James Bailey's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-dixie-association"
Mining ebay for missed baseball gems
Baseball is often hailed as the most literary of American sports, perhaps because it has such a long history of romancing dreamers, dating back into the 1840s, and even earlier if you allow for ancestral versions of the game.
The market is flooded every spring with dozens upon dozens of baseball books. I read as many as I can get to, but my preference is always in the world of baseball fiction, which is probably why I enjoy writing baseball fiction as well. Of course, baseball fiction is a tough genre to score in. There are typically only a small handful of baseball novels released by major publishers each year. Thanks to the explosion of opportunities in self-publishing and ebooks, there are a lot more titles coming out each year, but it goes without saying that they vary widely in quality.
I start a lot more baseball novels than I finish. I take frequent chances on authors I've never heard of, especially if the Kindle version is only a few bucks. But dropping $2.99 and dropping 8-10 hours of my time are two different things. If a book doesn't work for me, I'll abandon it and move on. Though I write a lot of reviews, I'll usually skip it in the case of an unsatisfying read from an indie press (or self-pubbed, which is close enough to the same thing). There's no point in warning readers off a book they weren't going to read anyway.
I've given up on at least four baseball novels this year. It's probably more, but I've just put them out of mind already. Honestly, I want to find something good. I want to find that underrated, unknown book and champion it. Most people have never heard of Jeff Gillenkirk's Home, Away, but I loved it. George Jansen's The Fade Away is another that I've read a couple of times that will never cross the consciousness of most baseball readers. I talk them up at every opportunity. I would hope someone out there is doing the same for mine (The Greatest Show on Dirt). They say word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising for books, and I think that's true.
But I'm growing a little weary of digging under rocks, so it's time to go back in time instead. I've been on an absolute ebay rampage the past week, digging for baseball novels that have stood the test of a decade or more. Here's what I've ordered thus far:
The Celebrant: A Novel, Eric Rolfe Greenberg
The Dixie Association, Donald Hays
The Great American Novel, Philip Roth
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy: A Novel, W.P. Kinsella
Play for a Kingdom, Thomas Dyja
Season of the owl, Mile Wolff
The Veracruz Blues, Mark Winegardner
Most of those show up fairly regularly when people compile lists of great baseball novels. Season of the Owl is one that may not be as familiar, but Miles Wolff was my old boss with the Durham Bulls and at Baseball America (the "big" boss, as he owned both), and I should have read it long ago, so I was glad to find a copy available.
I got all of them for $5 or less, used. Shipping pushed a couple orders up toward $7-8, but hardly anything that would make me flinch. The Celebrant has already arrived. It will be first up, when I finish off the books I'm reading at the moment.
I've been thinking that it would be fun to have a proper book club to share thoughts while reading these, but I'm not optimistic that will happen. I've tried forming and joining online clubs in the past, but they tend to peter out as quickly as they start. So I'll undertake them as more of a solo endeavor and see which ones I feel like raving about when I'm done. Unless, of course, anyone wants to join me.
The market is flooded every spring with dozens upon dozens of baseball books. I read as many as I can get to, but my preference is always in the world of baseball fiction, which is probably why I enjoy writing baseball fiction as well. Of course, baseball fiction is a tough genre to score in. There are typically only a small handful of baseball novels released by major publishers each year. Thanks to the explosion of opportunities in self-publishing and ebooks, there are a lot more titles coming out each year, but it goes without saying that they vary widely in quality.
I start a lot more baseball novels than I finish. I take frequent chances on authors I've never heard of, especially if the Kindle version is only a few bucks. But dropping $2.99 and dropping 8-10 hours of my time are two different things. If a book doesn't work for me, I'll abandon it and move on. Though I write a lot of reviews, I'll usually skip it in the case of an unsatisfying read from an indie press (or self-pubbed, which is close enough to the same thing). There's no point in warning readers off a book they weren't going to read anyway.
I've given up on at least four baseball novels this year. It's probably more, but I've just put them out of mind already. Honestly, I want to find something good. I want to find that underrated, unknown book and champion it. Most people have never heard of Jeff Gillenkirk's Home, Away, but I loved it. George Jansen's The Fade Away is another that I've read a couple of times that will never cross the consciousness of most baseball readers. I talk them up at every opportunity. I would hope someone out there is doing the same for mine (The Greatest Show on Dirt). They say word of mouth is the most effective form of advertising for books, and I think that's true.
But I'm growing a little weary of digging under rocks, so it's time to go back in time instead. I've been on an absolute ebay rampage the past week, digging for baseball novels that have stood the test of a decade or more. Here's what I've ordered thus far:
The Celebrant: A Novel, Eric Rolfe Greenberg
The Dixie Association, Donald Hays
The Great American Novel, Philip Roth
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy: A Novel, W.P. Kinsella
Play for a Kingdom, Thomas Dyja
Season of the owl, Mile Wolff
The Veracruz Blues, Mark Winegardner
Most of those show up fairly regularly when people compile lists of great baseball novels. Season of the Owl is one that may not be as familiar, but Miles Wolff was my old boss with the Durham Bulls and at Baseball America (the "big" boss, as he owned both), and I should have read it long ago, so I was glad to find a copy available.
I got all of them for $5 or less, used. Shipping pushed a couple orders up toward $7-8, but hardly anything that would make me flinch. The Celebrant has already arrived. It will be first up, when I finish off the books I'm reading at the moment.
I've been thinking that it would be fun to have a proper book club to share thoughts while reading these, but I'm not optimistic that will happen. I've tried forming and joining online clubs in the past, but they tend to peter out as quickly as they start. So I'll undertake them as more of a solo endeavor and see which ones I feel like raving about when I'm done. Unless, of course, anyone wants to join me.
