What are you reading? What do you want to read?
My most recent reads:
- David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker
- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
- Bruce Campbell, If Chins Could Kill
My most recent baseball purchases:
- Robert Whiting, You Gotta Have Wa
- H. Allen and Ira Smith, Three Men on Third (book of anecdotes; title track refers to this incident)
- Allen Barra, Clearing the Bases
My most recent non-baseball purchases:
- Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually)
- Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster
- Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau
* * *
Linkage…
- How MLB Became the Example of Peacemakers (FanGraphs). From Maury Brown’s thought-provoking article: “Wait a minute. The league that has no salary cap is in better shape than the two that have them? What?”
- Inside the rules: the NCAA “no agent” rule (Hardball Times). David Wade discusses the history of this rule.
- SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (Baseball-Reference). I’ve found Mark Armour’s project to be indispensable and fun. Help ‘em out if you’re so inclined.
- The Anatomy of a Hall of Famer (Seamheads). Mike Lynch examines the statistical differences between first-ballot and non-first-ballot Hall of Famers.
- Looking at Hall of Fame Pitchers (Joe Blogs). Speaking of the Hall of Fame… is Posnanski in yet?
- 2010′s Year Of The Pitcher Can’t Be Explained By Thinner Bats (SBNation). Rob Neyer offers an alternative take on a recent intriguing article.
- The worst of the best (part II) (Hardball Times). Can anyone win the World Series? I always point to the 1987 Twins as reason to hope. Chris Jaffe concurs.
Okay, there’s some stuff. Talk about whatever…
Upon a fine recommendation I’m reading Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders which is solid.
The last book I finished was Joe Poznanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A road trip through Buck O’Neil’s America. Awesome read about Negro Leaguer Buck O’Neil and the time Poz spent with him travelling to speaking engagements and appearances across the country.
Poznanski writes O’Neil the person so well I couldn’t put the book down. It’s also a great primer for learning more about the Negro Leagues.
Nuclear Jellyfish: Tim Dorsey
Florida crime at its’ finest
Seasons In Hell – Mike Shropshire: a look at the early 1970′s Texas Rangers
Willie Mays – Hirsch: the life, the legend
Free Lunch- Johnston: how the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at gov’t expense
Defining Moment – Jonathan Alter: FDR’s first hundred days
@AJM: I love Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball… series. Pos’ book is on my shelf somewhere, waiting in line.
@Field39: Cool; that’s not my genre, but Mrs. Ducksnorts might dig it.
@Parlo: I’ve heard the Mays book is good, but how is Seasons in Hell? Sounds like an interesting read.
If you like presidential bios, you might enjoy a blog that reviews books on Washington up through Reagan. It’s called One Through Forty-Two or Forty-Three and written by Bob Timmerman, former keeper of The Griddle and SABR member.
Seasons In Hell is more about the clubhouse and bars than what takes place on the field. There are some funny stories and some interesting personalities about a team that is otherwise forgotten.
But Shropshire is no David Halberstram or even Jim Bouton. For a beat writer, he makes an awful lot of factual errors. Some of them really stand out. It is a fun read, but IMO it needs a rewrite and some better editing.
I think Google has a few chapters online that you can preview.
Thanks for the One-Through-42 link. I wasn’t familiar with it.
I read a lot of historical non-fiction. At the moment I’m reading a book about the African campaign in WWII called the Desert Fox.
“The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders” by Lefèvre and Lefèvre is a great book about Didier Lefèvre, of the title, hired in 1986 to follow a team of MSF doctors into Afghanistan. A combination of photography book, graphic novels, documentary, history that’s not romantic but engaging, enlightening and heartbreaking.
here’s a review: http://tinyurl.com/4mc3582
Joe Lefevre? That guy had a *cannon* of an arm!
The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Your enjoyment of this novel probably depends on your opinion of Kissinger but it’s a good piece of journalism that really nails him to the wall.
As a lifetime San Diego Padre fan, who vaguely remembers an early childhood game at Lane Field, seeing Luke Easter and Max West in an oldtimers game at Westgate Park, many games at the Murph but now stranded in the land of entrapment of New Mexico, I am thoroughly enjoying “Baseball in San Diego, from the Padres to Petco by Bill
Swank.
Thank God ST is here!
@LM: ha…ha…this Lefevre has a camera for his tools.
reading “Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life” by Cramer, a loaner from GY. good read so far.
also finished Gail Tsukiyama’s Night of Many Dreams. not bad, a fiction of two sisters during the time of war in Hong Kong and Macao in the early 1940s.
Keith Richards alleged Autobiography, a book on boston crime boss Whitey Bulger and The American Diamond by Branch Rickey…
I wish I could read more books, but as a graduate student, it’s all about the articles. That being said, I make a little time every evening (does 5 minutes count?) for Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, which predated the amazing A Deepness in the Sky. If you like science fiction, you should check these out.
By the way, this is my first comment on the site! I enjoy your work, Geoff.