Baseball Books, Cormac Speaks Again, and Awards Galore

By Jenny Shank, 10-24-07

I spent two days online trying to get World Series tickets, along with every other poor baseball-loving sap in Colorado, but had no luck.  So I’ll have to content myself with some baseball reading as game one kicks off in Boston today.

Mike Merschel, the one-time Coloradoan and current editor of the Dallas Morning News’ book blog Texas Pages, recently posted about the best in baseball literature, while admitting he’s not the biggest fan of the sport: “those of us who spent our childhoods buried in books still tend to cringe when someone comes at us with hard balls and large bats.” Still, he puts in a vote for W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. 

I read Kinsella in high school, and don’t know if I’d still be as carried away by his books as much now, but I fell in love with his The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.  My all-time favorite baseball writing, however, is the first fifty pages of Don Delillo’s Underworld, which in my view easily bests Malamud’s The Natural.  I remember the exact chair I was sitting in when I read those Delillo pages that blew me away.  He published that section as a novella, ”Pafko At the Wall,” and later incorporated it into Underworld.

Also on the Texas Pages, Beatriz Terrazas praises Instant Karma, The Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum, Wayne Sheldrake’s memoir of bumming around the San Juan Mountains.  (Watch for Krista Crabtree‘s review of the book on NewWest.net/books soon)

New Mexico’s Cormac McCarthy talked to Oprah earlier this year and is now apparently feeling chatty--Time Magazine recently featured his conversation with the Coen brothers, who collaborated with him on a film adaptation of No Country for Old Men.

The Utah Humanities Book Festival is this week, with many events in Salt Lake City as well as other Utah locations.

The book awards have been raining down lately.  The lone Nebraskan in the running beat out the three Montana finalists for the High Plains Book Award--Michael L. Tate’s Indians And Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails took home the Book of the Year prize.

The Willa Awards, honoring “outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the West,” were announced last weekend.  The winners included K.L. Cook’s The Girl from Charnelle in the contemporary fiction category and the collection Montana Women Writers: Geography of the Heart in the creative nonfiction category. 

Colorado Humanities recently announced the Colorado Book Awards in a bunch of categories.  The winners included two books from Denver publisher Ghost Road Press: The Pull of the Earth by Teague Bohlen won for fiction and in the anthology category, Open Windows 2006 took the prize.  (A while back, I interviewed Matthew Davis of Ghost Road.)

Have some regional literary news or events to share?  If so,