You read any good books?
A list of stuff I've read recently (some not so recently) that might be worth your time.


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In November 2022 I put out a free post that was a Holiday Gift Guide, and as you can imagine I recommended either buying a subscription to your favorite newsletter1 or buy a t-shirt or six from the guy who writes your favorite newsletter. But then there was also a list of books that you could buy. And many of you liked that list, not the least of whom was intrepid reader Kyle Knauff who actually asked me if I was going to do that again.
I notice that Kyle didn’t ask if I was going to try to guilt you all into buying gift subscriptions again, but Twitter has a character limit for those of us too smart to pay to use it so Kyle probably meant to write that and just worried he’d run out of space.
Regardless. The book list was a good idea, and here we are in the interregnum between the end of another fallow Bears’ season and the start of another likely fruitless Cubs’ campaign, so it seems like a good time to recommend some books.
My plan was to think back to all the books I read this year and then tell you which ones are worth reading.
There’s only one problem with that.
I can’t fucking remember all the books I read. Does that seem like a cognitive issue?
It does to me, too.
But here’s the real cause. I love the library. Just the idea that for being a taxpayer you have access to borrow books and read them for free is amazing to me. Plus, I’m a big fan of drag children’s book readings. I mean, I’ve never been to one, and I’m not sure why they are a thing, but I will support their existence, regardless.
I check out a lot of books from the library. I see or hear about an interesting book and I go to the library website and I see if they have it yet and if they do I reserve it online. Then when it is available they ship it to the branch closest to me and I get a text that it’s ready. I drive over, barely walk in the door and find it on the reserve shelf, check it out from the unmanned kiosk and I’m on my merry way with my borrowed book. It’s still amazing to me.
I’m easily impressed, I guess.
So here’s the only problem with that. Because I read a lot of library books, when I’m done with those books they are not on one of my many book shelves. So when I sat down to write this column, many, if not most, of the books I read this year are back on the shelf in the library, and it’s up to me to remember which ones I read.
I am not up to that task.
I even went to the library and asked if they could look up what books I checked out and they looked at me like I was trying to recreate this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
They assured me that they kept no lists of what people checked out. I get it, these are strange days we live in. But again, it’s back to me and my faulty memory.
I remember most of the books I read. I only was hoping there was a list because I’m sure there would be one or two of the, “Oh, yeah! That was good!’ variety that would appear on the list that apparently can never be procured. Instead I’ll remember those books in like two weeks after you’ve read and forgotten this column. Oh, well.
So anyway, here’s a non-comprehensive list of stuff I read this year that you might like.
In addition to libraries, I love buying used books. We had a Half Price Books in town that went of out of business because nobody here other than me can read, and that was very sad. But I also buy a fair amount of used books on eBay, ThriftBooks and Biblio.com, so for the books that might be hard to find I’ll include links to these books in case you want to buy them. But I’ll once again give a plug to your local library. Use it. It’s an incredible thing. Or go to your local book store, otherwise it’ll go out of business, and that would suck.
The Book of Joe by Joe Maddon and Tom Verducci
I actually reviewed this book after I read it last year right after the last list came out, and I figured I would like it, but I liked it more than I even thought I would. Look, Joe is a little full of himself, but it’s part of his charm. He’s a great manager, and a great story teller. So what if almost all of his stories are likely exaggerated? They’re exaggerated in a fun way.
Francona by Terry Francona and The Curly Haired Boyfriend
This is an older book, 2013, and I read it right after I read Joe’s book, on the recommendation of Jon Greenberg. Terry’s end in Boston was eerily reminiscent of Joe’s in Chicago, with the exception that Tito won two World Series and Theo at least acted like he was sad to fire him. It’s a great read, and I was kind of surprised he wrote it with Dan Shaughnessy because the Curly Haired Boyfriend2 doesn’t seem like Francona’s kind of guy. But hey, the check cashed.
