Spring cleaning, er, reading

March 7, 2012 · 2 comments

When my wife gave me a kindle for the Hanukka, it was with the understanding that I would bring fewer books into the house. Yeah, that’s not working out too well right about now, as new baseball titles just keep coming. I have been asking for them in Kindle format whenever possible, but it’s not happening much. Yet.

Here’s a list from Jeff Polman of his top 25 baseball books which he “would like to have in a steamer trunk if my cruise ship to the Caribbean World Series ever runs into a hurricane and dumps me on a very remote, satellite-dish-free atoll.”

Naturally, a list like this is bound to garner some challenges. For example, conspicuous by its absence: Ball Four; no titles by Mark Harris, W.P. Kinsella, or Bernard Malamud; no The Celebrant. I could go on, but the point is such assemblages are subjective and good launch points for discussion. (On the other hand, I was pleased to see a rare mention of one of my favorites, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book, by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred Harris.)

Polman is author of the new baseball novel 1924 and You Are There!: A Fictionalized Baseball Replay, a published version of his blog which he describes as “An entire replay of the 1924 season using Strat-O-Matic Baseball, then reported through the eyes and hearts of two fictional characters in the language of the time ” (and which I do have in my “to-read-soon” pile).  His current project is Mystery Ball ’58, “a season-long whodunnit.”

 

 

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1 Bluenatic March 7, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Some egregious omissions there. Besides the ones you mentioned, there’s no Boys of Summer (or anything else by the great Roger Kahn). There’s
No A False Spring. There’s no Glory of Their Times.

2 Ron_Kaplan March 7, 2012 at 12:37 pm

“Egregious”? You say tomaytoe, Polam says tomahtoe.

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