Wimbledon players can be faulted for their reading habits

The upper echelons of the sport's elite display little taste for high culture

Wimbledon begins this week, and the prospect of a champion who champions reading seems as remote as ever. Martin Amis, Geoff Dyer, Sebastian Faulks, David Foster Wallace, Sophie Kinsella (as Madeleine Wickham), John le Carré and Lionel Shriver are among the novelists who've written about tennis, but their efforts have evidently made no impression on the sport's elite, who tend to cite YA fantasy fiction, Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho when asked to name a favourite book. On a video on YouTube in which top men's players dutifully pick a title apiece, Andy Murray, last year's winner, simply says: "I don't read, I haven't read a book since the second Harry Potter." His apparent phobia is shared by Stan Wawrinka ("I don't like to read books"), the world No 4; and unexpectedly by the ostensibly cultured No 3, Roger Federer written about by Le Carré and Foster Wallace, and the subject of a just-published book, Federer and Me, by Will Skidelsky, the Observer's former literary editor who says his print consumption is confined to "magazines and newspapers".

Slightly less dispiriting are the reading habits of the top two, as world No 1 Rafael Nadal has mentioned Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in interviews, and No 2 Novak Djokovic paid patriotic tribute to Ivo Andric (the Serbian, Nobel-prizewinning author of The Bridge Over the Drina) on Facebook on the 120th anniversary of his birth in 2012 although he also nodded elsewhere to The Hunger Games, which suggested something simpler is more likely to be his browse of choice.

Continue reading...