I finished reading Eight Men Out yesterday, something that was long long overdue and I'm so glad it was well worth the wait. This was actually one of my father's books, and I've had it on the shelf, unread, since he died almost seven years ago. (Something I can barely believe let alone write down.) When I got serious about the To Be Read pile over a year ago, I took all the unread books off the shelf and piled them up in "The Stacks" section of my office. Nothing was going back on the shelf until it was read! This was mostly a psychological booster for me - once I saw how many books I owned that I never read (almost 130) I was so shamed by the whole deal that I really got busy burning through them. In 2005 I kicked ass on The Stacks and now there are about 50 books or so on the floor - about fifteen of them gifts from Christmas and birthday last year. So yes, I read nearly 100 books from the pile last year. Wait - I removed around 100 books from the pile. That is the far more correct way of explaining how I weeded through them, loving some books and enjoying them to the last page while I tossed more than a few after only 30-40 pages of pain. I have no idea why I ended up with some of these books, but what a relief to see them depart for someone else's home!

Anyway, Eight Men Out. As pretty much every fan of baseball literature knows, this is the nonfiction story of the eight White Sox players who collaborated with professional gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series. You have to read the book to understand how it happened though, and to get a grip on how incredibly different professional baseball was back then in comparison to today. You also need to read it to see how thoroughly screwed the players were in comparison to everyone else involved (including owner Charlie Comisky) and how unfair the final outcome was. The players were acquitted by a court of law, but they were still banned from baseball, forever. This issue comes up every few years as there are still folks trying to get some of the guys, particularly "Shoeless" Joe Jackson into the Hall of Fame. Every time the Pete Rose issue comes up in terms of the Hall, so does the Jackson issue (and Buck Weaver, etc.) Bottom line is that the guys got so shafted that the whole thing is depressing. But boy, is this book well written and fascinating stuff. If you have a baseball fan in your life who hasn't read it (and it's fine all the way down to the 12 year olds), then this is the book for them. (Then go rent the movie, then rent Field of Dreams and then read Shoeless Joe by WP Kinsella, the book that movie was based on, and then....you get the picture.)

I have a YA baseball book on tap this Spring, Free Baseball, about a boy trying to understand the life and career of his Cuban baseball legend father. I'm looking forward to it tremendously, as it looks like a great story about the game, especially the Cuban leagues, something I know precious little about but have had a curiousity for quite some time. (I have a lot of Cuba curiousity due largely to growing up in Florida where Cubans are everywhere, but we learn nothing about them in school. Go figure.)

In other news, I have to write a CV for the interested literary agent, and a statement of truth about the AK flying book, and a sample dust jacket copy. The CV is really killing me - trying to remember what I have done aviation-wise over the past 15 years since I graduated from college is way harder then it should be. I just haven't thought about my life in these terms for awhile and although it makes sense (bolstering my credibility for writing this kind of book in the first place), it is still exercising parts of my brain that have been happily sleeping. I can't even remember the date I graduated from college the second time - was it 1995? 1996? And where the hell is that diploma......