Catching up with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, I see that they have a fresh essay by Sarah Vowell, written as the forward to Nick Hornby’s latest book. It is an extended complaint about all the books we don’t have time to read, and it is, of course, excellent. One highlight is a brief detour into the question of what the World Cup is, and whether it might be as compelling as a certain other televisual time-suck:

In that column, collected herein, [Hornby] confesses that he didn’t read a book at all because something called “the World Cup” was on TV. I’m not entirely sure what that is, as I do not live in the world; I live in the United States. But from what I can tell, he didn’t crack a book because this World Cup thing was as all-consuming a free-time eater-upper as the DVDs of the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica were to me. Not that I’m convinced that this Ukraine v. Tunisia rivalry he describes has the depth of feeling and moral ambiguity so dramatically summoned by the space humans’ ongoing war with the Cylons the humans themselves created, but then again what does?