The Blind Side: the evolution of a game – Michael Lewis

I’m a big fan of Linda Holmes, who currently writes the pop culture blog Monkey See at NPR.  She generally says what I’m thinking albeit more eloquently and with a lot more wit.  I tend to agree with her television reviews, movie reviews, celebrity opinions and book reviews.  So of course when she recommends a book and shouts from the roof-tops that it’s a must read, I run right out and get the book 99% sure I’m going to enjoy it.

A year or so ago she was recommending The Blind Side by Michael Lewis but I couldn’t find it in the bookshops in London.  I put it on my list.  Last month, bombarded by Sandra Bullock ads, I bought it.  No problems finding it at the Barnes & Noble thanks to the movie.  Linda Holmes was right.  Hands down this book is the most engrossing book I have read in a long time.

Michael Lewis weaves a tale of how a paradigm shift in game of football (protecting the quarterback’s blind side from the Lawrence Taylors of the game) leads to the story of Michael Oher.  If you’ve seen the movie trailers you might think the book is about Sandra Bullock saving the homeless kid.  The book, I assure you, is not about that.

Told from multiple angles and with abundant research, Lewis begins at the beginning – the single play of Taylor breaking Thiemann’s leg- that led to the shift in the NFL to how specimen’s like Oher are drafted in the first round of the NFL draft.  In one book, he seamlessly weaves two stories, that of the NFL and that of the Oher.

This book is also thought-provoking.  In the afterward, the author talks about how the book has been called Christian and anti-Christian (because of the word evolution in the title), a story about the human spirit or paternalistic; only after reading it can you look at it from the context of your worldview.  However, the story is the story.  It did happen.  The change in football happened, the Touhey’s did take in Micheal Oher, and Michael Oher did become a first round draft pick in 2009.  How it all happened is chronicled in the book, however, Lewis leaves it up to you to interpret what that means.

Read the book. Put it back on your shelf.  Re-read it.  You will not be disappointed.  Even if you don’t know the first thing about the NFL or couldn’t care less about it, you will still thoroughly enjoy the book.

A note on the movie: It is fantastic.  It has all of the criteria that make a movie entertaining.  It pushes your buttons – it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, etc.  As long as you remember that it is a movie and made for your entertainment, you will enjoy it.  However, it is quite a different experience from reading the book.  Read the book. See the movie.  Both are enjoyable in remarkably different ways.

In the President’s Secret Service – Ronald Kessler

I have wanted to read this book ever since I saw the author on The Daily Show.  Jon Stewart has a knack for having authors who write about interesting topics. So I added this to my list. After once again downsizing my life and donating most of my books, I was itching for something to read or even re-read.  However, as much as I love giving away my savings to Barnes & Noble, I rediscovered libraries!  I forgot about how amazing libraries are. I can go in, find a book (or in my case an arm load of books) and borrow them for as long as month.   How could I have forgotten about the library?

After consulting my running list of the books I wanted to read, this was my first check-out.  As excited as I was about this book, I was starting to feel the disappointment from the first page and by page 93, I stopped reading.

This has the potential to be a great book.  The subject matter is so engrossing.  For anyone with an ounce of curiosity gaining inside access to The Secret Service is hard to resist, not to mention timely with the events of this past weekend.  The Secret Service is an entity that has been romanticized on television, in film (think Katie Holms and Julia Stiles) and in fiction.  However, as their name suggests, we really don’t have a clue as to what they are all about save that they protect the President.

However, that is not the angle this book takes.  This is more a tabloid like expose into the past and current Presidents’ and their families and offers up gossip-like anecdotes of their behaviours.  And for a prolific author and award winning journalist, Kessler’s writing style is basic and similar to an US Weekly beat reporter.  Perhaps Kessler wanted to write a serious book but was told to write an expose and became uncomfortable writing his own book.

