Welcome to the August 2024 edition of the reading list! I’ve been on a baseball theme this summer. This month will continue that theme in a big way. We’ll also have some fiction to go along with it.
Read on to see the full list. And, as always, let me know what’s on your list!
Percival Everett – Erasure
Anyone reading this book in 2024 probably knows it first as the source material for the recent film American Fiction. But before that, it was a compelling novel about the life of a black author and what it means to be a black author in a world where (mostly white) people have strange ideas about what it means to be black.
The film updated all this in various ways, but it captures the spirit of the novel really well.
In the novel, a black author named Thelonious Ellison reads a contrived, exploitative book called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and decides he’s had enough. Its author – a highly educated, wealthy black woman – wrote the book to cash in on black ghetto stereotypes. In response, Ellison anonymously writes and publishes a wide ranging parody of those stereotypes.
He expects his parody to get people to stop the nonsense. And, of course, it doesn’t. Instead, the public and critics embrace the parody as a genuine novel. They even put it up for an award. Hilarity ensues.
Anyone who loved the movie should pick up the book. For one, it actually includes the full text of Ellison’s My Pafology (also known as Fuck). But also, it’s just a good read. It fills out the story in ways the film couldn’t quite get to.
David Halberstam – Summer of ’49/October 1964
These two come together as my second baseball book of the summer. They pair nicely, telling a broader story about the game.
In the first, Halberstam follows the exciting 1949 pennant race between the Yankees and Red Sox. Jumping out to a huge lead, the Yankees looked like the winners. But the Sox got back in it, chasing New York all the way down to the final game of the season.
Halberstam profiles key players along the way, looking both at their ’49 season and ensuing careers. And those discussions of players, their foibles, and their relationships stand out as the real strength of the book. Halberstam gets at the heart of what it means to approach the world as a young man playing baseball in an era where players remained under almost total team control.
Finally, for a bit of crossover fun, Halberstam briefly mentions Bart Giamatti, the eventual commissioner who banned Pete Rose from baseball. I read all about him in last month’s book. This one sees him as a young fan idolizing Red Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr.
In the second, Halberstam truly perfects his craft. He masterfully contrasts the ’64 Yankees to the St. Louis Cardinals. The Yanks entered the season as a declining baseball dynasty, while the Cards were just coming into their own.
He also contrasts the Yanks and Cards in terms of their owners’ racial attitudes. Yankees ownership was reluctant to sign black players, while the Cardinals were far more enthusiastic. Black players thereby drove the decline and rise of dynasties.
Halberstam’s narrative works, though it works better for the Cardinals than the Yankees. The Yankees didn’t really begin their decline until the next season. And this book would become a template for a certain kind of baseball novel.
Emily St. John Mandel – The Glass Hotel
I’ve really become a fan of Mandel’s work in the course of the last few years. Every book I’ve read from her has been enjoyable, and she particularly excels at building compelling characters who navigate unique circumstances.
In this one, many people navigate the aftermath of a Ponzi scheme. But the story focuses mostly intently on the leader’s ‘trophy wife’ (though they’re not actually married). The trophy wife – Vincent – struggles both before and after the ‘marriage.’ Afterward, she drops her life on land to become the crew member of a ship, where a murder mystery ensues.
Other characters deal with similarly bizarre events, including losing life savings in the scheme. I think the book has a few things to tell us about how we navigate disaster, both their makings and aftermaths.
Mitchell Nathanson – A People’s History of Baseball
Of course we have another baseball book! Nathanson offers an academic history of the game. But unlike other such histories, he tells this one from a perspective explicitly opposed to MLB’s. Nathanson highlights these counter-stories in 6 chapters. These take the reader from the dubbing of baseball as the ‘national pastime’ all the way to the blogging wave of the early 2010s.
Nathanson shows how Americans of each era used baseball to tell broader stories. These stories included ones about about the virtues and vices of work, who’s welcome and unwelcome into the country, and who the game of baseball is really about.
Many Americans know a few pieces of the puzzle. Most know a bit, for example, about the exclusion of black Americans from baseball until the time of Jackie Robinson. Even there, though, few know that team owners – rather than players or fans – kept black players out. And hardly anyone knows about the early struggles between players and owners over who would control the game.
Nathanson clearly slants his history toward certain topics and perspectives. But he explicitly tells us he’s going to do this when he introduces the book. His reasoning? Standard, pro-MLB perspectives dominant the current landscape. They need to be balanced.
That’s plausible enough. And I enjoyed reading the perspectives Nathanson adds.
Emily Tesh – Some Desperate Glory
This is Tesh’s debut sci-fi novel, and she makes the most of it. She writes about the destruction of Earth by aliens, a human supremacist element that fights on, and a couple of LGBTQ soldiers coming of age in a human breakaway state.
Tesh holds the story together pretty well. Her novel speaks mostly to the coming of age issues, as well as to the social issues and traumas that come along with a destroyed homeworld. I think she has especially insightful things to say about the process of breaking away from a far right, vaguely fascist ideological society.
So, yeah. This is quite a debut from Tesh. I’m interested in reading more.
