04/20/24
June 08, 2006
Summer Reading List: A long time ago my favorite basketball site did a fun 'summer reading list' post where they'd ask readers to suggest a summer reading list. So here is an attempt to do the same here :)
posted by tieguy to navel gazing at 08:12 AM - 13 comments
Just two books, but they are great.... The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball It includes writings by such greats as: Stephen Jay Gould W.P . Kinsella Ring Lardner William Safire Zane Grey Andy Rooney Damon Runyon Bob Eucker Thomas Wolfe George F. Will Red Smith Walt Whitman And: The Best American Sports Writing of he Century Another anthology, this time of the best articles from the entire 20th Century Two great reads that can be taken in small sips or whole gulps.....
posted by elovrich at 09:55 AM on June 08, 2006
I highly recommend The Best American Sports Writing of The Century. Great vacation book. My personal fave from it is John Updike's Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, about Ted Williams' last game at Fenway in the New Yorker. All kinds of good stuff in there. I'm reading The Natural right now. It's one of those books i've been meaning to read for ages and i finally remembered it when i was in a bookstore. Another book i hope to get to this summer... Paper Tiger : An Obsessed Golfer's Quest to Play with the Pros by Tom Coyne. A regular Joe writes about entering Q-school and trying to make the Tour.
posted by SummersEve at 03:22 PM on June 08, 2006
For those looking for light, sports-related fiction I highly recommend the first seven mystery novels by my high school friend and Edgar award winner Harlan Coben. They feature former Duke All-America basketball star turned lawyer/sports agent Myron Bolitar fixing trouble his clients get into. Harlan's actually written a half dozen novels since these but aren't sports related and all are much darker, good but not beach reads.
posted by billsaysthis at 04:12 PM on June 08, 2006
I konow it's kind of old but The Game by Ken Dryden is pretty good read. Did anyone read the Bill Murray golf book and if so was it any good?
posted by HATER 187 at 04:30 PM on June 08, 2006
Obviously I'm biased but Pete Davies' "All Played Out: Full Story of Italia '90" is my favourite football book.
posted by squealy at 07:29 PM on June 08, 2006
Last summer I thoroughly enjoyed "French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France" by Tim Moore. It's about a regular joe who decides to ride the entire route of the Tour, and is extremely funny in some places, as well as providing some good historical background on the race and all the legends that surround it.
posted by afx237vi at 04:17 PM on June 10, 2006
I agree that the Tim Moore book is a great read and very funny. On another post Smithers and I nominated 'Football In Sun and Shadow' by Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano. 'Football Against the Enemy' by Simon Kuper is excellent, and much better than the more recent Franklin Foer's 'How Soccer Explains the World', which covers the same ground.
posted by owlhouse at 09:05 PM on June 10, 2006
For golfers, I suggest Down The Fairway by Herbert Warren Wind, and the entire Harvey Penick collection.
posted by mjkredliner at 03:06 PM on June 13, 2006
The last couple of sports books that I read: The Bogey Man Out Of My League Paper Lion The Curious Case of Sidd Finch I also have, but yet to read (I must finish my Robert Fisk tome first. 1200 freakin' pages!): Open Net Mad Ducks and Bears All of them very enjoyable and very well written. If you have not yet introduced yourself to the world of George Plimpton, do it now.
posted by NoMich at 03:22 PM on June 13, 2006
Has anybody checked out "Glow Pucks and Ten Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History"? I just found out about it through a recent post. I wouldn't think the book to be high-brow sports prose, but its probably entertaining. Or I might be a sucker for anything with 'beer' and/or 'puck' in the title.
posted by garfield at 04:34 PM on June 13, 2006
I have a copy of Glow Pucks. It's very witty, and well written. Not much of a sit-down-and-read book, but it is fun to skim. I wouldn't take it on vacation, but it's a good book to throw on your coffee table. Friends can randomly pick it up and it could spark a decent discussion. Or you can keep it in the bathroom. It would work well there too. The #1 worst idea is the NHL shootout. His logic for that is a bit flawed. That kind of disappointed me, but i suppose that's part of the charm. Like i said, very witty. But you know Wyshynski already so you probably figured it'd be witty.
posted by SummersEve at 04:56 PM on June 13, 2006
Right on. Thanks for the revue.
posted by garfield at 05:33 PM on June 13, 2006
I got 'Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way' for Christmas, and it was excellent. Probably should have been subtitled 'Brazil, the soccer way' instead- much more about explaining Brazil (geography, identity, politics, economics) through soccer-based vignettes than it is about explaning soccer through Brazil-based vignettes, if that makes sense. Either way, a great read that I highly recommend. Other things on my sports shelf that I recommend, some of which I've pimped here before: