1. Football’s Eagle and Stack Defenses, by Ron Vanderlinden, currently Penn State’s linebackers coach. This is a solid book on one particular defense, though much of it has general applicability. Fortunately you can read most of it online via Google Books, here.
2. Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. Sad, funny, wistful (I enjoy the fake-word “wisty” as a descriptor). I’m only about halfway through but it’s written beautifully and thus is recommended. Not for everyone, I suppose, but I enjoy it.
3. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves, by Andrew Ross Sorkin. This book has no real policy analysis, no economics, and no politics, and these are strengths; it is a blow-by-blow of the End Of Days Scenario that was our recent financial crisis. I wasn’t going to pick this up (it’s not a short book), but I read some of the excerpts online and found them gripping. Indeed, someone mentioned that they imagined Sorkin writing this in one long manic Kerouacian frenzy, and it does read like that. Again, this is a compliment.
4. The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, by Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy). Someone picked this up for me. This is another of those too-long books that I nevertheless am tempted to hunker down and read. In particular, I am intrigued by this review of the book by economist/polymath Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution:
Could this be the best 736 pp. book on the diversity of human talent ever written? It starts slow but eventually picks up steam. It’s also devastatingly funny. That said, if you don’t know a lot about the NBA, it is incomprehensible. (I could not, for instance, understand the section of Dolph Schayes because that was not the NBA I know.) In the historical pantheon, he picks David Thompson, Bernard King, and Allen Iverson as underrated. The 1986 Boston Celtics are the best team ever, he argues. And so on. I found this more riveting than almost anything else I read and yes I think it is very much a work of social science, albeit in hermetic form.