There will be lists!

February 9, 2025

As we approach spring training and the start of a new season, there will be lists of suggested reading.

I find a lot of them fascinating.

I was speaking with an author recently about working with editors. Undoubtedly, it helps to have one who’s knowledgeable on the topic. The same can be said about the folks who write these lists.

Punctuation of Life: Question Mark | by Christal Luster | MediumFor example, this one from Covering the Corner, an SB Nation blog covering the Cleveland Guardians, offers the following “Six Baseball Books to Get You to Spring Training”:

  • Baseball Life Advice by Stacey May Fowles
  • Living on the Black by John Feinstein
  • The Wrong Stuff by Bill Lee
  • The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
  • You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian
  • The Art of Catching Feelings by Alicia Thompson

That’s quite a diverse bunch of books. The first three are non-fiction, the last three are novels.

I don’t know the work of the piece’s writer, but I wonder what their criteria was. Certainly any six books can “get you to spring training.” Doesn’t mean they’re good. It just strikes me that of all the baseball books out there, these were the ones selected, no disrespect to Fowles, Feinstein, and Lee.

Here I’m focusing specifically about the works of fiction, which all seem to share a single theme. If you’ve been following this site for a while, you know my feelings about The Art of Fielding. It received massive critical acclaim, along with a massive advance, but I didn’t think it was all that (since that post is more than a decade old, I’m not going to vouch that the links are still valid).

But as the French say, “À chacun son goût.”

 

0Shares

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post:

script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5496371-4']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();