(Faithful)
I love horror. Even stories that I don’t necessarily love tend to interest me on a concept level.
You know what I don’t love? Sports.
Do you know what sport I particularly don’t love? Baseball (well, and also football, but that’s not relevant here.)
If Stephen King and a friend had teamed up to write a book about basketball, for example, I probably still wouldn’t read it except for a project like this one — but if I did pick it up, there would be at least a chance of it catching my interest. Probably a small chance, but, something.
There’s next to no chance that a book about a season of baseball written by anyone — a favorite author, a Great American Author, an objectively “best” author (if such a creature existed), or hell, my best friend — would do much of anything to catch my interest. My instinct is to apologize for that, but why should I? I’m allowed to have interests. And disinterests. My complete boredom with the entire subject of baseball shouldn’t negate anyone else’s enjoyment of it. I don’t have a problem with anyone else’s enjoyment of it — I just can’t get there myself.
So, this book? Yeah, I didn’t care for it. I freely admit that I skimmed large chunks of it just to get through it. I couldn’t get interested. I will probably never revisit it with any interest — I mean, never say never, but this is a subject I just don’t have any interest in. And I’m a person who has at least some interest in a lot of subjects, but I don’t see this ever becoming an interest no matter who writes about it.
I will give both Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan credit for being engaging writers, at the least. There are some passages and some exchanges between them that are fun to read just because they are who they are and they write how they write. The writing isn’t irredeemable — it’s not even bad. It’s the subject that’s irredeemable, at least for me.
If you care about the Red Sox, even slightly, you’ll probably enjoy this book. If you care about baseball, even slightly, you’ll probably enjoy this book. And if supporting and rooting for a team is something that factors into your life in an important way — even if it’s not this team or this sport — there’s a very good chance that something in here will speak to your experiences as a sports fan. It just doesn’t do it for me. Frankly, I was just glad to push through it and move onto The Colorado Kid.
I wish I had more to say about this book, but I don’t. It’s a non-fiction book about a subject that I have negative interest in. It doesn’t interest me. That doesn’t mean it’s poorly written or uninteresting objectively, it’s just definitely not for me. It might be for you, though, if you have enough interest for it to catch your interest. I believe that the point of the book was to write for the true fan, not persuade non-fans to become fans. So it didn’t even fail by not catching my interest — it’s quite literally just not for me.
Uniquely Portable Magic 