There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension | 
pickI‘ve had mixed responses to Hanif‘s writing before and I don‘t like basketball, so I skipped this when it first came out. So I‘m glad the NBA longlisted it for nonfiction, because it‘s terrific. It‘s not really about basketball at all, rather that sport is used as a framing device to talk about community, life as a black man and more. This one gets all the stars from me (and it should have been shortlisted).
pickThis was poetry written as prose. The fight of the underdog, the awe of Lebron, and just exquisite writing about mundane life makes this one of the best of the year.
The writing is almost poetic in this nonfiction book that says it‘s about basketball but is about much more
July #ReadingRoundup 12 📖
One Nonfiction, and it might have been my fav of the month, a very American look at a variety of topics all based around basketball - I am not a fan of the sport, but still found this book fascinating, his writing is fantastic, interesting, and entertaining.
Had some good balance - Blindness, Let Us Descend, The Absolutist, and Julia were all pretty dark, but Yinka, Less, and Starter Villian were lighter and more fun.
"I never asked what exactly he was praying for. There are places where questions are a salve, and there are places where questions are a weapon, pushed into a wound, and it's best to learn the difference between the two before you end up in some place you don't wanna be, acting a damn fool."
"And besides, it might do all of us some good to reconsider what making it even means, or at least to honor a world where making it is not defined by a glamourous exit, not only by television cameras, not only by coming back with a pair of trophies riding shotgun. What, after all, do you call it when your name is good on every block you touch, or when kids gather around porches to hear stories of when you were great"
Such an amazing writer.
My best of 2024 so far (2 of 3)
I love this, he writes with such poetry -
"Her father worked second shift and her mother's name was carved into one of the headstones in a field a mile west of the school"
pickThis is every bit as good as all the reviews claim! I was so impressed with the way Abdurraqib eloquently described growing up in Columbus, Ohio (on the wrong side of town, he says) and how meaningful basketball was to him as a kid, and those in his circle. LeBron James features prominently as Abdurraqib came of age around the time of LeBron‘s ascent. More than a sports essay collection, this is about heartbreak, passion, and life itself.
loneliness and heartbreak are not the same. I have been heartbroken and preoccupied with any number of pleasing but ultimately foolish pursuits, just as I have been lonely with a heart at least mostly intact (though it can be said that my heart, and perhaps yours, hums at the frequency of a low and ever-present breaking).
