Review: Selected Shorts: Baseball

Selected Shorts: Baseball by Symphony Space
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m used to reading books about baseball. As an audio-only release of their “Selected Shorts” series, NPR has chosen a few shorter pieces on baseball. I found these mostly hits, in terms of content. The readers mostly were reporter types, and perhaps didn’t have the experience of fiction or poetry reading. Not that they were bad, just not polished. And this was a live recording in front of an audience, so no redo’s. Entertaining was the live banter with Bart Giamatti and Roger Angel, they were enjoying themselves and you could tell. My favorite stories were the two longer bits – both of which I had already read. I have John Updike’s article on Ted Williams in its Library of America hardcover. You really get the feel of the times. The other excellent short story was W.P. Kinsella’s “The Thrill of the Grass”, which I read a few decades ago. I’m glad I ran across this again as an older baseball fan, as the story revolves around how older fans feel about the game. Highly recommended here or in Kinsella’s short story collection of the same name.

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