What are you reading? Topic

My daughter and dad built a "Little Library" and we installed it in front of our house after we moved in. Tons of great books are flowing through it every day, and it's inspired me to get on a reading kick. Kind of feel like a pinball -- I'm bouncing all over the place, but it's been a fun ride. I've knocked off the following over the past few months:
  • Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
  • Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Travels with George by Nathaniel Philbrick
  • Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
  • Have a Little Faith in Me (John Hiatt's biography)
  • The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  • Friday Night Lights
  • Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best
  • The MVP Machine: How Baseball's Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players by Ben Lindbergh

I never read The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, so I'm thinking that's up next. Looking for suggestions of interesting fiction or non-fiction.
Thanks! hb
3/4/2022 9:17 AM
Just finished The Boz. Much more enlightening and in depth than I thought it would be!

I'm going to start living by the Boz 10 Commandments. It's tough to argue with his life philosophy:

1) Be yourself or be dead
2) Cause change
3) Show some emotion
4) People that hate you hate themselves
5) Only one face to a person
6) Never, ever, be bored
7) Only people you care about have opinions you care about
8) No preaching
9) Tell the truth
10) Kids matter


3/8/2022 10:34 AM
https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Democracy-at-the-Ballpark

Must read for everyone here. How baseball builds democracy aand sustains it, you know, except when it doesn't. Great book that actually challenges most previous political theory.
4/26/2022 12:26 PM
It is good to see the Italy professor in good health and fine form.

For those who still like to read books that are books and browse in a book store there are 614 Barnes and Noble stores left in the USA. Approximately 12 per territory.

Yes, they drove away most new book seller independent stores but they are the only game left in town for new books with paper pages.

A good source for monthly recommendations for all genres is Goodreads.
Sign up and get email. It is very helpful.

Book stores might be in an extinction era.
4/26/2022 12:57 PM
I want to re-emphasize how great "Democracy at the Ballpark" is. It is a very great book for both baseball and political science, with insights that political theory should incorporate, such as how specatators are an important part of democratic culture, with strong argumentation and evidence shown to that effect to make a convincing case for something that goes against most political theory for the past 2,500 years.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Democracy-at-the-Ballpark

I am re-reading Whitey Herzog's "Your Missin' a Great Game!" - a must read for all baseball fans.

But I just started a book that "Democracy at the Ballpark" cited, John Sexton's "Baseball as a Road to God." Forward by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Looks good so far.

https://www.amazon.com/Baseball-Road-God-Seeing-Beyond/dp/1592407544


6/16/2022 6:58 AM
Hey italyprof, "Your Missin' a Great Game!" was indeed a great book. Read it years ago, might look for it again.

As for me, the Dostoyevsky re-reading tour continues, this time with The Brothers Karamazov. Once again I chose a modern translation (1990, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) and once again was very happy with it. As with "Crime and Punishment" on the second read, I liked the novel a lot more, and found the characters a lot funnier, especially the scoundrel father.
6/18/2022 9:21 AM
Hi everybody. Thanks for the nice comments. Here are some good quotes from John Sexton, "Baseball as a Road to God" - very much worth the read:

Quotes from “Baseball as a Road to God” by John Sexton
Quoting from “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" by W.P. Kinsella, “You’ve got to watch the pitcher, Gideon…. and you’ll appreciate why baseball is a combination of chess and ballet. Watch him back up the bases, watch him get across to first on a grounder to the right side, see how the first baseman leads him, tossing to an empty sack, trusting him to be there. “When it looks like nothing is going on, choose a player and watch him react to every pitch, rising like water, receding like water. Watch a different player every inning. It takes a lot of years watching baseball to learn not to follow the ball every second. The true beauty of the game is the ebb and flow of the fielders, the kaleidoscopic arrangements and rearrangements of the players in response to a foul ball, an extra-base hit, or an attempted stolen base.”"

"Forbes Field is a wonderful example of baseball’s historic role in American life. When the park opened, there wasn’t much a steel-mill worker could afford to do in his precious free time, but he could afford to see a game;"

"and (Pittsburgh) built a new stadium at the end of a trolley line. It was a park built for working families, especially recent arrivals. Pittsburgh was a natural place for immigrants to go, because they were certain to find work—extremely hard work and extremely low-paying. The typical immigrant in the early 1900s would make about fifteen dollars for a sixty-hour workweek. But hard as it was, every once in a while they would find their way to the ballpark and buy a seat for about twenty-five cents. Sometimes, if they saved their money, they could take their family."

