One of the things I admire about Nick Hornby's writing is the way he can balance obsession and immediate feeling. Take pop music. In his Songbook/31 Songs, going into a chapter of detail on each of his favorite songs, he gives one of the spots to Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird just because it's on the radio when he's writing the book and he enjoys it. There's no guarantee of future enjoyment, but the song works for its time.

To this day for me, when Top 40 gets a likeable song that has a pop preponderance of guilty pleasure evidence, I cite that Hornby chapter in the argument in my head and bolster my defense.

Mariah Carey's line about taxis falls there these days — "shake it off, like a cab on commission." The lyric's given me weeks of half-second thought bubbles and stabs at images of taken cabbies shaking off would-be hailers. If last weekend in Chicago taught me anything, it's that those taxi roof lights are doing better than my eyesight. But weeks later it turns out I'm all wrong. Mariah is saying "Calgon commercial," making more sense (full lyrics), and I've got reason to keep listening.

What I've been working on recently is Hornby's first book, Fever Pitch, the narrative of his lifelong obession with soccer. It's definitely a good read. As bad as I've heard the original film adaptation and the Jimmy Fallon baseball version are, I now think they've got to be even worse. The book's too good at repetition, at the repetitive act of watching and enjoying soccer for decades, for any half-decent film to render the pacing well. Beyond that success, it's also readable on this side of the pond. I'm sure British soccer history helps, but it's not required. If you know Adu, you have a shot. If you played Montgomery County youth soccer for, say, 10 seasons, you're in.

The spots where obsession and immediacy collide best in the book are the reasoning sections. Hornby's not going anywhere directly at these parts, and he's only talking to justify something else. He has time to spare. So he finds himself letting go on things like taste and defeat. On living his 30s, "I have noticed that certain type of music — hip-hop, indie guitar pop, thrash metal — all sound the same, and have no tune," he says.

You can of course take issue, but that's his statement for the time, unspinning from some larger and unexplained ideology. On hearing positive talk before a difficult game, "their positiveness … on this beautiful May morning made me sad for them, as if these chirpy and bravely confident young men and women were off to the Somme to lose their lives, rather than to Anfield to lose, at worst, their faith." More reasoning for a larger cause — engaging the world of competition and doubt.

It's a feeling that something needs to be said, something needs to be considered, informed, or all that base of understanding built from the in-between moments of life — the healthy obsession parts, unconsciously relapsing — might go to waste.

My favorite instance comes midway through the book, when he's talking about a girlfriend falling for his soccer team. The passage brings out the methodology and ethics of sulking better than most sulkers could admit.

All my footballing life I have lived with people — my mum, my dad, my sister, girlfriends, flatmates — who have had to learn to tolerate football-induced moods, and they have all of them, more or less, done so with good humour and tact. Suddenly I found myself living with someone who was attempting to claim moods for herself, and I didn't like it. Her elation after the 1987 Littlewoods Cups Final … that was her first season. What right did she have to swagger into the pub that Sunday evening with an Arsenal hat on? No right at all. For Pete and me, this was the first trophy since 1979, and how could she, who had only been going for the previous four months, understand what that felt like? 'They don't win things every season, you know,' I kept telling her, with all the pointless and bilious envy of a parent whose Mars Bar-munching child has never experienced the deprivations of wartime rationing.

I soon found that the only way to claim all the emotional territory for myself was to go on sort of sulk war, confident in the knowledge that when it came to football I could pout and grump any pretender to the Football Pain throne right off the terraces, and eventually I beat her, as I knew I would. It happened at the end of the 88/89 season when, after a home defeat by Derby, it looked as though we were going to miss out on the Championship after having led the First Division for most of the season. And though I was genuinely inconsolable (that evening we went to see Eric Porter in King Lear at the Old Vic, and the play didn't engage me because I couldn't see what Lear's problem was), I nurtured every bit of the misery until it grew to monstrous, terrifying proportions, I behaved badly in order to prove a point, and inevitably we had an argument (about going to see some friends for a cup of tea), and once it had started I knew that Arsenal was all mine once again: she was left with no alternative but to say that it was only a game (she didn't use those words, thankfully, but the implication was, I felt, clear), that there was always next year, that even this year all hope was not lost, and I leaped on these words triumphantly.

'You don't understand,' I shouted, as I had wanted to shout for months, and it was true — she didn't, not really. And I think that once I had been given the opportunity, once I had uttered the words that most footballs fans carry around with them like a kidney donor card, it was all over. What was she left with? She could attempt, or pretend, to behave even worse than I had done; or she could withdraw, yield ground, leave the agony and the ecstasy more or less entirely to me and use her own distress merely to buttress mine. She is much too gentle a person to attempt to out-tantrum me, so she chose the latter course, and I can safely and smugly say that I am top Arsenal dog in this house, and that when and if we have children it will be my bottom exclusively that fills our season-ticket seat. I'm ashamed, of course I'm ashamed, that I have had to play dirty like this, but for a while back then I was beginning to worry.

All around, means worth the ends?

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