December Reading Log

 

2023's reading ended not with a bang, but with a whimper...that's what happens when you spend a full week of the month in the hospital, where's there's nothing to do yet you can't concentrate enough to read. So the year ends with a pretty short log, just 3 books. Take a look!

BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton

Right on schedule, I started desperately missing baseball roughly a month after the end of the World Series. To ease my suffering, I turned to one of the most influential books ever written about the sport, Jim Bouton's Ball Four.

First published in 1970, this memoir shook baseball's foundations, offering an unfiltered portrayal of life in the big leagues. With an unvarnished, matter-of-fact voice, pitcher Jim Bouton expounds upon everything from clubhouse culture to struggles with management to what ballplayers are up to off the field. In a time when Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were still seen as larger-than-life, iconic role models, Jim Bouton was a mythbuster, taking readers behind the curtain and showing what ballplayers were really thinking and doing when the cameras weren't rolling. His account was so revealing—and credible—that MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to discredit his own book, urging him to publicly declare its stories were entirely fictional (Bouton declined.)

I was already familiar with Ball Four's reputation and impact but, more than 50 years after its initial publication, found its contents relatively tame, albeit entertaining. The book is essentially a diary, chronicling everything from offseason contract negotiations to spring training to a demotion to the minor leagues and subsequent call-up back to the majors. In the spirit of the gonzo journalism that was all the rage at that time, the narrator is also the main character, exposing larger systems through the voice of an informed everyman—not a professional journalist, but an actual ballplayer willing to reveal the truth. As a result, Bouton writes with the authority of the an informed source but the accessibility of an ordinary person.

Most importantly, the book is funny. Bouton is a witty narrator with a natural gift for storytelling, so his revelations come off less like a sensationalist's tell-all and more like a buddy shooting the breeze at the bar. This book is a delight, one whose anecdotal nature makes it more suitable for reading 5 minutes at a time rather than in long stretches. Baseball fans everywhere need to take the time to pore through its 400+ pages—some books just need to be understood, but this is a book that demands to be read.

HIDDEN CHRISTMAS: THE SURPRISING TRUTH BEHIND THE BIRTH OF CHRIST by Tim Keller

What is Christmas really about? It's a question asked by everyone from Charlie Brown to the harried shopper wondering why he's racking up debt to the parishioner in a pew at his local church's Christmas Eve service. Amidst all the busyness and tradition, we want Christmas to mean something, for there to be more to it all than commercialism and sentimentality.

In Hidden Christmas, the late pastor and author Tim Keller walks through the gospel texts to explain in a concise, insightful way why the birth of Jesus changes everything, why the Incarnation is not only worth celebrating but worth believing. With a Bible passage as the starting point for each chapter, this book is essentially a collection of sermons (and indeed, this book is an adaptation and synthesis of the Christmas sermons he preached over the course of his ministerial career.)

Keller had a gift unparalleled since the days of C.S. Lewis for presenting the Christian faith in a winsome, intelligent way that treated his readers like adult learners—he neither talked down to his readers nor sent them scrambling for a theological dictionary. Keller balanced his own convictions about faith with unfailing respect for those who did not share them, and the result is that his evangelistic efforts never felt like a sales pitch but instead like a sincere announcement of good news.

In less than 150 pages, Hidden Christmas turns the Christmas story over and explores its many different angles, all with the intention of showing you that Jesus is Lord. For the believer and the nonbeliever alike, it's an instructive, joyful primer on events we know well but could understand better. A great devotional read for anyone during the season of Advent.

ESSENTIAL MARVEL TEAM-UP VOL. 4

After 4 months and more than 100 issues, I'm still not sure what this title was ever supposed to be. A secondary Spider-Man book featuring his Amazing Friends? A vehicle for C-list characters to get a chance to shine? A throwaway money grab by a company that knew anything with their premiere character on the cover would sell books?

Whatever Marvel Team-Up was intended to be, it definitely reached its creative peak in the Chris Claremont-John Byrne years, before they left for the greener pastures of Uncanny X-Men. This fourth and final Essential volume is back to the slog of Bronze Age mediocrity—which would be more forgivable if these issues were from the 1970s instead of the early 1980s. Every issue—by this time we're back to single issue, standalone stories—Spider-Man, through some vagary of chance, teams up with another Marvel hero, usually one who isn't popular enough to warrant their own title, to take on some lower-tier villain. The writing is as slapdash as the art, and the creators are all either B-players trying to make their bones (Steven Grant, Bob McLeod) or over-the-hill veterans looking for an easy paycheck (Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino).

Though the title would run for another 50+ issues before Marvel mercifully ended its run, it's clear that by this stage of the book's life, everybody had given up on any illusion of it 'mattering,' either creatively or canonically. These are the kind of disposable stories that used to define comics before the Silver Age, the sort of issues you'd give your kid to read on a long road trip and that he'd toss in the trash with his Coke bottle once he was done.

The harshness of my review probably makes it sound like I hated reading four volumes of Marvel Team-Up, which isn't exactly true. It wasn't bad, just bland, the white rice of reading experiences. I've certainly read better, but I've definitely read worse. If I have a bone to pick, it's with Marvel for deciding this demanded 4 volumes of reprints. Essential? Hardly.