One More Book: Bouncing Back

Tuesday is my day off.  Like everyone else, I have more to do than can be done.  I often struggle with my feelings of failure and inadequacy.  That I-am-behind feeling leeched the joy from my days off and I couldn’t figure out why I was getting so cranky.  Doh!  I needed to play, to rest, to do things for fun.

And, when I was a kid, the most fun thing ever was reading.

I have a shelf full of improving tomes waiting for me to read them.  I have a lot to do to remedy the gaps in my white suburban education and also a lot of cultural progress has been made since I was last in school.  I will, in fact, continue to read my way through all those Very Useful Books.

But on my day off, I will read fiction.  And I will read the fun kind.  Today, I picked the perfect book for a Tuesday:  Scott Ostler’s Bouncing Back.

Scott Ostler is one of my two favorite writers from the sport page of the San Francisco Chronicle (the other is Joan Ryan, who no longer writes for them, but I miss her.).  He can make me enjoy reading about sports I don’t like.  He’s smart and funny and deeply knowledgeable and he explains the underlying stories so well.  And now he brings all those talents to a middle grade novel about… wheelchair basketball.

Of course I am a total sucker for sports stories and movies (unless they have Kevin Costner in them, but that’s a whole different issue).  This book has all the things I love about sports stories—underdogs, hard work, workout montages, personal growth—and some things that I wish more sports stories had—strong women, political consciousness.  At base, this is a really good story about a kid who learns to love a new kind of basketball.

Read it.  Root for the Rolling Rats.  It will lift your spirits.

Current spring total:  27 books

Book Report: Three of Four More

I’ve read four more books.  I’m going to write about three of them right now and one more afterward, because it makes sense to me.

In my continuing quest to get through the humongous pile of nonfiction I have accumulated, I finished Peter Boag’s book Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past.  Boag traces the history of cross-dressing in the “Old West.”  More interestingly, he traces the concerted efforts to fit transgender and cross-dressing people into a narrative that the larger culture found palatable.  There are some true pioneers of every sort in his book and I am glad to have had his flexible and often humorous prose as a guide to the territory.

The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle by Christina Uss jumped out at me in a bookstore and demanded that I bring it home.  I am so glad I did.  It’s a quest, it has bikes, it has hilarious monks and nuns, a ghost, and fried pies.  I laughed out loud enough that it would have been embarrassing except that I was at home and the other denizens are used to this behavior on my part.  I would give this book as a gift to pretty much everyone I know who has a soul and it might restore the souls of any who don’t.  It’s that good.  Go read it now.

I have read the entire Lord of the Rings out loud twice because I have two children and I love them both.  For the most part, I have avoided the Tolkien stuff not published during his lifetime.  I slogged through The Silmarillion as a kid thinking I was not smart enough to get it, only realizing later that it was actually just a difficult collection of unfinished texts (because I read it again.  I don’t learn…).  However, the library book sale offered me a hardbound copy of Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales.  I think that Christopher Tolkien improved over time as an editor and writer because it was a much smoother read.  I don’t normally go in for fiction with footnotes (except Nicholson Baker—he writes the best footnotes ever.), but I actually enjoyed the deep dive into how constructing worlds can work.

Next post:  one more book