Sports and Books

A couple of days ago, baseball's non-waiver trade deadline passed us by. Like many other baseball fans, I was busily watching to see what my favorite team would do on the trade front.

Having only recently finished reading Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten, the 4th book in the Thursday Next series, the big business of professional sports was on my mind. With my own interest in (OK, obsession with) the baseball news, it was all the funnier to me to read the jibes made at the whole professional sports industry in the novel. Fforde's book is not exactly about professional sports, but the whole sports scene plays a part in the novel. For me, it provided a laugh at some of the practices that can get pretty irritating to a sports fan, especially how it seems there is a real disparity in sports based on money and geography.

Fforde's series is one of my favorites, as readers of my various blogs would already know. This is one of the reasons I love the series. It is funny -- and I mean laugh out loud hilarious -- but it also says something. I don't in any way mean that they get preachy or all proclaim-a-message; just that they deal with real issues in a thoughtful way. I love books that can entertain, and yet have a little substance to them too.

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