes to read? Every so often he goes on a new adventure in a book and this week he’s been swimming around Funny Girl<\/em>, a novel by Nick Hornby.<\/p>\n

Amazon.com Review<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February 2015:<\/a><\/strong> No, Nick Hornby\u2019s latest is not a retelling of the story made famous by the old Barbara Streisand movie called Funny Girl \u2013 but the allusion to pop culture of the 1960s in this delightful novel is not coincidental. On the surface, this Funny Girl is about a working class English girl who comes of age as a TV star in the days of Carnaby Street, the Beatles, and the musical Hair; what it\u2019s also about is the way the world turned over for everybody \u2013 but especially actors and writers — in that explosive era. Sophie Straw is the gorgeous girl from Blackpool who, like Lucille Ball (to whom Hornby slyly introduces the starstruck Sophie in a late scene), is originally deemed too pretty to be funny; like Ball, she manages through wit, decency and pratfall to become her nation\u2019s sweetheart. She\u2019s a great character, and readers \u2013 like everyone in swinging London \u2013 will love her. But if Sophie is the star, the rest of the population here \u2013 the hilariously narcissistic lover\/co-star, the director who pines for Sophie for years, and, my favorite, the writers who give her her vehicles \u2013 are exceptional supporting players. And Hornby, who was a bit of a pop culture wunderkind himself, is wise about the way artists\u2019 (especially writers\u2019) careers morph and change, and what it\u2019s like to define a cultural moment and then watch yourself live past it. — Sara Nelson<\/i><\/p>\n

“Nick Hornby<\/a> is the author of the novels A Long Way Down, How to Be Good (a New York Times bestseller), High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and of the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. He is also the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and the Orange Word International Writers London Award 2003.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did youknow that the Help@Ames beta likes to read? Every so often he goes on a new adventure in a book and this week he’s been swimming around Funny Girl, a novel by Nick Hornby. Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":500,"featured_media":1188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ames-highlights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/files\/2015\/02\/funny-girl.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1191,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions\/1191"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}