Beach reading, continued

July 26, 2011 · 2 comments

Allen Barra, author of several notable baseball titles himself, offers this list of top five baseball fiction titles, including:

  • Ring Around the Bases, by Ring Lardner
  • Sometimes You See It Coming, by Kevin Baker
  • The Brothers K, by David James Duncan
  • Squeeze Play, by Jane Leavy (author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy)
  • The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover

Needless to say, short lists like this can omit some other top-notch novels. I could never push myself to finish The Brothers K and found the Coover book overrated. But then there are those who would say the same about some of my choices, like Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, or Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings.

Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.

Speaking of Barra, he contributed this piece on Curt Flood and the HBO documentary about his role in baseball history to The Atlantic.

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Tagged as: Allen Barra, Brothers K, Jane Leavy, Kevin Baker, Robert Coover

{ 2 comments }

1 ZinnBeck July 26, 2011 at 10:59 pm

I found that Brother K and Squeeze Play had very little to do with baseball.  After I was done reading them I took them off of my baseball  shelf.  For baseball beach reading I would go with the Mickey Rawlings series or the Crabbie Evers series.

2 Anonymous July 27, 2011 at 12:11 am

The Rawlings books were excellent. I wish Soos had kept them going. The Evers books I could take or leave.

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