May Books

It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley. Great title. Incredible title. The narrator, Bradley, has to stop playing college football when his eligibility ran out. He’d played ball his entire life (his dad was a coach) and some of the men he admired (and hated) most were football coaches. Football was a huge part of his life, and in small town Louisiana, a large component of the fabric of life there – who LSU was playing, how the new kicker was looking, on and on.

It was wrenching when he stopped playing, which I got. But. Years into a career as a talented freelance writer and novelist and it still is as painful as it is to him? I was with him up through about the first five years he was out of college. After that, I couldn’t help but think, “Let’s move on, shall we?” I don’t know. Maybe one has to A) Be a guy and B) Have grown up playing team sports and C) Played for the LSU Tigers, none of which I have.

The book jumped around a lot, one thing I’ve seen in many biographies and memoirs, and this is a personal thing, but I don’t care for that. I like my books straight up and chronological, thank you. (Except for The Time Traveler’s Wife, but that’s something else altogether.) I found that a bit distracting. The jumping around seemed a bit forced at times, like it was for effect.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. It’s a great title, for one, and I identified, to a degree, with the author’s struggles and uncertainties and everything else that goes along with a writing career.

Again, I’m not a guy and have never played a team sport so a great deal of his angst was something I simply couldn’t relate to after a point.

However, I thought enough about it and how powerfully he writes about his family and his hometown that I will look for other novels by him.

This Book Will Change Your Life by A.M. Homes. You know, I really liked this. It’s an incredible (as in, outlandish) story of these incredible (again with the outlandish) things that happen to the main character, Richard Novak, but at the same time, I enjoyed reading it. Somehow, I didn’t feel like I knew the characters all that well BUT I looked forward to picking up the book each time I had the chance to. I can’t explain it.

I read up on other works by the same author. She also wrote Music for Torching, which I read a few years ago and didn’t like all that much. Maybe I should read it again and see what I think.

I’m still reading Bird by Bird. I think I may read a book about writing, the craft of, every month or so. Just because.

I’m also reading The Abundance Principal: Five Keys to Extraordinary Living. I’ve been reading this off and on for a while. I love self help books.

Body Surfing by Anita Shreve. I’ve read several books by Anita Shreve and I’ve enjoyed them all. She’s a quiet little writer but gets so much right. I don’t know how to explain it. I’d put her in the same category as Alice Hoffman, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Berg, if that helps any. This particular book was about a wealthy family, and you know. Actually, that’s not what it was about. I don’t know how to explain it without it sounding like a soap opera. Or Jerry Springer episode, which is so not what it was like.

Favorite book this month: This Book Will Change Your Life.

Character whom you'd most like to have a drink with: I've already forgotten his name, but the dad in Body Surfing, who grew the roses.

Previous months' posts about books are in the sidebar.