Celebrities can Read Books

Ok, so I know that your first thought, looking at the title of this post, is to scoff sarcastically. Well good for you, scoffing is an important skill, and doing it sarcastically takes effort. However, I am serious. There are celebrities out there who can read, some of them even choose to do so.

I come to you with proof of this. The website Poll the People has started up the ambitious attempt to create an unscientifically produced polled series of international lists about books, albums, and movies (or as they call them, films). This part is boring, go ahead and be bored by it.

Are you done? Good, cause there's actually something interesting too. It could get more interesting if people outside of England join them.

Poll the People is encouraging celebrities to contribute top 5 lists. Why are you excited by this, Matt? I hear you ask. After all, who cares what celebrities think, most of them aren't so bright, and in the States we best know them for saying dumb things around election time. This is true.

But hang on, you see the secret with celebrities, and I know I'm dropping a bomb on you here with this revelation, is that they are popular. It is highly likely that the Rolling Stones are more popular than literacy in America. So if they lend their fame to a support of literacy maybe more people will read. I know, I know, it's a fantasy, but it couldn't hurt.

The bad news is, the Rolling Stones are not, as far as I know at present, throwing their considerable weight behind the whole reading thing. Instead, right now we have a bunch of obscure British celebrities who have contributed their top five lists.

Among them is Nick Hornby, the author. We can rest assured he's not bringing anyone new to books. He did his share when people were told that that Cusack movie they liked was once a book.

Still, there's some hope. Tim Rice-Oxley, of the British band Keane, and Tom Simpson, of the band Snow Patrol, have both contributed lists. Now I will admit, I've barely heard of these bands, but if I've barely heard of them, they're probably pretty big. If their fans pick up any of the books they've listed, then we're in the black. So that's pretty cool. Now we just need A-Rod to announce that he loves to curl up in the dugout with his well-thumbed copy of Gormenghast and America will enter a reading frenzy.

A Game of Pain

It's often said that baseball is a game more about losing than winning. This certainly seems to be true for me, as a Mets fan. Of course, even a good hitter gets out more often than they get a hit, and that's what the saying is really about.

Paper Cuts, at the NY Times, had a post not long ago about sports writing where they quoted George Plimpton's saying that 'the smaller the ball, the better the book.' Now as was pointed out in the comments, this could lead to pinball or marbles being the best sports books, and that's not true. So really it's an implied progression from basketball to football to baseball to golf. The only one of these sports I follow is baseball, though I also follow World Cup soccer(or Football if you live anywhere besides North America).

Now, I don't hold with hard and fast rules, but I think that there is something to baseball writing. Of course, I've only read one book devoted to baseball, Donald Hall's Father's Playing Catch with Sons, but I deeply loved it. The pain and loss so typically associated with baseball lends itself well to writing. Everyone knows Casey at the Bat. There's something very literary about the moment it describes, and it happens all the time. I would say that a 'Casey' strikes out in almost every single game. Sometimes it matters more than others.

Of course, as for sports books, I also read and really enjoyed Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, also a book about the bad times in sports as much as the good. So far, I much prefer his nonfiction.

Both books are also about being fans of the game more than they are about the sport. If baseball is a game of pain, it certainly seems that soccer can make a bid, I think all sports can. For every year that your team wins it all, there are a lot more where they don't, even if you're a Yankees fan. And true fans pride themselves more for their loyalty in the bad times than for enjoying the good times. Fair weather fan is not considered a complement.

It makes sense. The true experience includes the pain. If you're not there for that, then you can't truly understand the thrill of victory. I know that ten years from now I will still be talking about last season, and probably wear it like a badge of honor. Because I was there, and I always watched through to the last pitch.

Being a sports fan is also a lot like reading. In the end, we don't hit the home runs or pitch the strike outs anymore than we have a picnic in the ruins of a fortress with the Rochelois attacking. But we feel like we're there. The authors and the athletes share these experiences with us. Most fans begin to develop a special, entirely fictional relationship with their favorite players. Similarly, readers often do the same with their favorite characters, and sometimes their favorite authors too. D'Artagnan and Jose Reyes both feel like friends to me, but I've never met either of them.

Still, if you're a sports fan, even a little bit, there's a book out there for you, and probably a blog, and I recommend both. Then you can combine your love of the sport with your love of reading, and enrich both.