[Upbeat intro music]
All right. So I love sports, and I love
books about sports, and I haven't seen
too many people talking about these
types of books on BookTube so I figured I
would do my top 10 favorites starting
with my absolute favorite Fever Pitch by
Nick Hornby. This book. [laughs] I love this book.
It's hilarious, and it's witty, and it's
really just an ode to the author's
absolute obsession with Arsenal FC, an
English football team.  And for anyone who has ever followed sports or cared about
sports, it just validates all your
feelings of caring too much about your
team and what it means to follow a team who is absolutely just shit and always
losing and the beauty in that.  It's also
a little bit autobiographical. He talks
about growing up as a boy going to the
games and as an adult like right next
door to the stadium. You might have
read some of his other works. He wrote
About A Boy, High Fidelity, A Long Way Down. But this is really his his heart, I think. Yeah.
Even if you're not a sports fan read
this book because it will give you
insight into the sports fans in your
life, and it will make you laugh. Number
two is a series of essays from the
collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll
Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.
He has a few essays in that collection
about tennis. A couple of them are about
professional tennis.
but the one that I love is called
"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." And
it's about him playing tennis as a high
school student, and his obsession with
tennis and math and just the strange
way that his mind works.  And it's written
in..his you know his typical dark
humor and postmodern absurdity. And
there's so much absurdity in youth sports
already so you can imagine. It's just
highly entertaining and laugh out loud funny.
Number three is Friday Night Lights: a
town a team and a dream by HG Bissinger.
And I know this is a movie and a TV
series and those are both...they're both
great. But the book is just...it's
absolutely a good read. It's heartbreaking
and a little bit depressing—a lot bit
depressing—but just this this insight
into small-town America and what it what
sports can come to mean in the psyche of
a place like that. It follows the 1988
Permian high school football team and
their road to the championship. And it just paints a portrait of not
just the boys on the team, but the
townspeople that all they can think about
is this football team. And I also have a
personal connection to that one because
both of my grandparents on my mom's side grew up in Odessa Texas in the high school...
in the high school that is featured
in this book so.  Number four is Into Thin
Air by Jon Krakauer. If you've ever read
anything by Jon Krakauer, you know
his writing style is absolutely gripping. You just you can't put it down. And this one
is a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster. It's horrifying. It's horrifying
and it's tragic, but you can't look away. And it's also
incredible. It's the story of—in 1996
this awful storm that hit the mountain.
It killed a record number of people. But
it's just...it's written in his very
typical umm grabs you and you can't let go kind of style. Again, the theme of climbing.
This was a book that I grew up with when I was a kid:
Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman. It's a Newbury Honour Book. And it's about a boy, Rudy Matt, growing
up in this small town in the Swiss Alps
where climbing is a really big deal. And
his father attempts to climb this
mountain, The Citadel, and parishes in the
attemt. And Rudy decides that he's going
to attempt the climb, and takes his
father's red climbing shirt with him. And it's a really nice coming of age
story. And I remember as a kid being
really inspired by his his courage.
This is a fiction book. I think the only
fiction book on the list.
Number six is Seabiscuit: an American
Legend by Warren Helen Bryan. Who doesn't
love an underdog story? This is like the
ultimate underdog story. It's about a horse
that's really lazy, a trainer from the
middle of nowhere, this self-made
millionaire, a jockey who was, you know,
this failed boxer, and none of them
really have any business being in the
world of high-stakes sport racing. But
they come together, and somehow they
create this global phenomenon. And it's
absolutely a great book. I know the movie is good but the book is wonderful. And
you might know that she also wrote Unbroken, which has been really popular the last
couple years. I would recommend that. Read that if you ever just want to just hate
life for a little while. [laughs] Okay! A couple soccer books. The Ball is Round: a global
history of soccer by David Goldblatt. He loves to write these ginormous
encyclopedic books about sports. His book
about the history of the Olympics is on my
TBR pile. I'm honestly maybe a fifth of
the way into this. It's slow going, but I
really appreciate the way that he looks
at the cultural context and impact that
soccer has had
for hundreds of years. Have you ever
wanted to know why
soccer is a big deal everywhere except
America? Read this book. If you ever
wanted to know everything ever about
soccer, read this book. The next book is also about soccer, but in a fairly different vein.
This is Soccer and Sun and Shadow by
Eduardo Galeano translated by Mark Fried.
And it's really..it's a series of just
these lovely little vignettes. Really he
just picks out moments from either
playing himself. He does...he talks a lot
about the Uruguayan national team. He
talks about the different World Cups—
Moments of those, such as the goal by Zara, the goal
by Azizino. And he just he writes in
this really lyrical, lovely way that
really helps you appreciate that...that
Latin American passion and...and love for
this beautiful game. Number nine is Adrift:
Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by
Steven Callahan. And I know this isn't
technically a sports book, but it's about
adventure and really about like the
limits of human endurance, so I wanted to include it.  And, I must have
read this book like six or seven years
ago, and still when I think of it I'm
like instantly back on the raft with him
and the Sun beating down, bleaching the
orange out of the canvas boat; the sharks
nudging at the bottom of the boat;
trying desperately to catch a Dorado
with a homemade spear; and just the smell
of the salt caked into his hair. And his
descriptions are so vivid that you
really do feel like you're surviving
with him day-to-day on this raft.So yeah,
definitely, definitely recommend this one. Number 10 is Crossover by Kwame
Alexander, and it's actually a lyrical
verse book ,which I hadn't ever read
before. I'm not sure why. I love poetry,
and I love books, but I just hadn't. And um,
it's about two twin boys that are great...
they're both just basketball prodigies
And, you know, they deal with like typical
high school boys stuff: girls and
relationships, jealousy. But they also
deal with a really tragic family event.
And the way that he writes it, it is just...
I don't know. It captures like the pace
of a basketball game and the small
moments that
make it such a frenetic, exciting sport. And I highly recommend that one. I
recommend that one to like people who
either aren't interested in sports just
because the beauty of the writing will
definitely suck you in, but maybe to
like younger...a younger audience who
isn't too sure about reading in general. I feel
like maybe this kind of verse book would
be more accessible. It's pretty short.
It's like 200 pages. And so yeah, that was
my top 10 favorite sports books. I wanted
to say that I realized this list is
incredibly one-sided and has no women on
it, so I'm really excited because the
reading women 2019 challenge has a
section for women in sports. So right now
I only have four ideas: In the Water They
Can't See You Cry: a memoir by Amanda Beard
I remember watching her in the Olympics. That one looks good.
Then there's Dottie Wiltse Collins:
Strikeout Queen of the All-American
Girls Professional Baseball League by
Carolyn Romney. And I love A League of
Their Own, but I don't really know that
much about that period in history, which
is sad because it's absolutely
fascinating. So I'm excited about that
one. I also have Sum It Up:
1098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant
Losses, and a Life in Perspective by Pat
Summitt
