The Book Shopper

MARTA Book Club #31: Reading Revival

It's  almost been ten months since our last book club posting (MARTA Book Club #30) and a few of you have asked:

A.) Is anyone reading on  Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) buses and trains any more,  or B:) has the  secretary of the MARTA Book Club become too lazy to record what people are reading while they are riding public transit?

Quite frankly, it has been a combination of the two. For a while, I just didn't see people reading much in the way of books.  E-readers like Kindle seemed to have disappeared from the platforms as well. Time spent watching videos on phones seems to have increased though I don't quite see the pleasure of watching a dazzling dance number complete with stage lighting and gyrating music on a two by three inch screen.

Combine this media consumption trend to my lack of investigative fortitude and you can understand why there has been  dearth of titles and subsequent postings.   

One has plenty of time to read when the next train is 1408  minutes away

But enough of the excuses. I have made a concerted effort lately. So here's a list -- a small resurrection, if you will, of what people have been reading in Atlanta the past few weeks:

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and Michael Meyer.

Selected Commercial Statutes for Secured Transactions by Carol Chomsky and Christina Kunz (This month's winner of the Hefty Book Award).

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (second place winner of the Hefty Book Award).

 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.

Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child.

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Hume.  This was my offering. In this book, Hume reveals the intricate and tenuous nature of our transportation network from shipping containers  at the Port of Los Angeles to home delivery. He writes about the economic costs, the human costs (16 pedestrians are killed each day in the U.S.) and the environmental costs. Saying our infrastructure needs to be rebuilt is one thing, but doing it is something entirely different. One can start by reading this book.

Flash Point: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis.

Outcast, Vol. 3: A Little Light by Robert Kirkman and Elizabeth Brietweiser.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. (of course, considering it's just been released as a movie)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Game of Thrones by George W. Martin

The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls

Perhaps this is not much of a effort compared  past lists but you can can contribute by adding a book in this posting's comments section.

 

The Little Library of Football Stories

So what is the story behind this abandoned, perhaps vandalized,  little book library located in a public park near my house? It's been that way for months. It's not filled and curated like many of the little book libraries that you see in nicer neighborhoods.  What makes this repository with it's missing glass more pathetic is that the only book in there is Pete Carroll's Win Forever: Live, Work and Play Like a Champion. Originally published in 2011 after a successful tenure as a football coach at University of Southern California  (before the NCAA issued heavy sanctions against USC) Carroll extols the virtues of a winning attitude (read: good timing). I am not surprised that this once mighty book had found itself in a lowly state. Even the average football fan knows that later, as head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Carroll lost to New England when he blundered in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX. More recently Carroll was  fined by the NFL while the Seahawks lost a draft pick when the league  discovered that Carroll had held illegal off-season workouts.

But then again how  many "great football books" are there-- really?  They all could fit in a well-organized neighborhood book library. Here's a stab at a list though I have not read any of them:

•  Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay: The Diary of a Green Bay Packer (1968). Noted sportswriter Dick Schaap co-wrote an account of Kramer's season under legendary coach Vince Lombardi.
• Art Donovan's Fatso: Football When Men Were Men (1987). The ex-Baltimore Colt Hall of Famer, who played in the Johnny Unitas era,   was a frequent guest on David Letterman's talk show.
• Peter Gent's  North Dallas Forty (1974). This book is more known for the movie adaption starring Nick Nolte.  Long before there was any discussion about the effects of  concussions, the movie revealed how football players used marijuana and painkillers just to endure the weekly suffering  between games -- sanctioned by the team owners and winning coaches of course.

 P.S. This is in contrast to all the great books about baseball -- just mentioned on this blog alone. It is no coincidence that I am posting this on the last day of the regular baseball season.