On My Faithful Reading of the Sports Section

Readers of this blog may be surprised that I am a faithful reader of the Sports Section of the San Francisco Chronicle, my local newspaper. Until about a dozen years ago, I had no interest in this section, and only a very mild interest in following sports, such as those at my alma mater and those at my daughter’s alma mater. It turned out that my fair-weather fan interest in the San Francisco Giants baseball team – in other words, only when they were winning in the early 2010s – and later and more dramatically in the Golden State Warriors – when they started winning in 2014 – was what made the difference. In particular, I have become an enthusiastic fan of The Warriors, the NBA professional basketball team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was, initially, mostly the influence of my late husband, and we enjoyed watching games (on TV) together. I was hooked, and continue to watch quite faithfully. Of course it was exciting when they did so well, and won four championships in the past eight years. So although in the past I would pass the sports section to my husband, or if he was not there, sometimes just put it directly into the recycling pile (yes, I read the newspaper in old-fashioned print!), I now turn to it first (maybe after a quick glance at the headlines, which I return to later). I read about the Warriors in particular, but I find myself reading about other sports as well, even sports I dislike (American football!). I especially like the stories about the human interest side of sports, such as profiles of players, discussion of controversies, and columns on political and social aspects of sports. To tie this back to my general love of reading, especially novels, memoirs, and biographies: I see the same main thread of my interest in characters, plots, themes that sports stories share with fiction and memoir. They are all stories about people and life, and I never tire of those!

Still more on author Dani Shapiro

I have taken a deep, deep dive into the work of Dani Shapiro, within a short period of time. Often when I like a book, I very soon read others by the same author. With Dani Shapiro’s work, I have done so more systematically than usual. I have now read all of her novels and all of her memoirs. (Earlier posts here about her work include those of 8/14/11, 9/7/17, 2/2/23, and 2/16/23.) All of her work is compelling, even gripping. Of particular interest are the ways in which she has taken the events and feelings of her own life and used them not only in the memoirs, but also in the novels. I don’t mean they are exactly the same, but similar themes come up over and over again. The biggest theme is that of difficult families and childhoods, and in particular, extremely difficult mothers, and the lifelong consequences of these for daughters. The plots of the novels are different, but there is an immediately recognizable world found in both the memoirs and the novels, especially since I (for the most part) read the memoirs first and the novels second, although they actually appeared mostly in the opposite order. There is certainly a sense that Shapiro is working out her feelings and issues over and over again in various guises. This might sound off-putting, but it is actually intriguing, and despite their common themes, the books do not feel repetitive.

My on-and-off relationship with mystery novels

Readers who have read this blog for a while know that I have read many, many mystery novels in my life, but that over and over again, since childhood, I have gone through a cycle regarding them. I have loved them, then have gotten tired of them, then somehow started a new phase of reading them. Over and over. (See my posts of 1/27/10, 1/5/16, and 11/12/16 on this topic, for example.) As a refresher: I have gone from the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of childhood, through the great classic British novels (some classified as “cozies”) (e.g., by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, and more recently, Elizabeth George), the stories of tough American women detectives (by, e.g., Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton), the historical mysteries (by Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd), and many more, including, fairly recently, Deborah Crombie, Louise Penny, and Donna Leon. I also sometimes re-read mysteries that I last read years or decades before (and therefore have conveniently forgotten the solutions to the mysteries). Often, unfortunately, I don’t find the same interest in those favorites of yore. For example, I re-read one or two novels of Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers, and did not feel the same about them any more. The exception was re-reading the always-wonderful P.D. James. In the past couple of months, I had one of my resurgences of reading mysteries, focusing on more Tana French novels, and on the Thursday Murder Club series, by Richard Osman. Those were enjoyable to read, but suddenly – I never know when or why this will happen – once again, I got tired of mysteries. By now I have accepted this ebb and flow of my interest in this genre, and the unpredictability of when it ebbs and when it flows. But I always return to mysteries eventually…