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.<\/p>\n
Paul Shirley’s Can I Keep My Jersey?<\/cite><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, and the last section of the book seems to be largely taken from an earlier blog for the Suns<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… Continue reading Paul Shirley, Can I Keep My Jersey? [Library of Babel]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}