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I am going to be crafty here because basketball does not produce classic books.

I mean, is David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game a good book? Sure. Is it anywhere close to Halberstam’s baseball equivalent, Summer of ‘49? Not even close. It lacks an essential element. Romanticism, perhaps. Halberstam is reporting his subject in one instance and falling in love with in the other.

For whatever reason, basketball - like carpentry, but unlike fly-fishing - does not lend itself to literature.

Maybe the characters are so outsized in their public lives, there is no need to dish about their private ones. Maybe the game is too frenetic. Maybe the ball’s too big.

So these are not great basketball books. They are great books that contain some amount of basketball, and one idle diversion that is nothing but.

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll: You’re going to think to yourself, “There’s an awful lot of heroin in this sports book, and I was pretty sure that was discouraged in sports.” Carroll’s story of misspent youth in the simultaneously decaying and fecund New York City of our Warholian dreams counts as one of the very few decent drug memoirs. Plus, there is some basketball.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford: Since the protagonist of Richard Ford’s masterpiece is a sportswriter, there is basketball in here. I believe. I’m pretty sure. Okay, the word must be used at least once. Though he captures the rhythms of the job perfectly, this isn’t a novel about sports or writing them. It’s about that moment in middle-age when you stop to reflect on what went wrong. So, probably what you’re doing right now.

Under The Frog by Tibor Fischer: This novel about Hungarian basketball players crushed under the heel of the Soviet regime is an absurdist delight. Fischer, a Brit, was one of those hyper-masculine literary stars of the 90s who got ploughed under by a shift in mores. But this book – rejected by 58 publishers before going on to get shortlisted for the Booker – seems newly relevant on topics like despair, ennui and isolation.

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons: Simmons is one of those writers it was once fashionable to love, until everyone loved him, upon which he immediately became fashionable to hate. The entire sports internet now copies the epigrammatic, all-over-the-place style Simmons popularized. Simmons seems bored by himself half the time. But when he wanders back to his core obsession, basketball, and is given room to roam – as he is in this encyclopedic attempt to rewrite NBA history – he’s still a lot of fun.

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