Winning Fixes Everything by Evan Drellich
Drellich writes a full account of the Astros cheating scandal, and relates just how much more went into it than banging on a trash can. But you also learn just how brazen they were about it, especially Carlos Beltran. They didn’t try to hide it, including putting the TV back up after AJ Hinch ripped one off the wall. Drellich and Ken Rosenthal wrote the pieces in The Athletic that first broke the story. This is a nice companion to the unfortunate Ben Reiter book, Astroball: The New Way To Win It All that came out just as the scandal was coming to light and making everything he wrote bullshit.
Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
I bought this book when it came out two-plus years ago and because it’s an oral history I am prone to pick it up and read chunks of it and then get distracted by something else for a while. Give me a break, it’s 971 pages long! But Miller did such a good job with it, just like he did with the recently departed Tom Shales on Saturday Night Live and on ESPN, and by himself on Creative Artists Agency. All four of those books are great, but the HBO book is up there with SNL as his very best. The was no way he was going to screw up an oral history on four decades of HBO, and he didn’t.
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
The same can not be said for our pal Michael Lewis and his book on Sam Bankman-Fried, although I enjoyed this book much more than most reviewers did. The problem they had with it was here was this great writer embedded with the biggest player in crypto right as things were turning to shit. What a break. We were going to get the unvarnished truth about what a shit SBF was. But that’s not what Lewis wrote. He clearly felt sympathy for SBF and portrayed him more as somebody who this happened to than somebody who made it happen.
To play amateur psychologist, this is the first book Lewis has written since his daughter died in a car accident and I think he just didn’t have it in him to totally crush somebody just a few years older than her.
However, the book is not bad in the slightest. You will not understand crypto after you read it (I don’t think anybody ever will and Lewis has a hilarious explanation about how every time he thought he understood it he’d go to bed, wake up and realize he still didn’t know how any of it really worked) but I can tell you that I had little sympathy for SBF after reading it. Lewis doesn’t defend what he did. People are just mad that he portrays SBF more as being naive and careless than evil. But contrary to what you might have read, Lewis doesn’t make Sam all that sympathetic. Lewis’ skill is making people you’ve never heard of interesting, and he did it most incredibly in The Fifth Risk and The Premonition (both are absolutely worth your time by the way), so maybe he’s not as good at doing it with somebody you already don’t like. (The timing of the book didn’t help either, as it was released just as Michael Oher was suing Lewis’ old college roommate Sean Tuohy and his wife Leigh Anne for cashing in on him and keeping all the money.)
If this book is similar to any of his other ones, it’s probably The New New Thing which also has a protagonist—Jim Clark—who you mostly don’t like, even though Michael clearly does.
Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo
Richard Russo is my favorite writer, and I didn’t even know this book was coming out this year. So it was a very pleasant surprise when I stumbled upon it. Somebody’s Fool is the third in a series that follows Nobody’s Fool (which is also an incredibly good movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Jessica Tandy, Margo Martindale and on, and on), and Everybody’s Fool. They all take place in the fictional small town of North Bath, New York and follow basically the same group of incredibly entertaining flawed people. I could go on and on about these books, but I’d rather you just read them and find it all out for yourselves. Start with Nobody’s Fool and I dare you to not love it.
And Nobody’s Fool isn’t even my favorite book of his. Straight Man, which AMC made into a pretty good, but not great, series last year with Bob Odenkirk, is my favorite.
When I get in a rut, writing3 there are two books I go to. I just pick up Straight Man or Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys4 and read a couple chapters and see if that did the trick.
The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney
This one appeals to the media nerd in me, as Nagourney takes a breezy look at the last 80 years or so of The New York Times. I’m not even done with this yet and I’ve already said out loud, “Oh, shit, I forgot about this scandal” like three times. You will never get used to how over seriously that place takes itself and just how many obvious piles of shit they still manage to step in.
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story by Sam Wasson
I’ll need to update you on this. It’s the story of the making of Apocalypse Now and I’m only about a third of the way through it. It’s good, but so far I haven’t gleaned anything important that you can’t learn by watching Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the documentary that came out in 1991 using the footage Coppola’s wife Eleanor shot during the filming.
If you’re willing and able to ignore the Spanish subtitles, you can watch the documentary for free on YouTube.
