AudiobooksNow Blog

Sports books have been this week’ s theme. We began with a look at why sports books have a potency beyond mere athleticism with The Sports Illustrated list of 100 best sports books and we recommended the audiobook version of “The Boys of Summer”, available at AudioBooksNow.

We looked at ways of learning or improving your own game, whether it’s golf, tennis or Bocce.

Most popular sports books are biographies and memoirs, so we came up with recommendations for the very best.

Goodreads gave us lists of favorite sports fiction voted on by members and books on women in sports. Joe Layden’s “Women in Sports: The Complete Book on the World’s Greatest Female Athletes” came out as a clear recommendation.

Lastly we looked at sport in a wider context, and came up with something quite unusual – Final Whistle, Stephen Cooper’s elegy to members of a London rugby club who volunteered to serve in the First World War, and did not return.

And don’t forget to check out our collections of sports audiobooks, including special sections on baseball and golf!

This is what academic types like to call “Sport and Society”. It’s that part where the activities of athletes connects with real life, and makes their skills more than just “Good at running around with a ball.”

My recommendation here is a little out of the mainstream. The Final Whistle is a book about rugby, which is certainly not an everyday sport in North America. But, really, it’s not. It’s about fifteen players from the Roslyn Park club in London, who served and died in the First World War. Nominated for the Times Sports Book of the Year.

“This is the story of fifteen men killed in the Great War. All played rugby for one London club; none lived to hear the final whistle. Rugby brought them together; rugby led the rush to war. —- together their stories paint a portrait in miniature of the entire war. An old press cutting gave numbers – 350 served, 72 died – but no names. So began a quest to rediscover these men and capture their lives, from their vanished Edwardian youth and vigour, to the war they fought and how they died.’

‘Haunting and beautiful . . . this tells the story of men from one rugby club but it is a universal narrative of heroism and loss. He writes superbly and has produced a book of commendable scholarship. I cannot recommend it enough.’ Fergal Keane”

The growth of women’s sports hasn’t – yet – been matched by a real growth in the number of sports books by, about and for women.

Here’s Joe Layden’s “Women in Sports: The Complete Book on the World’s Greatest Female Athletes”. And once again we go to Goodreads for a list of  ‘Women in sports’ books.

I’ll quote from one piece from one book, “Nike is a Goddess.”

“…from Gertrude Ederle’s historic swim across the English Channel to Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, Nike Is a Goddess tells the inspiring stories of women opening up an arena that had been closed to them. Nike Is a Goddess pays tribute to the athletes who led the way and serves as inspiration to those who will come after.”

Some of the best sports writing is fiction, in novels or short stories. A hundred years ago the Chicago columnist Ring Lardner was lionized as not merely the best sportswriter, but one of the very best writers of his time. P.G Wodehouse – possibly the funniest man ever to bang away on a typewriter – wrote short stories about golf that a non-golfer like myself can enjoy.

The Goodreads site, a gathering of regular folks who like to read, has a list of favorite sports fiction voted on by members. It’s a real mix, from John Grisham’s novel about a football failure to a Middle-Grade book about a young Latina girl who is picked as a goalkeeper. There should be something for everyone there!

Part of being a rich and famous athlete or coach is that you get to write your autobiography. It’s understood that a professional writer may be involved in helping the celebrity put the thing into book form.

But being good at what you do doesn’t mean you have a great story to tell. And sometimes your story is best left in the hands of someone else. Here’s a list of nine sports biographies that make the cut.

This covers a mix of American sports, with more on baseball than any other. But we have ‘Seabiscuit’ and a biography of Muhammad Ali, the autobiography of Arthur Ashe and more.

What are you, a couch potato? Let’s start the week by seeking out some audiobooks about actually playing a sport. Of course, merely listening to the book doesn’t actually work any muscle groups or teach you valuable skills, but it puts you in the mood to play a sport.

Let’s assume that you aren’t looking for a book to learn a team sport. Most of us learn those at an early age, from coaches, parents and other kids. If you think that the best starting place is a book, you’re probably already an adult.

Want to play golf? Here’s what people who already play – or, at least, are PGA Facebook fans – recommend: the nine best golf books ever. And check out our golf collection too.

How about tennis? (I’ve avoided Venus and Serena Williams’ ‘How to Play Tennis’ in the grounds that you’ll just have sand kicked in your self esteem)

And something less active? The Joy of Bocce. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of Bocce. You’ll know it when you see it!

In the early 1900s editor Maxwell Perkins told anyone who would listen that Chicago sports columnist Ring Lardner was the most talented writer he knew – high praise, given that Perkins’s stable included Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Sports writing can reach a very high level indeed.

The Sports Illustrated list of 100 best sports books shows this. In recommending Roger Kahn’s 1971 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer”, the reviewer explains why this book isn’t just about men in funny clothes running around a field:

“A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-’50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise’s 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it.”

The audiobook version of “The Boys of Summer” is available here at Audiobooks Now – listen for yourself and see why it’s so highly praised!

Likewise, Ken Dryden’s ‘The Game’ isn’t just about ice hockey. It’s “a well-crafted account of his career combined with a meditation on hockey’s special place in Canadian culture.”  Anyone who has spent time in Canada knows that hockey isn’t just a sport.

All this week we’ll be looking at sports books – factual and fiction, men and women, those who want to play and those who are happy just to watch.