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I love it so much that it is now in the same place as my ever fav Bridget Jones’s Diary. I didn’t expect to like it to such an extent, coz it is about a boy, well, actually “two” boys (including one Peter Pan) and I didn’t think I would relate to it as I did with BJ Diary. But Nick Hornby’s writing style turns out to be one of my fav styles: seemingly light and even flippant yet conveying a much heavier message, satiric yet tender, comic yet true to the bone in terms of depicting the characters. How could anyone not love Marcus? Will is, as the other male protagonists in NH’s novels, a flawed hero. It is never intended and will never be a larger than life hero, and it is not even a better than average human being if you measure him with the usual moral standards. However, such a character is more endearing than the “heroes”, and touches people’s heart to a greater degree, when it strives for the better. I am sure people can find more or less a reflection in themselves or people around them. To be honest, I at first thought that Will’s lifestyle is the one I eventually want: having enough money to do nothing and can do whatever I want in the world. However, as I read the story, I realized that it is not that easy as it sounds. As Rachel tells Will: “About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do… most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and despair, and you don’t seem a very desperate person…The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point… but on the quiet you don’t think life’s too bad.” People need a point to go on living, and most of us define ourselves with objects, or things around us, such as work, family, friends or lovers, or even abstract things like ambition, aspirations, dreams, etc. However, for someone like Will to live happily (or at least not painfully), he has to love life itself, instead of the things that attach us to life. However, even Will finds out, eventually, that life is not just another NYPD Blue to look forward to, or another Nirvana record to expect, but about actually living, and caring, and being attached to people and things around them. So this is a paradox: you can live relatively well without the “attachments”, and yet, you need these attachments to actually “live”, because eventually you will find out that music and Telly is not enough, and you need these attachments to define yourself, to a certain degree. So “to do whatever I want in the world” will still involve something, some intellectual, physical or emotional output, and this output engages you to life. It is not enough to be a mere audience to life. To live is to participate.

Compared to the movie, I prefer the ending of the movie. The ending of the movie creates a real climax, the point where audience may cry, and feel happy that things end this way. I don’t know if this is the hollywoodization of a British story (but it is directed by British directors), but I actually prefer this ending to the relatively bland (but probably more realistic) one of the book. Will is a man that goes with the trend, not against it or away from it. He wants to blend in, and actually blends in, most of time anyway. He teaches Marcus to be invisible so that he won’t be singled out by the kids at school. Therefore, it is no small feat for him to go up the stage and literally “rescue” Marcus from lifelong “psychological trauma” (well, maybe just embarrassment). I know that I genuinely love this character at that point. In the book, on the other hand, he is pushed by Rachel to talk to Fiona, and pushed all the way to realization by external events. It might be more believable, but it is much more touching in the movie, and it gives people a sense of completion, and a starting point of another journey on a new level.