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