The List is life.

And as in life, goals are not always met. In this case, I didn’t come close to my goal of reading all the books on the list, but who cares. The idea of the list kept me reading which is the important thing.

Of course, Christmas (my favorite holiday, natch) brought more books which means the list has grown (and growns) a bit. The new arrivals include “The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac” (from the beautiful wifey) which is really more a nightstand/coffee table book. It’s by the people at Freedarko.com and it is awesome. The art by Big Baby Belafonte is fantastic (check out the Josh Smith/Gerald Wallace drawings) and the text is brainy fun. I especially enjoy the feature on the “2000 NBA Draft, A Legacy of Ruin and Evil” (I actually attended that draft) and “Euro for Beginners”. Comparing Tim Duncan’s career numbers to the Fibonacci Sequence is equally rad. If you love the NBA, pick this baby up.

Other books I received are “Atmospheric Disturbances” by Rivka Galchen which I am reading (and enjoying) right now and “2666” by Roberto Bolano (from Bethany). I didn’t read “The Savage Detective” but I think I’m up for this whopper which clocks in at 893 pages. “Cryptonomicon”, the biggest fiction book on the list at 910 pages, might have to wait . . .some more.

My brother-in-law and his girlfriend gave me “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. They gave me the book because they liked it. They also gave it to me without knowledge of my list and the rules of the list which bind me to read the book. So welcome to The Shadow, at least for now, a paperback that is nearly 500 pages.

And finally, my wife gave me “Alex & Me” by Irene M. Pepperberg, a non-fiction book about Alex the African Grey parrot who died in September 2007. I read just about everything on Alex after his passing so I will devour this book I’m sure. One of my favorite stylists (journalistically speaking), Verlyn Klinkenborg of the NY Times, wrote a great piece on Alex.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1629,Alex-the-Parrot,Verlyn-Klinkenborg

Go Atheist Bus, btw.

I mixed it up toward the end of the year, reading a Birthday List book. Yes, there is a Birthday List. I’m in the process of compiling the Birthday List and will try to post those books soon. But one book I received for my birthday this year was “Neverland” by Joseph O’Neill.

Neverland started a bit slow, but turned out to be a fabulous read. I’m not sure it was one of the best books of the year (NY Times designated it so), but I loved it. For one thing, I have a soft spot for cricket which serves as a sort of subtext. Having done a story on cricket a few years ago, I picked up on what makes the game special. I traveled to England for the story and brought back a bag of cricket books including a very underrated one, “Pundits from Pakistan” by Rahul Bhattacharya. The title itself is fun to say using a Monty Python old lady voice. Try it.

But in Neverland, O’Neill (a Irishman who grew up in Holland) more than captures the game; he captures what it means to play a sport at any age. Considering my own ventures in basketball (every Sunday morning), I felt a kinship. Left alone in New York after his wife and kid leave for the UK, the narrator Hans devotes an entire summer to cricket. He finds that many of his old skills are still there, even if he can’t hit “the cow-shots and lofted bashes in which many of my teammates specialized.” Instead, he cuts balls and keeps the ball out of the air as a batter. But he also discovers a path back to his “younger incarnation” through the game:

“But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived then in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held. To reinvent myself in order to bat the American way, that baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting, involved more than a trivial abandonment of hitting a ball. It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years, to my mothered self.”

The wisdom in this lyricism is the real gift of the book, O’Neill’s true gift as a writer. The story which hinges on Post-9/11 New York, Hans’ relationship with his bitch of a wife and his friendship with the intriguing Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon is entertaining and, by turns, sweet with emotion. But O’Neill’s gift for description (his tracking the stages of snow in a windowpane for example) is the real treat. He is a writer’s writer I would say, wordy at times, but powerful.