Selected Books by the Bed

Every month (or however often the magazine comes out), Nick Hornby does a fabulous essay in Believer Magazine called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” Hornby is one of my writing heroes anyway – I included him in the acknowledgements of The Soul of Baseball even though I’ll never actually meet him. In these essays, he goes over the books he lists the books he bought and read in the previous month, and it’s all very witty, thoughtful and brilliant.

This will be nothing at all like that, of course, except that it’s also an essay about stuff I’ve been reading. I am an obsessive reader and book buyer. I don’t say this proudly; it has been one of the very few sore spots of my marriage. My wife, Margo, has the tolerance and patience of the angels for any number of my myriad flaws and quirks. But only recently has she made her peace with the book thing. Margo is a library person. And I am a book buyer. This, more than any religious, political or philosophical difference, was something to overcome.

On my side of the bed, there is an ever changing pile of, say, 50 books. The number will go up and down depending on mood, season and how recently we’ve vacuumed. Right now, there are 57 books there. So, I was thinking that I may list a few of these books each week as part of Bloggy Friday, assuming:

1. I ever do this Bloggy Friday thing again.
2. I don’t come to my senses and quit this blog while I’m ahead.

Note: I will classify each book by how it got to be by the bed. So a “Work” classification would mean I pulled out the book for some sort of column I was working on. A “finished” classification would mean I just finished the book. A “3rd attempt” classification would mean that I’m trying, for the third time, to read the book. Maybe it will be clear in context.

Note 2: There are few baseball/sports books in this list for some reason (at other times there are more). Just a warning in case you’re here for some baseball talk.


Messages From My Father, Calvin Trillin.
Classification: Reference
-- I love Calvin Trillin. I love the way he writes, I love the way he thinks, and it was his classic New Yorker story “Hometown Boy” – he broke down the best restaurants in the world, all of which just happened to be in his hometown of Kansas City – that helped me understand where I was moving when I came to work for The Kansas City Star 11 years ago.

This is a wonderful book, one where Calvin passes along the wisdom and good sense of his father Abe, a grocer and restaurant owner in Kansas City. I’ve read it any number of times, and in this case I was looking up the particular wording of a favorite story about Abe’s classical Midwestern sense of humor. Abe was in New York, looking at jewelry at Tiffany’s.

He said to the salesman, “What’s the name of this store again?’

“Why, Tiffany’s, sir,” the salesman said.

My father said that he had never heard of it, and asked if it had just opened. “I’m from Kansas City,” he added, by way of explanation.

“Oh no, sir,” the salesman said. “It’s been here for a number of years. It’s quite a well-known store.”

“Does it have anything to do with Cartier’s?” my father asked. “I’ve heard of Cartier’s.”

“No, sir,” the salesman said. “Nothing at all to do with Cartier’s.”

“Tiffany’s,” my father said, rolling the word around as if testing how it might work out as a name for a jewelry store. “Tiffany’s. Well, that’s a new one on me.”

Moses, Jonathan Kirsch
Classification: Third or fourth attempt.
-- There are some books where I just love the IDEA. I love the idea or reading a biography about Moses – I can’t say exactly why. And this is a good book, that’s why I keep going back to it. I’ve learned that Moses could actually be quite petulant, and he was not exactly the peaceful Charlton Heston character. It’s just one of those books, though, I keep abandoning in the middle.

Chances Are: Adventures in Probability
Classification: Abandoned and ready to be refiled
-- I’m not a fair reader. I buy too many books, and so you get a chapter to capture me. Didn’t do it.

Nobody’s Perfect: Anthony Lane
Classification: Permanent Residency
-- This is a collection of Lane’s essays and movie reviews from The New Yorker. He’s hilarious, biting, a writing genius. All of this is easily seen in his unparalleled movie review of one of the crappy new Star Wars movies – especially the paragraph when he takes on Yoda. (Language alert: I normally try to keep the worst language off this site, but the ending of this too priceless to bleep out).

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

This essay, unfortunately, is not in “Nobody’s Perfect.” But many equally hilarious ones are, including his review of “Speed II.”

End Zone, Don DeLillo
Classification: Re-read.
-- Every so often, I will pull out a book I read a few years ago for a re-read. This is a football meets nuclear war thing. DeLillo is one of those writers who is so good, it doesn’t even matter to me what the heck he’s writing about. His books are just worth reading to see the way he puts words together. For a baseball feel, read "Pafko at the Wall," DeLillo's fictional recounting of Bobby Thomson's "The Giants Win the Pennant" game. That would later beocme the opening chapter for his novel "Underworld" but it really stands alone well.

Weaver on Strategy, Earl Weaver and Terry Pluto
Classification: Work
-- I’m planning to do an Earl Weaver essay at some point. Maybe next week. It’s amazing to me to how prescient Earl Weaver was 30-plus years ago, and how few people have caught up.

City of God, E.L Doctorow
Classification: Wish List
-- I’ve never read this, and I keep meaning to do it. I keep putting it off.