Here’s a sample paragraph to offer up the style and content of this book:

“Like Nancy, the Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis was difficult.  When agents were with her in New York, she would attempt to ditch them by jumping out of the official vehicle while it was stopped in traffic.  She viewed her detail as a nuisance.”

If you want to know about the crudeness of LBJ or the comings and goings-on in the Kennedy White House then pick up this book.  You’ll learn that Nancy Reagan’s code name was Rainbow, Ronald Reagan’s was Rawhide and Gerald Ford’s was Passkey. I didn’t make it past the Reagan Presidency.

Good thing this was a library book and I can return it!

Who is your second favourite author?

When someone asks me who my favourite author is, I say Jane Austen – bar none.  The woman was a genius because of her ability to provide commentary of her society and her ability to create brilliantly layered characters.  Beyond that, however, she was an incredible story teller.  It’s usually a fairly easy question for me to answer.

A few days ago, while at a party with very intelligent PhD candidates, someone asked me the question and I answered, Jane Austen.  “Yeah, sure, that’s everyone’s favourite author,” he waved my answer away, “how about your second favourite author then?”

I was stumped.  Who was my second favourite author?  Is it because I read a lot of non-fiction, which for me is more about the subject than the writer?  The questions kept nagging at me over the weekend as I scanned my meagre bookshelf (courtesy of downsizing my life a year ago).

As I perused the less than forty books facing me, I saw one name keep jumping out at me.  Susan Elizabeth Phillips.  She’s not literary and her books will never be required reading in any English Lit course and she hasn’t won any Pulitzer or Booker or Orange prizes.  What she has done is write wonderful, light, funny, character-driven stories.  Reading her books is like watching The Philadelphia Story or Roman Holiday or Pillow Talk.  Her characters are sharp, ridiculously witty and generically flawed.  She is a whiz with dialogue, so much so that I wish she could write some of my scenes.  Most importantly, she has the one skill that the best authors need to have – she tells a great story.

While Jane Austen, in my opinion, has no peers, Susan Elizabeth Phillips could possibly be my second favourite author. 

My Top 5 SEP Favourites:

5. Ain’t She Sweet

4. It Had to be You

3. This Heart of Mine

2. What I Did For Love

1. Match Me If You Can

Who is your second favourite author?

Can you re-read a book for the first time?

Reading a writing blog the other day, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, I came across an interesting question to ponder.  What book would you want to read again, for the first time?  

Imagine your favourite book, before it was your favourite book, and to be able to read it again for the first time.  For me, the answer was easy, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  I’ve read and re-read this book so many times, I think I have it memorized.  However, it would be incredible to read it again for the first time.

The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I wasn’t evolved enough to appreciate it.  I was a sophomore in high school and Mr. Emma had assigned it as part of English Literature.  The other required reading for that class was Romeo and Juliet, selected works of Emily Dickenson and a few other books that I never enjoyed.  Pride and Prejudice fell victim to other teenage distractions like friends, field hockey, theatre and boys. 

Many, many years later, I was in Houston for a family vacation to visit other family.  Needless to say, Houston, was not a hot bed of activity, so I had plenty of time on my hands to read a few books.  I picked up Pride and Prejudice and Emma and by the end of the five day family holiday, I was hooked.  I had remembered Pride and Prejudice from English Lit and had a vague recollection of Mr. Darcy and Lizzy Bennett, but I hadn’t really remembered the story so it was kind of like reading it for the first time.  Since then I pick it up whenever I need to escape.  If I am having a lazy Sunday curled up on the couch, I pop in the six-hour BBC DVD with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.  If I’m driving Boston to New York or from Spokane to Butte, I pop in the audio book.  Pride and Prejudice has become my security blanket and my go to when I don’t feel like reading anything else.

It’s not possible to go back and re-read a book for the first time, unless of course you can’t remember anything about it.  However, it is possible to appreciate a book that you perhaps didn’t appreciate the first time around.  Maybe, I’ll go back and re-read Romeo and Juliet, Emily Dickenson, Treasure Island, or even The Lord of the Flies.