Idiots
I looked forward to reading Bill Simmons' first book, Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox. His columns for ESPN.com's Page 2 are consistently its best material, especially since the death of Ralph Wiley (though Scoop Jackson has tried to fill the void left by Wiley to a certain extent). His column is written from the perspective of a regular fan from Boston, and I'm not sure anyone else could pull that shtick off. Certainly not as well. Simmons writes well and is funny, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of the drivel that passes for sports journalism.
So, needless to say, I was eager to see what he had to say in his first book, a look back on the events that defined him as a tortured fan of the Boston Red Sox and led to their World Series title in 2004.
Of course, before I got a copy, I wish I had done some investigating and discovered that the book is just a compendium of columns from the past seven years or so, with little new material. There are some brief introductions to each section, and an endless stream of witty or illuminating footnotes, plus he includes the bits censored from the original. So, if you really like profanity, I guess that's new.
I find myself fundamentally conflicted about my assessment of the book. The writing is good. And Simmons chose columns he thought withstood the test of time, which is generally true, even if some of the cultural references are dated, as Simmons delights in noting with several footnotes. Not to mention, the columns date back well before Simmons' ESPN days, when he was writing for his Boston Sports Guy web site, so there's a lot of material that's new to me, and to most of his readers.
But on the other hand, I can't escape the feeling of being cheated. Probably a lot of this is just my own failure to have learned going in that I was getting a book of old columns. It's just difficult to get past that. Maybe I'd feel differently if I found this in a bargain bin for four bucks in a year or two. Then it might seem like a surprising gem. But I don't know that it merits the hype surrounding it. (Then again, I should always know better than to get sucked in by the ESPN publicity machine.) It just seems like if one of your favorite bands hadn't released anything in a couple of years, then you found out there was a new album and ordered an advance copy, only to have it show up and discover that it's just a greatest hits album, with maybe one new track. You'd feel shorted, too.
So maybe other people will have different experiences, especially if they know in advance what they're getting. The writing is still good, and there were plenty of moments where I laughed out loud. I just hope the next book from Bill Simmons is actually a book.
So, needless to say, I was eager to see what he had to say in his first book, a look back on the events that defined him as a tortured fan of the Boston Red Sox and led to their World Series title in 2004.
Of course, before I got a copy, I wish I had done some investigating and discovered that the book is just a compendium of columns from the past seven years or so, with little new material. There are some brief introductions to each section, and an endless stream of witty or illuminating footnotes, plus he includes the bits censored from the original. So, if you really like profanity, I guess that's new.
I find myself fundamentally conflicted about my assessment of the book. The writing is good. And Simmons chose columns he thought withstood the test of time, which is generally true, even if some of the cultural references are dated, as Simmons delights in noting with several footnotes. Not to mention, the columns date back well before Simmons' ESPN days, when he was writing for his Boston Sports Guy web site, so there's a lot of material that's new to me, and to most of his readers.
But on the other hand, I can't escape the feeling of being cheated. Probably a lot of this is just my own failure to have learned going in that I was getting a book of old columns. It's just difficult to get past that. Maybe I'd feel differently if I found this in a bargain bin for four bucks in a year or two. Then it might seem like a surprising gem. But I don't know that it merits the hype surrounding it. (Then again, I should always know better than to get sucked in by the ESPN publicity machine.) It just seems like if one of your favorite bands hadn't released anything in a couple of years, then you found out there was a new album and ordered an advance copy, only to have it show up and discover that it's just a greatest hits album, with maybe one new track. You'd feel shorted, too.
So maybe other people will have different experiences, especially if they know in advance what they're getting. The writing is still good, and there were plenty of moments where I laughed out loud. I just hope the next book from Bill Simmons is actually a book.
posted by Alexander Dubcek | 18:34
1 Comments:
This isn't really an uncommon practice for columnists, sweetie. There isn't really another way to collect those classic old columns and be able to reread them short of spending hours with the microfilm machine or Lexis-Nexis. A famous example of a column compendium book would be Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City," upon which the show was based. Sometimes putting all those columns in book form introduces your work to a much wider audience.
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