I've always been a voracious reader, but sometimes, reading feels more like an assignment than a pleasure. Like, when I hear the critics raving about how great a book is or it explodes onto the bestseller list, and I find myself slogging through it, just to get to the end, wondering what the heck all the fuss is about.

The worst is when a trusted friend recommends a book, tells me in breathy excitement that it changed her life, and I end up hating it. This was the case for me with Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. A friend of mine actually barred my exit from a bookstore until I not only bought a copy, but made a solemn oath to read it immediately.

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but something about the ridiculous leap-frog on the jacket told me right away that I was not going to fall in love with this book.

Seriously. See for yourself.

But, I am a woman of my word and kept my promise. And I will never get that Saturday afternoon of my life back. I didn't just dislike the Ya-Yas, I hated them. I didn't see them as saucy or groundbreaking or sassy or fun or wise. I saw them as spoiled and unlikable, with nothing redeeming about them other than the final page, and only that because I was able to put down their drippy Southern story and honestly tell my friend that yes, I had finished it. It's not that I don't understand a good book can have unlikable characters. But I found nothing likable about the prose or the people inhabiting the Ya-Ya world. The success of the book remains a mystery to me. It made me want to vomit in my own mouth.

One could, of course, point out that Rebecca Wells has had phenomenal success with her novel and the other tales of Ya-Ya hijinks, whereas I am more a hack with the same half-finished manuscript on her desk at home that has lived there since 2004. True enough.

But I looked at my friend a little differently after I read that book. This was a book that changed someone's life? I didn't get it, didn't see it.

The flip side is when someone recommends a book that truly does speak to me, where the author steps aside and lets his characters breathe and live. This was the case with A Long Way Down, which I finished last night.

Let's start with the cover, and maybe you'll already see the difference. This is the one on my copy:

The four shoes represent Nick Hornby's four very different characters - JJ, Jess, Martin and Maureen - who separately climb to the top of a tall London building one New Year's Eve with the same intention - to throw themselves off.

Spoiler alert

Instead, they find each other and form an unlikely club of sorts. By the end of the book, the circumstances of their lives are relatively unchanged. Maureen is still the caretaker of her vegetable son. Jess' sister is still missing and her tongue is still acerbic and tactless. Her parents don't suddenly reach out to their angsty daughter to form a perfectly warm nuclear family. JJ's band remains broken up and his girlfriend doesn't come back to him. And Martin is still a loathed, washed-up middle-aged former TV morning host who spent some time in jail for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. He is still, much like Lindsay Lohan, spectacularly unable to make the good parts of his life really work and become a redeemed human being.

I make no secret of my Nick Hornby fandom and would argue with my fellow Pop Diner blogger that his name belongs up there with the greats of Brit lit.

In the first place, he so exquisitely captures the despair that makes someone want to kill himself - times four for each character. You can feel the weight of their hopelessness, how it is such a struggle to carry themselves through the day that the answer seems to be in ending it all. It's a dark place, and you have to feel pretty helpless about finding your way out, and Hornby gets this without melodrama or shmaltz. And he gets how sometimes it isn't a major change that makes a difference, it's just a shift of circumstances that makes you wait another 24 hours, then another 30 days, then another 90. There doesn't need to be a ridiculous deus ex machina that Hollywood so often relies on. Sometimes it is enough to acknowledge other people feel the same way you do, they get it and they crystallize it. And suddenly, you're not in that dark place alone. And you can see that alongside the despair and hopelessness is the genuine beauty of living.

As I read, I found myself wondering about the title. Is it a long way down to find yourself in such a place where ending it all seems the only answer? (One of the characters tells a great story about a man who threw himself off a bridge intending to kill himself and then, halfway down realized the only unsolvable problem in his life was the one he created by throwing himself off the bridge.) Without meaning to, I found myself thinking of the Sarah McLachlan song "Ice Cream," in which the singer reflects "It's a long way down to the place where we started from." Did Hornby mean it's a long way back to that feeling of hope? A long way down the stairs and back on the street to make the brave decision to keep going, keep living? Or quite literally, a long way down to the moment your body crashes and crumbles against the concrete when you throw yourself off a building?

I don't have the answer, but this book really did change my life. It reminded me of dark places I have been and the tiny shifts that brought me back to the light. And how far I have come since I was in those dark places.

Hornby draws each character with such a fine pen. No matter how obnoxious she gets, one never doubts that Jess would say the things she does. And Martin's self-importance and pomp trickles through his vocabulary. Hornby doesn't write to show the world how smart he is. He is intensely readable, believable, to the point I could feel when the weight around Maureen's life began to lift just a little, just enough that I knew she would never find herself back on top of that building, despairing. 

In a book about suicide, Hornby's novel left me so appreciative of all the flaws and coincidences and beauty and mistakes that make life so grand.