The United States of Wal-Mart, John Dicker
Classification: Reference
-- Every so often I need to find a Wal-Mart fact to reference in a column that mentions Royals owner/former Wal-Mart CEO David Glass. But even beyond that, I found this book to be fascinating. It tries to tell the story from the center (though, admittedly, the author is leaning slightly off-Wal Mart), and what I like about it is that it manages to offer a fresh perspective of the Wal-Mart phenomenon – and, in turn, give a fresh perspective of America. Good reading.

The Courier and the Heretic, Matthew Stewart
Classification: Reading*
-- I just want to be known as the kind of person who reads books about Spinoza. My grandfather has read books about Spinoza in at least four languages. He's smarter than I am. There’s an asterisk by the word “Reading” because there are numerous books that I’m in the middle of right now that I, undoubtedly, will never get back to. I’m not sure yet if this is one of them – the book was pretty interesting. But to be honest, other books keep jumping ahead on the list.

Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
Classification: Finished
-- I go through literary heroes much the same way I go through favorite bands and performers. There are a few standards (Springsteen, Roth, U2, Sinatra, Hornby, Hemingway, Ella, Wolfe) and then there is an ever-changing array of people -- Alice McDermott, The Postal Service, Pearl Jam, Dave Eggers, Imogen Heap, David Sedaris, REM and so on. Some I like for one book or one album; some I like for a long while.

Right now, my literary hero is David Foster Wallace. This book is a collection of essays, and they’re pretty much all brilliant. The best of the bunch, I thought, is called: “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” and it tries to come to grips with the inevitable disappointment you feel every single time you buy an athlete’s ghost written biography only to find that it (like all the others) is awful and shallow. The essay is about more than that, of course. Wallace is a brilliant observer of things, and he writes as if he’s making discoveries with each new sentence. Amazing. There are other incredible essays in here too … one about a Los Angeles talk show host.

There’s also a brilliant essay in here where he absolutely skewers John Updike and his forgettable 1997 novel “Toward the End of Time.” I’m a fan of the way Updike writes (as is Wallace) but this review is so on point and such a decisive knockout, I find myself wanting to throw tomatoes at the book. I would only say this: David, if by some miracle you are reading this, please don’t review “The Soul of Baseball.” You (and you alone) are excused from buying it.

How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer
Classification: Re-read
-- I’m not a huge soccer fan. I mean, I like the World Cup, and I find it entertaining to check in on some of the European leagues now and again, and I keep thinking I will go out and write a column or two on the Kansas City Wizards here in town. My father was a semi-professional soccer player, so a little bit of soccer is in the blood. Only a little, though.

That said, I love READING about soccer. I can’t explain it. It definitely goes back to Nick Hornby’s masterful “Fever Pitch” which is the best book I’ve ever read about being a fan. Among the 29 books I want to write in my life, one would be a baseball book like that, a baseball book that captures what it is to be a fan, young and old. OK, think about the MOVIE “Fever Pitch.” OK? Got that in your mind? Yeah, I’m hoping to write the precise opposite of that.

Anyway, after reading Fever Pitch, I started reading soccer books, and there were a few good ones (one about Maradona was fun, the book about the North American Soccer League was good too), there were a few awful ones, but none really came close to Fever Pitch. And then I read Foer’s book, and it’s really terrific, it takes you around the world and explores big issues through soccer. I like reading a chapter or two every so often.

Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
Classification: Finished
-- I’m big on recommendations from people I know and trust. But only certain people. For instance, numerous people had recommended that I read the Harry Potter books. And I always told them, “Yeah, I sure will, you know, after I run out of adult books to read.” I’m really not into fantasy, wizardry, all that Hobbit stuff – I was mostly frightened by the Dungeon and Dragons set when I was in high school.

Anyway, one day I was having dinner with Bill James and HE suggested I read the Harry Potter books. Well, that was a whole different thing. I read them all, and I must say that I enjoyed them, and I can certainly appreciate J.K. Rowling’s genius. I even have my own theories about what will happen in the last book. This amuses the friends who initially recommended the book to me – you know, the ones who still talk to me.

Anyway, a bookstore salesman favorite named Steve, who always recommends books, and almost always does a great job, said I should read this Grossman book. It’s about comic book superheroes, which I must say would have normally been a real warning signal for me. I mean, I like Superman and Spiderman as much as most people, I have warm feelings for the flabby Batman (and Julie Newmar as Catwoman – meow!), Wonder Woman, and I’ve always had an appreciation for Aquaman because I keep wondering how the guy stays in business. Are there many underwater crimes being committed these days?

That’s about where it ends, though. So I would not have bought this book without Steve’s recommendation. But it’s terrific. It’s told from two perspectives, one (my favorite) being that of a super-criminal named Dr. Impossible. It’s funny and touching in its own way – highly recommended. I once wrote a short story about some of the Joker’s henchmen, I wonder where that is.

Understand, however, that any recommendations found in this essay are not to be confused with the main point of this blog, which is that you should buy The Soul of Baseball. David Foster Wallace may be brilliant, but remember, he's not giving you long and free essays about Tony LaRussa.