It’s been ages since I did a booklog post here. I’ve been reading lots of stuff, I just haven’t been blogging it. I really should do something about the books in the stack by my computer, though, so I’m going to try to write a short post about each, and then shelve them before they topple over onto the keyboard and break something.
Paul Shirley’s Can I Keep My Jersey? gets to be first, because it’s from the library. I picked it up as seasonally-appropriate reading material– it’s subtitled “11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond,” and is about, well, it’s pretty obvious what it’s about.
Shirley is a former Iowa State player who has spent the years since his graduation rattling around various professional basketball leagues, trying to make a living playing the game. He’s also, unlike many of his teammates, able to string words together into coherent sentences, so he’s carved out a niche for himself writing about the game from a player’s perspective. You can get a flavor of what it’s like from his blog for ESPN, and the last section of the book seems to be largely taken from an earlier blog for the Suns.
The book has a foreword by Chuck Klosterman (one of the things that drew me to it), and that pretty much tells you what to expect. He’s doing a sort of jock Klosterman thing, telling stories about his life with healthy doses of snark, pop-culture references, and self-deprecation. The stories are interesting, and generally engagingly told.
He’s not as talented a writer as Klosterman, though, and when he attempts to say anything Deep, it tends to fall flat (and one set of comments about race was actively cringeworthy). I enjoyed the basketball stuff enough to skip past most of that; people who are less interested in the game may not be quite so forgiving.