This is basically a book about English professors getting laid. If you're into that sort of thing, well, then this is the book for you. Granted, if I were an English professor, like David Lodge, that's just the sort of thing I would want to write about too. Note to self: Add more sex to novel about college administrators.

Okay, I'm being a little too flippant about a book that I actually did enjoy. Lodge always sucks me in. This is the second novel in the Rummidge trilogy, and I've now accidentally read all three. I like Lodge, so I just keep picking up his novels, and gradually I've read a trilogy without knowing it. I started with the third book, then read the first book, thinking that the characters all seemed rather familiar, and now I've read the second book. I don't think there are any more in the series, but who knows?

The book also seems rather Dickensian in that it's full of coincidences. Pretty much everyone is running into everyone all over the world. I can go several days without running into my roommate, and yet these characters are constantly running into each other in Switzerland, Turkey, Amsterdam, Hawaii, and all sorts of other exotic locales. Just as with Dickens, there seem to be about 50 people in the entire world, and they are always bumping into each other.

Not so much like Dickens: they're screwing each other lots too.

Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball

I was skeptical of this book at first. I'm not a fan of syrupy books about baseball, nor about fatherhood. I don't think Leitch is either, and it's not what he did here, despite the title making it sound like that and despite its release near Father's Day. This is mostly a memoir of a baseball fan with an entertaining father who is also a baseball fan.

Some of it feels familiar, if only because I've read so much of Leitch's writing. He's mentioned some of the same stories in "Life as a Loser" and on his many autobiographical posts on Deadspin. That's okay. For someone who writes as much as Leitch, it's only natural that he repeats some stories. They're good stories too, so it's not like he's retelling anything dull.

This is basically the second book in a row I've read about one baseball game. The last one was about one of the greatest games ever and turned out to be a sort of a lackluster book. This is about a rather lackluster game that turned out to be sort of a great book. It took some time to grow on me though. As much of a fan as I am of him, I wasn't sure what I thought in the early innings.

I kept looking for some grand, overarching theme. I don't know that there really was one. In interviews, he says that the book is about his belief that this is the golden age of baseball, and how baseball is the way he communicates with his father. There's more than that here though. It's really just a meandering baseball memoir of a fan, and that's great.

It also feels like the type of book only an established writer can write. If I were to go to a publisher and ask, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about my observations as a fan," they would laugh at me. Luckily, they didn't laugh at him. In fact, you can tell how much the publishers like Leitch in that they let him keep in one chapter which was essentially a list of all the interesting baseball games he has ever attended. I want a publisher to like me that much.  

Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime

Things I learned while reading this book:

Someone named Squeaky tried to assassinate Gerald Ford.

The first game of the 1903 World Series was probably fixed.

Eddie Futch, Joe Frazier's trainer, wouldn't allow Frazier to start the 15th round against Muhammad Ali in the "Thrilla in Manilla."

You'll notice that none of these are about Game Six of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds, which is what this book is presumably about. This is a book of tangents. For example, Gerald Ford's son was at the game, which somehow led not only to a discussion of the two assassination attempts on Ford but also to a page and a half about Patty Hearst. It became maddening at times.

I love the whole notion of a book based on one game. Daniel Okrent wrote a wonderful one called Nine Innings, and the next book on my baseball docket is Will Leitch's latest, which is set during one Cardinals-Cubs game. Still, I can't help but feel that Frost is padding this book. I mean, this book is about what some would call the greatest baseball game ever. I don't need to be reading about Spiro Agnew, "stagflation," and the Boston Red Stockings of 1882.

Having said all that, it wasn't an awful book, just frustrating. It was basically a not-so-great book about a great game, so in the end I still enjoyed reading it.

Incidentally, my parents were at this game. Unlike so many others, they really were. My father had season tickets, in the roof boxes above the third base line. However, because the Red Sox needed extra seats for the press, they made him move down below on the third base side, about twenty rows behind the visiting team's dugout. He was pretty happy about this, because in exchange they gave him three times as many tickets.

As the game was winding down, with the Reds winning 6-3, the owners of the Reds left their seats, presumably to get ready for the celebration in the locker room. One of the ushers who usually worked in the roof box seats was nearby. He recognized my parents and asked if they wanted to sit in those seats for the end of the game. ("I never really tipped him during the season, but I guess the people I sent down to use my seats tipped him really well, and he knew that.")

And so, they were in great seats to see Bernie Carbo's three-run homer, Dwight Evans' famous catch, and Carlton Fisk's game-winning home run. For my father, Dwight Evans' catch in right field, the one that stole a home run from Joe Morgan in the 10th inning, was the biggest moment. From his vantage point on the third base line, it seemed utterly impossible that Evans could catch that ball, and yet he did.

Oh, my father also enjoyed the part about the 1882 Boston Red Stockings.

I got this book through Swaptree, and the person who sent it to me included a sticky note that read, "Enjoy, or read it and weep." This is not exactly a happy book. I will read Michael Lewis about anything, but I think I prefer his sports books, rather than his books about the horrible collapse of the financial world. That might just be me though.

Many of his recent books have been about market inefficiencies. Moneyball was about how Billy Beane of the Oakland A's discovered that other teams were ignoring players with high on base percentages and decided to invest his dwindling resources on them. The Blind Side was about how, when free agency started in the NFL, teams suddenly started paying more for left tackles -- until they became the second highest paid players in the game -- all because they protected the quarterback's blind side. Or at least it was about that until almost accidentally the book became about a plucky Academy Award winning Mom who adopts a kid from the wrong side of town.

Here though, Lewis is writing about an entire market that is inefficient, and the few people who were smart enough to notice this and short it.

Still, he does find an interesting group of people who predicted the collapse of the housing bubble and were wise enough to short the market and make millions. It was a group that included a money manager incapable of censoring his thoughts and a one-eyed investor with Asperger's Syndrome.  I'm sure there are other people who shorted the market too, but Lewis probably found the only ones who weren't boring.

I love Michael Lewis, but I was kind of happy when I finished the book. And frankly -- despite the fact that the writing was great, the stories were entertaining, and the characters were amazing -- the ending kind of sucked. It's not really Lewis' fault. That's just what you get when you write about the collapse of the worldwide financial markets.