Elizabeth Willse

Even Booking Through Thursday gets Olympic fever.

• Do you or have you ever read books about the Olympics? About sports in general?
• Fictional ones? Or non-fiction? Or both?

And, Second:

• Do you consider yourself a sports fan?
• Because, of course, if you’re a rabid fan and read about sports constantly, there’s a logic there; if you hate sports and never read anything sports-related, that, too … but you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a good sports story.
• (Or a good sports movie, for that matter. Feel free to expand this into a discussion about “Friday Night Lights” or “The Natural” or whatever…)

The only thing close to an Olympic book I’ve read is “In Lane Three, Alex Archer,” a YA book about a young girl on the swim team. It was set in New Zealand.

My favorite all-purpose sports book is “Shoeless Joe,” by WP Kinsella. I read and reread it, after having seen “Field of Dreams.” I like the book much better than I ever liked the movie.

Oddly enough, I will read almost any fiction about vintage baseball (Dodgers in Brooklyn vintage) but you can’t get me to sit through a baseball game. The sports I love to watch are football and women’s basketball (ideally, at the college level.) This year, I haven’t been following the Olympics, except for Michael Phelps. A friend of a friend is part of a baseball re-enactor league. I keep meaning to go check that out. Because I do have a fairly endless appetite for the 1940s and 1950s worldview of baseball, especially as part of a coming of age novel, complete with sandlot nostalgia.

On football and basketball movies. A lot of football movies answer the same need that the abovementioned baseball nostalgia books do for me. But I haven’t seen that many. “Varsity Blues” comes to mind. Also, when Dad and I went to see “Glory Road” in the theater, the one about an integrated basketball team, we were yelling a little bit, and he was cheering and calling plays, the way he does whenever he watches basketball, even on TV. We were very glad it was a matinee and we were nearly alone in the theater.