Remember how I said I was going to read The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao? You didn't. Good. I got 150 pages in and quit b/c all the Spanish was a little too much to take after dealing with grade 4s all day.
Instead, I got through Can I Keep My Jersey, which is basically 336 pages of Paul Shirley complaining about playing professional basketball. I can appreciate that he doesn't like a lot of things that many basketball players are: rich, greedy, selfish, detached from reality, etc., etc.; and, while he's pretty self aware - her recognizes he's a whiner -he doesn't have anything positive to say about anything, which is kind of depressing. An interesting reminder that not all professional athletes are: rich, greedy, selfish, detached; but maybe a reminder that most professional athletes are not people you'd sit down and have a beer with.
Grade: C-
Up next: I'm starting to feel the need to get away from sports/basketball books... I googled 'best fiction' this morning and came up with a book, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which was described as a literary version of The Office, so, we'll see how that goes. Otherwise, I've got this Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, that's been sitting on my shelf for a while...
1. The Inner Game of Tennis | Timothy Gallwey (134 pages) | A
2. The Last Shot | Darcy Frey (240 pages) | A+
3. The Road | Cormac McCarthy (287 pages) | A+
4. Outliers | Malcolm Gladwell (299 pages) | C+
5. The Last Season | Phil Jackson (304 pages) | B-
6. The Sunset Limited | Cormac McCarthy (160 pages)| B-
7. The Education of a Coach | David Halberstam (288 pages)| B+
8. Downtown Owl | Chuck Klosterman | (288 pages)| B
9. Can I Keep My Jersey?| Paul Shirley| (336 pages)|C-
Posts
3 comments:
Admittedly, the Spanish stuff is trying at times (see also: McCarthy, Cormac), but I think you should probably go back and finish Wao. The last third of the book is quite good.
That said, Then We Came to an End is quite good, so you can't go wrong with that either. Note that I have a copy of this, and can bring it to dodgeball this week (unless you already got it from the library).
...though I should add that whoever described it as a book version of The Office is misleading you a bit. End is funny at times, but is mostly pretty dark.
I got it from the library, but thanks.
I think I'll add Wao to the list of books I'm going to give a shot when I have some time where I can concentrate on reading (this may never actually happen)... although I think at the end of the month I may try and go round 3 with the Infinite Jest...
Post a Comment