What's Dalton reading this week?

Well, last week I finished Manhunt for my book club. The name of our book club is B.I.B.L.E. Study, which stands for Brotherhood of Intense Book-Loving Enthusiasts. One neat thing about being in a book club is you get to read books that you wouldn’t have decided to read on your own initiative. Like Manhunt. I enjoyed this book, but it’s not the kind of thing I think I would have read otherwise. It’s too much information about too small a topic. It covers a period of just 12 days in a very small geographic location. I now have way more information than I could ever possibly need concerning the chase for John Wilkes Booth following Lincoln’s assassination.

Generally, I like to alternate fiction and non-fiction (I totally don’t get those people who say they don’t like reading fiction). And after 400 pages about the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, I wanted a quick, easy read. So I started up Le Mort de Napoleon by Simon Leys. It’s only about 120 pages and I finished it in about 24 hours. So it definitely qualified as a quick, easy read.

Then I switched back to non-fiction, and now I’m about halfway through Soccer In Sun & Shadow (originally El Futbol A Sol Y Sombra) by Eduardo Galeano. The author is a well-known Uruguayan intellectual. And for some reason, I love it when intellectuals write about sports. (Except perhaps when George Will writes about baseball; there’s far too much of that excessively nostalgic golden-days-of-summer-type crap.) It annoys me intensely when intellectuals denigrate sports and act as if it's beneath them. Interestingly, Galeano actually addresses this early on in the book. Conservative intellectuals, he argues, think of sport as something appropriate for the masses, but not worthy of those who have an ability (and the time, and the money) for the genteel pursuits of the mind. And left-wing intellectuals, he posits, feel that sport “saps revolutionary fervor,” or something like that. “Bread and circuses,” sans bread. It’s true that dictators frequently turn the patriotic spirit aroused by sporting events to their own devices. Antonio Salazar even had some term for this, like “patria e futebol” or something. Unlike most tyrants, he actually admitted he was using nationalism and sport to keep the masses distracted.