I finished Portobello this week and to my surprise, everything turned out satisfactorily for the people who met on Portobello street in London. Well, not all the people. A couple of them were killed (one innocent, one guilty), but their killer went to prison, so at least that part turned out well, for the reader, anyway. The rest did manage to redeem themselves in the end, to the extent that they were no longer unattractive, just humanly flawed. So I did enjoy the book and recommend it highly.
From Portobello I turned to non-fiction once more, choosing a volume of short pieces on sports, collected under the title The Best American Sports Writing, 2010. This is an edition in the series, The Best American Sports Writing, which comes out yearly and prints the best stories (fiction and non-fiction) that have sports as their main subject and were published the year before in magazines and newspapers of the U.S. or Canada. Each year a large selection is narrowed down by the series editor, and then around 25 of those are chosen for that year's volume by a guest editor, who is always a sports writer of some repute.
That means that the stories in the volume I'm reading came out in 2009 and cover a wide range of sports, from boxing to baseball, from cycling to football. I've read six of the 26 so far, and they've all been well written. And I've learned a lot that I didn't know: Jose Canseco is really a dirtbag; an obscure Central Washington softball player is revered for having helped an opponent who seriously injured her knee complete a homerun she would have otherwise lost (see the video here); Muhammad Ali was in 50 fights and some of those men he fought are still around to tell the tale; football players at all levels take many more serious hits to the head than most people realize; the man who was the first American to race in the Tour de France was convicted of child molesting; Greg LeMond is really a nice guy.
What's interesting about these Best American . . . series is the particular angle the guest editor brings to them. Each year there's a different collection with a different perspective. I haven't read enough of the sports series or this particular collection to say yet what the perspective is for 2010. But maybe when I'm done I will.
What's nice about the stories is that they're all fairly up-to-date and beautifully written. You can't go wrong with that. The only criticism I have of the collection is that there's no way to tell whether a story is fiction or non-fiction. They could at least say "short story" in the table of contents or something, but they don't.
Other Best American series are: Comics, Essays, Mystery Stories, Nonrequired Reading, Science and Nature Writing, Short Stories, and Travel Writing. I have one of the Science and Nature series, one of the Essays series, and many of the Short Stories series. I must say that so far I'm enjoying the Sports series much more than I did the Short Stories. That may be because good sports writing is evaluated differently than short story writing. By that I mean that a certain style seems to be prized in short stories (when evaluated by short story writers) that is not my favorite--a kind of cool, cynical style that can be at times depressing. The style of writing in sports stories is more journalistic and seems mostly celebratory--of the people and the excellence they strive for--and therefore upbeat.
But I have a ways to go with this book--twenty more stories, to be exact. I'll let you know how I feel about them as I read.
See you next time!
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