This my current reading list. Bouncing between these two...
“Show Don’t Tell” by Curtis Sittenfeld is a collection of short stories. You may have seen her name in the New Yorker or on one of her several other books.
I got this book from Molly months ago and now I’m finally into it. Good stuff these stories are. Good stuff.
“Football” by Chuck Klosterman. This book is not for the average football fan. I’m confident it would not appeal to the Seahawk fans I saw last week crowding my 5:30am train on their way downtown to stake out a spot on the curb on 4th Avenue to wait six hours for a chance to see the superbowl trophy roll by.
I’m a Klosterman fan but I need to take his work in small bites. He knows his shit and can talk about anything for a long time. He talks about football and a wide range of other things as well. It brings to mind a fictional metaphorical road trip in a minivan from Flagstaff back to Grinnell listening to whatever radio station came in clearly across Nebraska when long-time KEXP DJ Kevin Cole, one the backseat passengers, couldn’t stop commenting on every song that came on the radio, expressing his amazing knowledge of music, bands, musicians and the music industry, until one of the other passengers finally told him to “shut the fuck up and just look out the window or take a nap or something”
I consider myself a football fan but not “an average football fan” and therefore I’m within Klosterman’s target audience with this book. I’m taking it in small servings. When I got to a passage on page 182 where Klosterman mentions Public Enemy’s “She Watch Channel Zero” I had to pause and smile and give an imaginary fist pump ::: two seven five four eight she watched she said all added up to zero and nothing in her head
It might be hard to watch a game with Klosterman if you wanted to actually pay attention to it. But he points out several times in the book, a three-hour televised football game contains only 11 minutes of actual live play. Klosterman would have no problem keeping you entertained for those other 169 minutes of down time.
This is my next next next book. I've only read a review of it but I can already recommend it to you two too.
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