Reader’s Diary

Glen Guzzo

“Strat-O-Matic” is a cardboard baseball game based on real world stats.  For its most avid players, its more than a just a game.

Even though I’m not a baseball fan I really enjoyed this book about the invention and life of the game and its players.   It’s the story of game inventor Hal Richman and how the game helped him escape the malign influence of a domineering father.   There’s some great stuff here about game players and ball players’  players relationships to the game, but it’s mostly the story of Richman.

Guzzo’s packed the book with more human interest here than I expected; it’s a great story that will appeal to baseball fans, gamers, and game designers

(One thing that struck me in the book: Richman’s stats and scouting-based analysis, which he used to create tables that allow simulated seasons that are accurate in the aggregate (i.e., statistically) preceeded Bill James’ stats and Sabremetrics.)

Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy found out the hard way that working in the music industry was more a corporate job than a creative one.  His coming of age story for thirty somethings captures feeling of not fitting in at corporate job because you  just don’t understand corporate culture.  This is a funny book that will resonate with office workers.

Ben Ryder Howe

While working for George Plimpton’s “Paris Review”, Ben Howe was living with his Korean wife’s family and trying to run a New York City convenience store with his fearsome, insanely hard-working immigrant mother-in-law.  His story is a warm, amusing memoir, a meditation on the immigrant experience,  a portrait of Plimpton’s last days, and a classic fish-out-of-water story.

Honoré de Balzac

Set – and written – in the early 19th Century, this is a long, detailed novel that tells the story of a naive poet from a rural city and his rise and fall in Paris.  Lucien Chardon has talent, though not as much as he thinks he has, and lacks the social smarts to distinguish real friends from those who mock his pretensions.  It’s the tragic tale of an ambitious young man with promise who betrays his talents by devoting his energies to finding shortcuts to success.  It could be titled “Wasted Potential”.

I read this book on my iPod and it took forever, but it was very satisfying to sink into such a richly drawn world populated by dozens of interesting characters.

John le Carré

In le Carré’s latest a vacationing British couple gets involved with a Russian oligarch/gangster who wants to sell his knowledge to the British in exchange for protection from his enemies.  There’s no action but the characters are finely drawn, the writing is first rate, and every element is 100% believable. Nobody does it like le Carré.

E. Duke Vincent

The Mafia, Castro, Cuban Exiles, Kennedy, the Grassy Knoll, a mobster with a brother in the FBI – you get the idea.  This novel has a great plot, but it’s marred by a wooden and repetitious writing style.  For example: three different rooms, each with “an art deco coffee table” in the space of fifty pages.  Are there no editors?