Well, I think I have found a keeper of a book that fills a number of bookish desires, so thanks to all (especially Linda who first recommended it) who shared baseball-related reading suggestions! I am reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year for this month's reading prompt. I am happy that I managed to find a book that I will enjoy and am sticking with my original list of themes. And I have a complementary list of other books that I have saved for later as well.
I've only just started to read, but I am already caught up in the world of the author. Nonfiction or not, she is a very good storyteller. Although there is more than a smattering of baseball, she writes about her family with much affection and their story is so interesting that the baseball just feels like an interesting detail. NYC in the 1950s, what's not to love. NYC, while I have never properly visited there (have only been so far as one of the airport terminals at JFK airport) is one of my favorite cities to read about.
I am sure my teaser is going to endear the author (and her mother) to you as much as it did to me! She doesn't just love baseball, but she loves books as well. It is a love passed on to her from her mother, whose health issues left her housebound.
"Whereas my father's interest in reading was confined mainly to newspapers and magazines, my mother read books in every spare moment: books in the middle of the night, when she had trouble breathing; books in the morning, after she cleared the breakfast table; books in the early afternoon, when she finished her housework, shopping, and ironing; books in the late afternoon after preparations for dinner were completed; and, again, books in the evenings."
And then she goes on to describe not just her mother's love of books, but what life was like in this particular time and place, which is what helps bring this all to life for me visually.
"The corner drugstore had a lending library where current best-sellers could be rented for several cents a day. And in the center of our town stood the cramped public library she adored, an old brick building built before the town had a high school or bank. With linoleum tiles on the floors, a massive receiving desk, ladders reaching the top shelves, and books spilling out from every corner, our library held a collection begun more than a decade before the village itself was incorporated in 1893. The books my mother read and reread--Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Tales of the South Pacific, David Copperfield--provided a broader, more adventurous world, an escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted."
And here is the best bit of it--what utterly resonates with me.
"Is she couldn't change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it; she could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing the journeys while she remained in her chair."
Amen to that! That is just where my own reading is at right now even if our circumstances are very different. Is this not a great teaser or what? Perfect June reading. Perfect anytime reading.