It takes an Olympic village
Sit quietly and read about sports!
The Olympics are wrapping up, and I will be sad when it’s over. What’s not to like? Even I, who is too dumb to figure out American football despite several seasons of Friday Night Lights, feel actual stirrings of interest in sports during the global spectacle of human majesty. Because, as NBC knows so perfectly well, it’s about stories.
I love it! At any time of day, you can tune in, learn about So-and-So from Elbow Bend, Indiana who overcame a rare blood disease and now is the best beach volleyball player in the land, and oh, btw, there’s a new move allowed in beach volleyball this quadrennial, and suddenly beach volleyball is a discipline in which you basically hold a terminal degree.
This is my first Olympic year since Tokyo 2020 (which, of course, took place in 2021) in which I have not worked on a pop-up Olympic newsletter. I’m bursting with things to say. Those incredible Paris opening ceremonies! That awful Gemini ad where a dad uses AI to write his kid’s fan letter! Mixed relays, are they the most fun type of event to watch? 3x3 basketball — why does it unnerve me so?
Anyway, I don’t read a ton of books in which sports of any kind are heavily featured. I did come up with a couple, though, and crowd-sourced a good list from readers, Substack followers, and my dude Michael, who was my trivia team’s sports guy. He knows everything, probably including why 3x3 basketball unnerves me so.
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🌽 Shoeless Joe
W.P. Kinsella, 1982
A very American book that inspired a wildly American movie (Field of Dreams, in case it wasn’t clear) — written by a Canadian author. I won’t try to untangle it, but I will tell you that no matter how many times you have seen Kevin Costner gazing at his homemade baseball field wondering if, now that he has built it, they will come, you should still read this weird little novel.
It’s different enough from the film to keep you guessing, for one. And the voice (not The Voice that speaks to Ray, but the narrative voice) is really good. Like all solid nostalgic baseball content, I found it comforting. But unlike the less-solid nostalgic baseball content, it is not boring. Chalk that up to the other things going on with this story: a famous author who is sort of kidnapped, a farmer who is sabotaging his farm, a traveling circus, and of course, baseball ghosts.
Recommended for: Those who are in love with Iowa and/or baseball, but that’s not necessarily a prerequisite. I read it when I was up in the middle of the night with a newborn and by all rights should have been dealing with escapist page-turners, and it still got me.
✊ The Resisters
Gish Jen, 2020
This is the second Gish Jen book I’ve recommended (see EELS: For a small fee in America), so I feel like I’m making a face that I make when I want my child to stop complaining and just do a thing. He does a good impression of it, so I know it’s kind of like a cross between this 😐 and this 😯. Don’t sleep on Gish Jen! 😐😯!
The Resisters also involves baseball (sorry), but the sport is a beautiful mechanism for revolutionary teamwork. The oppressor: big capitalism, and its general is a sweet-sounding AI named Alexa, I mean Siri, I mean Aunt Nettie. Both are all up in our smart homes in this near-future climate mess.
It’s not as hopeless as it sounds. This is a fun book that could also be said to be about parenting a sporty teen. You know, like all those Olympics ads. Just don’t let the AI write the fan mail. That’s how the dystopia begins.
Recommended for: Those who are into stuff with an element of speculative fiction, but don’t need all the gloom and doom.
And now, some recommendations from the village
Luckily, other people read sporty books that aren’t just about baseball. Here are their recs, for fiction and non! (Basically, you can spot the novels by looking for titles without colons.)
🏀 Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and Off the Court — John Wooden, 1997
🏀 Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior — Phil Jackson, 1995
🏀 A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton — John McPhee, 1965
🏄 Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life — William Finnegan, 2015
⚾ The Art of Fielding — Chad Harbach, 2011
🏇 Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son — John Jeremiah Sullivan, 2004
🏊 Black Cake — Charmaine Wilkerson, 2022
🏊 Swimming To Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer — Lynne Cox, 2004 (and I need to share this quote from my friend Anna: “Nothing like swimming through the highly polluted Nile and punching your hand through the carcass of a dead animal to stick in my mind forever. I’ve obviously never been as driven as this woman but she tells a good story.”)
🚴 Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion — William Fotheringham, 2012
🏃 The Book Thief — Markus Zusak, 2005
🏃 Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption — Laura Hillenbrand, 2010
🎾 The Tennis Partner — Abraham Verghese, 1998
🚣♀️ Lessons in Chemistry — Bonnie Garmus, 2022
Special thanks to Kelly, Michael, Oliver, Katherine, Anna, Vijay, and Cindy.
That was the forty-ninth EELS and a tribute to Liz, my Olympics newsletter buddy. As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan
Have you read 'W' by Georges Perec? It is the first and last word on human beings and sport.
Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson is also brilliant (this guy coached the teams of Shaq & Kobe and MJ leading both to multiple championships)