"By its very nature and rules, baseball operates outside of ordinary time; in fact, timelessness is at its essence. The length of an inning or game is not set by a clock; it shares the boundless framework of Eliade’s sacred time: It is not linear, with a simple past, present, and future; it is cyclical, building and building again toward certain, quintessential moments."

"For many fans, the most sacred times are Opening Day and the World Series."

"Each spring, just before Easter and Passover, baseball elicits a sense of renewal."

"Midseason brings a weekend in a Cooperstown, the upstate New York village and mythical but not actual birthplace of the game, where new heroes are elevated to sit alongside those from the past—an enactment of what Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return, a “revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical "time of the beginning of things, to the ‘Great Time.’”

"Today, especially in the West, that word, myth, too often is used as a synonym for falsehood. The Greek word mythos originally meant a truth that is experienced, an awareness that lies beyond words. As theologian Karen Armstrong wrote, “A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.”"

6/21/2022 2:17 PM
Beautiful and profound.

Thanks Prof.
6/22/2022 1:11 PM
I'm reading "Blue Jays 1, Expos 0: The Urban Rivalry that killed Major League Baseball in Montreal" by David Luchuk.

A good book, very eye-opening about a lot of things. At first I was put off by the method of writing. It's not really a history of baseball in Canada, as the author makes clear, and it jumps around from time period to time period over two or three centuries.

But it works, because the book would have been boring had it been written starting in the 1700s or 1830s or whatever up to the 2002 season where most of the action takes place. Instead, various facets of that season, ,and of the history of the two Canadian franchises, lead to vignettes about the political and economic history of Canada, the history of baseball, and the main issue that author is concerned with, the way baseball and its owners milk local populations and public treasuries for new stadiums and play cities off against one another.

It's a good read and I am enjoying it. I have a soft spot for the Expos and their fans. If you do too, you want to read this.
7/5/2022 6:15 AM
The Canadian baseball book was good, but sad. "Baseball as a Road to God" was inspiring, as was "Democracy at the Ballpark."

Now reading John Darwin's "After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000."

So far very engaging, a new look at what I thought was a familar history. But he makes it seem fresh.

https://www.amazon.com/After-Tamerlane-Global-Empires-1400-2000/dp/1596916028

7/8/2022 6:31 AM
Cool Papa Bell by Lonnie Wheeler. About 3/4 of the way through. Good read.
7/8/2022 10:51 AM
I’m about halfway through Moneyball.

Much more interesting then the film. We learn what drove Billy Beane. (Didn’t realize he still us the GM of the Angels ). Besides learning about the birth of sabermetrics in baseball, also great portraits of individual players. Particularly interesting so far is submariner RP Chad Bradford, and manager Art Howe.
7/8/2022 11:04 AM
I'm currently reading

See this image

Black Dragon: The Experience of a Marine Rifle Company in the Central Pacific (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series)


An amazing read! To understand what these guys went through .... and to know what happened to allow that flag to be raised on Iwo Jima ....

(I'll confess to a vested interest here it is possible that my dad is mentioned a time or two in this book)
7/8/2022 1:15 PM
"

The Swallows first batter was Dave Hilton, a skinny newcomer from the States, and a complete unknown ... The cleanup hitter was Charlie Manual ... he was a real stud, a slugger the Japanese fans had dubbed 'The Red Demon'

...

I think Hiroshima's starting pitcher that day was Yoshiro Sotokuba. Yakult countered with Takeshi Yasuda. In the bottom of the first inning, Hilton slammed Sotokuba's first pitch into left field for a clean double. The satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded throughout Jingu Stadium. Scattered applause rose around me. In that instant, for no reason and based on no grounds whatsoever, it suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.

"
7/19/2022 2:35 PM
"
he sat back and didn't move, as usual. He cleaned his teeth with a toothpick, then cleaned his nails, and after he had dug under all ten of them, he put the toothpick in his mouth again

"
8/9/2022 9:38 PM
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