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The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a story of escapism, a tale of fleeing from reality…The bus was jammed, they had to stand. People jostled, rammed them moistly toward the rear. Rain drummed on the roof. If skyscrapers were penis-prisons, what were the buses? the efferent tubes? The driver barked orders. Passengers protested at the shoving. Lou was the biggest in sight, so everybody turned their darkest looks on him. A woman complained about getting elbowed, and
Sports..."War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction. People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable run...
This is one weird book. But I liked it a lot.Two personal personality quirks might account for this: 1) The main character has created an entire fantasy baseball league, and is in the process of playing out year 56. Not with real players. Entirely created and maintained and imagined by J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Years are played out, deaths are mourned, injuries happen, he creates complete lives for each player, all centered around the game of baseball.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn...
Now with Afterword This is not a book about baseball. It's a book about a man who enjoys his solitude and crates a whole world of stats and player biographies in a fake a basball league that's (real?), the players live and die,break records as it's creator losses his fucking mind. He invets a whole league, he explains that he takes words he sees in real life and turns them into ball player names, I come up with few myself. Here is my starting line up and team name.note the words used are words I...
An interesting going deep imagining of a man's imagining [about baseball] which if you're not really into it may leave a reader withered, but if you're into it [baseball] you just may love it, mostly, as I did.
What shocked me, after hearing about Coover, was that the plot of the book isn't the star here, nor the characters. Rather, the charm of the book is almost entirely in the structure, which is remarkably playful, complex, and nuanced. I was expecting some sprawling Pynchonesque thing, but instead I got a fun, almost breezy, frequently comic novel touched with metafictional elements.
Man, I love baseball. It's hard to write about the literary merits of this mind-bending book, of which there are DEFINITELY many (in short, without talking about baseball, the created world becomes the real world), without talking about baseball. And the fact that Coover created a complex board game equivalent of modern fantasy/tabletop baseball that used statistics in ways that were never discussed until Billy Beane's SABRmetric-focused appearance in "Moneyball." But the world that Coover creat...
I feel like this could easily be a five-star book...for someone else. Probably someone who likes baseball a lot more than I do. I'm definitely impressed with what it accomplishes; you could basically say it's an account of a man's life falling apart at the seams due to an obsession with a proto-World-of-Warcraft. And in that way, it's eerily prescient. Well executed, too. Henry Waugh's fantasy baseball league is imagined from the ground up, complete with its own history and a huge group of fully...
Well, first things first, I don't give a damn about baseball. This book probably would have meant more to me if I did, but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless. It's too bad my baseball-loving father doesn't give a damn about experimental novels-maybe between the two of us we would have been able to make a bit more sense of this thing.But anyway, this is only tangentially a novel about baseball. It's more about imagination, and creativity, and statistics, and rules, and (ugh, sorry-but I can't think o...
I'm eager to discuss this book primarily because of how much I disliked it.Moments ago, I summarized it for my husband, and he said, "That sounds interesting. I'd never read it, but if you were stoned and had that idea for a book, it'd be pretty exciting."That's the gist: If I were intoxicated or otherwise impaired and had the idea for this book, it would be exciting. Now, running that idea out for 242 pages is simply mad, and let's face it, cruel.I understand why this book is considered great b...
Basically, this is a pre-D&D roleplaying geekout disguised as a quite elegant baseball novel. The sports writing is stellar but the plot seems to plod pretty predictably along, and frankly I didn't get the ending at all...! I thought there'd be nine chapters because of all the stuff about numerology, but there were only 8... and the author decided to create this kind of meta-russian roulette round out of the last chapter: that seemed a little sloppy: I was just starting to like some of the other...
