KPR's Staff Picks

One of the best insider baseball books I've ever read. Based on interviews with hundreds of players from the last 50 years of baseball, along with great historical anecdotes, The Baseball Codes reveals the unseen game: what offenses cause a pitcher to intentionally hit a batter; what recourse that batter has; what's ok and what's not ok when it comes to stealing signs; how to properly celebrate an accomplishment without earning the ire of the opposing team; what actually constitutes "running up the score"; what is proper decorum for a rookie in the clubhouse. Best of all, the authors are both local, so many of the tales involve the Giants.

One of the things that makes a work of fiction into a work of literature is when it transports the reader into a new world, be it into a time or place (or reality) wholly different from our own, or into the head of a character like no other. Such a book is Motherless Brooklyn, which takes us into the head of one Lionel Essrog. Lionel is an orphan with a bad case of Tourette's Syndrome, and he fairly overflows with odd habits and compulsions, his mind continuously revolting against him in lurid outbursts of strange verbiage. He is drawn into playing detective to try to solve the murder of his small-time crook of a boss, but this book is not about plot. It is about language, and a character struggling to control the words and sounds that bubble up from within him. And did I mention that it is hilarious?