Kelsey
Wow.
I may have to revisit this pathetic “review” after I manage to pick my jaw up off the floor. Maybe then I can add a handful of concrete reasons why There's Always This Year has been my favorite book in the last decade.
This book is art at its finest.
It's been a VERY long time since a book made me feel the way that There's Always This Year did; it was the most beautiful thing I've read/experienced/felt since (probably) adolescence (a time when my brain was ripe for feeling everything deeply). My brain is no longer ripe for feeling so deeply, and yet... something was triggered. I can't even comprehend how this was possible.
For the sake of whoever is reading this, I cannot emphasize this point enough: There's Always This Year is not only for people who have played or who love basketball. Sure, it helps to be familiar with some of the players (caveat: if you haven't heard of LeBron James, then... fine, this book isn't for you), but it's not a prerequisite to appreciating this masterpiece. Sure, it would maaaaaybe help to understand the feeling of playing pickup with your childhood friends on the blacktop with shitty nets (or, if you're lucky, chain nets) or the feeling of tuning out the entire world while shooting around in a gym that's all your own at 9pm because the janitor didn't mind staying late... But the great thing about this book is that you really don't have to have experienced any of those things in order to feel what you're meant to feel.
I'm saying “feel” a lot. It's probably because I struggle with poetry. I struggle with poetry because I don't know if I'm smart enough to identify what it's doing to me or why (frustrating), but I know that it's doing something big (equally frustrating). And this entire book was pure poetry to the point of disbelief. I re-read nearly every sentence at least once, and I found myself scratching my head, wondering, “How the fuck did someone think to do this? What makes this string of words the most perfect string of words that have ever been composed? How are these words communicating something to me that doesn't even line up with the words themselves?”
Now this section is more for my benefit than anyone else's (as is the rest of this review, let's not kid ourselves [ourselves being the multiple versions of myself, of course]): I'll forever be disappointed by whatever writeup I manage to produce here. My only real thought after finishing this book is that everyone I know needs to read it as a way of vastly improving their lives. My only real regret is that I read it too quickly (to be amended next time). And my only identifiable feeling is that I'm equal parts devastated and inspired.
What am I supposed to do with that? How do I move on?
Wow.
I may have to revisit this pathetic “review” after I manage to pick my jaw up off the floor. Maybe then I can add a handful of concrete reasons why There's Always This Year has been my favorite book in the last decade.
This book is art at its finest.
It's been a VERY long time since a book made me feel the way that There's Always This Year did; it was the most beautiful thing I've read/experienced/felt since (probably) adolescence (a time when my brain was ripe for feeling everything deeply). My brain is no longer ripe for feeling so deeply, and yet... something was triggered. I can't even comprehend how this was possible.
For the sake of whoever is reading this, I cannot emphasize this point enough: There's Always This Year is not only for people who have played or who love basketball. Sure, it helps to be familiar with some of the players (caveat: if you haven't heard of LeBron James, then... fine, this book isn't for you), but it's not a prerequisite to appreciating this masterpiece. Sure, it would maaaaaybe help to understand the feeling of playing pickup with your childhood friends on the blacktop with shitty nets (or, if you're lucky, chain nets) or the feeling of tuning out the entire world while shooting around in a gym that's all your own at 9pm because the janitor didn't mind staying late... But the great thing about this book is that you really don't have to have experienced any of those things in order to feel what you're meant to feel.
I'm saying “feel” a lot. It's probably because I struggle with poetry. I struggle with poetry because I don't know if I'm smart enough to identify what it's doing to me or why (frustrating), but I know that it's doing something big (equally frustrating). And this entire book was pure poetry to the point of disbelief. I re-read nearly every sentence at least once, and I found myself scratching my head, wondering, “How the fuck did someone think to do this? What makes this string of words the most perfect string of words that have ever been composed? How are these words communicating something to me that doesn't even line up with the words themselves?”
Now this section is more for my benefit than anyone else's (as is the rest of this review, let's not kid ourselves [ourselves being the multiple versions of myself, of course]): I'll forever be disappointed by whatever writeup I manage to produce here. My only real thought after finishing this book is that everyone I know needs to read it as a way of vastly improving their lives. My only real regret is that I read it too quickly (to be amended next time). And my only identifiable feeling is that I'm equal parts devastated and inspired.
What am I supposed to do with that? How do I move on?