The first I thought I'd mention is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (which I didn't assign, but thinking back, wish I had). It's a wonderful memoir of Hornby's growing up a fan of the Arsenal football club in London (that's football in the European sense, i.e. soccer). He paints a vivid portrait of the ups and downs of fandom, and you'll never read a better description of the elation that comes when your team finally, after years of frustration, breaks through with a championship win. If this were only about sports, it wouldn't really be all that special, but Hornby's genius (also evident in his more famous novels) is to capture the complex road to maturity traversed by contemporary males for whom popular culture-- including sports-- defines a pretty narrow road map for the journey. Hornby is enough of an intellectual to see through the illusions, even as he finds himself often wallowing in them, finding their often banal but occasionally transcendent familiarity reassuring in the face of the more sinister elements of real life (that is, relationships, parenthood, the working life, etc.). There have been a couple of halfway decent movies made based on the book (the Hollywood version translating the football setting to Fenway Park and the Red Sox), but they lack the book's depth and a lot of its humor. Do yourself a favor, and seek out the original. You won't be sorry.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Recommended Reading
I'm co-teaching an Honors Seminar this semester on Sports and Society, and consequently reading and thinking a lot about that topic. I thought I'd start posting some mini-reviews of books in the sports genre that some of you may be interested in reading (some of them, assigned in our course).
The first I thought I'd mention is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (which I didn't assign, but thinking back, wish I had). It's a wonderful memoir of Hornby's growing up a fan of the Arsenal football club in London (that's football in the European sense, i.e. soccer). He paints a vivid portrait of the ups and downs of fandom, and you'll never read a better description of the elation that comes when your team finally, after years of frustration, breaks through with a championship win. If this were only about sports, it wouldn't really be all that special, but Hornby's genius (also evident in his more famous novels) is to capture the complex road to maturity traversed by contemporary males for whom popular culture-- including sports-- defines a pretty narrow road map for the journey. Hornby is enough of an intellectual to see through the illusions, even as he finds himself often wallowing in them, finding their often banal but occasionally transcendent familiarity reassuring in the face of the more sinister elements of real life (that is, relationships, parenthood, the working life, etc.). There have been a couple of halfway decent movies made based on the book (the Hollywood version translating the football setting to Fenway Park and the Red Sox), but they lack the book's depth and a lot of its humor. Do yourself a favor, and seek out the original. You won't be sorry.
The first I thought I'd mention is Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (which I didn't assign, but thinking back, wish I had). It's a wonderful memoir of Hornby's growing up a fan of the Arsenal football club in London (that's football in the European sense, i.e. soccer). He paints a vivid portrait of the ups and downs of fandom, and you'll never read a better description of the elation that comes when your team finally, after years of frustration, breaks through with a championship win. If this were only about sports, it wouldn't really be all that special, but Hornby's genius (also evident in his more famous novels) is to capture the complex road to maturity traversed by contemporary males for whom popular culture-- including sports-- defines a pretty narrow road map for the journey. Hornby is enough of an intellectual to see through the illusions, even as he finds himself often wallowing in them, finding their often banal but occasionally transcendent familiarity reassuring in the face of the more sinister elements of real life (that is, relationships, parenthood, the working life, etc.). There have been a couple of halfway decent movies made based on the book (the Hollywood version translating the football setting to Fenway Park and the Red Sox), but they lack the book's depth and a lot of its humor. Do yourself a favor, and seek out the original. You won't be sorry.
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