Wednesday, May 07, 2008

What is Nicholas Dawidoff reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nicholas Dawidoff, author of, most recently, The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball.

The entry opens:
The more I read, the more I realize how much I will never read—a forlorn truth that so oppressed my grandfather he went ahead and calculated how many books he would complete in his lifetime. Discovering that the number was a mere five thousand, he plunged even deeper into despond. What revived him is what buoys me, the promise of all that was waiting out there for him. On that glistening shelf of my future I include books of my past. I seem to spend a lot of time returning to books I’ve already read; every time I begin again the experience deepens. Recent books in that respect are Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It which is among the most beautiful and haunting stories about family I have ever read.... [read on]
A Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri, and Berlin Prize Fellow, Nicholas Dawidoff is currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. His books include The Fly Swatter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and In the Country of Country, which was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg, was a national bestseller and appeared on many best book lists.

Read an excerpt from The Crowd Sounds Happy and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Check out Dawidoff's list of the five best baseball novels.

Writers Read: Nicholas Dawidoff.

--Marshal Zeringue