The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson by Jeff Pearlman
And, a book I completely forgot I read this year until I re-read that gift guide, is Jeff Pearlman’s book on Bo Jackson. It’s really good. You will be amazed at how little Bo ever worked out and how little regard he had for practice. But it won’t make you like him less. Rather, you’ll just be even more amazed than you were before at what an incredible athlete he was. There are so many great stories in this book.
I know I’ve forgotten some books. Like I said, I’ll remember them in two weeks and have to put them in a different newsletter.
But here’s a book I read a long time ago, but was referenced a lot in our Remember This Collapse podcast about epic Cubs’ choke jobs from 1969-1999.
The Cubs of ‘69 by Rick Talley
Never has a team that didn’t win anything been mythologized as much as the Durocher Era Cubs, but this book, published in the 20th anniversary year of their big collapse, does a great job of explaining the undying appeal of those guys and takes you step by step through everything that had to happen for them to blow it.
So that’s it. I believe between the books I described and the one in the footnotes that’s 17 books you could read.
However, as I was looking at my bookshelves trying to see if I forgot any I read this year, I just randomly grabbed a few that screamed, “Shit! They should read this!” So here’s a non-comprehensive speed round of more recommendations.
- The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal by David Halberstam - It’s the book on crew that George Clooney should have made a movie about. I don’t even like rowing and I loved this book.
- The Kennedys - An American Drama by Peter Collier and David Horowitz - My copy of this book is falling apart, and has to be more than 30 years old. Published in 1984 it is the comprehensive book at what a fucked up, fascinating, ridiculous family the Kennedys are. And they’ve only gotten more ridiculous since.
- Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden A lot of the stuff in this book ended up in the first two seasons of Narcos on Netflix, but not all of it.
- Boss by Mike Royko - The only book I kept from journalism school. Everybody who lives within 200 square miles of Chicago should be required to read it. It’s incredible.
- The Brothers K by David James Duncan - To call this a baseball book would be giving it short shrift. There’s a lot of baseball in it, but it’s far more about the family, and manages to be funny and maddening and heartbreaking all at once. It’s nearly 700 pages long and as you get to the end you’ll wish it were even longer.
- Catcher in the Wry by Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz - It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read. I stole my brother’s copy in 1984 when I was 11 and I still have it.
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - The second funniest, but overall best book I’ve ever read. The back story of Toole’s elderly mother trying for years to get this published after his suicide is incredible enough, and the world should be forever grateful that she never gave up. Any copy of this book will do, but if you can get your hands on the little yellow hardcover version, that one’s a real keeper. The last time I was in New Orleans, I walked out of my hotel and right across the street was the Ignatius J. Reilly statue that I didn’t know existed. Incredible.
- Loose Balls by Terry Pluto - The comprehensive history of the American Basketball Association that you never knew you needed. Every story is more ridiculous than the one before it. The famous Marvin Barnes “I ain’t getting in no time machine” story is in there and it’s like the fifth best Marvin Barnes story in the book.
- Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball In the Big Leagues by Jim Bouton - A lot of times the books we’re told are groundbreaking seem tame by the time we get to them, but not Ball Four. Fifty-four years after it was first published it still can elicit an, “Oh shit.” Bouton got endless amounts of vitriol for writing about what a drunk, skirt chaser Mickey Mantle was, which was unheard of (but obviously very true) at the time. It’s full of great stories and terrible pitching coaches and one very, very funny Joe Torre joke.
Anyway, that’s more than enough, but we’re still just scratching the surface.
Mine, to be clear, but honestly, you should also be subscribed to Kelly Dwyer’s, so take a second and go do that and then come back and read the rest of this post. ↩
Carl Everett famously gave Shaughnessy that nickname while yelling at another Boston Glove writer, Gordon Edes. “Get out of here and take your Curly Haired Boyfriend with you!” ↩
I can hear you out there thinking, “When do you think you’ll ever get out of that rut.” ↩
My favorite of Chabon’s is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is just dying for Christopher Miller and Phil Lord to turn into a movie some day. If they don’t, I don’t know who possibly could. ↩