Two Foers

[dogofthefuture]

I just finished two books by authors with the last name Foer. It's not a coincidence. While searching the library's catalog for one, I saw the other and thought it sounded interesting.

The random one was How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer. It certainly kept my interest, tracing the various

Comments

[essentialsaltes]

I'm sorry, but the correct title of this post is "Two by Foers"

[dogofthefuture]

You are correct, sir. (I'd initially thought of titling it "Two Foer Sex Ain't" or something similarly amusing but couldn't make it work.) I willingly accept your title as much, much better than mine.

[madbard]

If you liked Extremely Loud... you might also consider reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It's also a first person narrative by a young man with a social dysfunction, but vastly more positive, and it doesn't lecture you about how you should drive a Prius.

[dogofthefuture]

I actually read The Curious Incident of etc... several years ago and enjoyed it, though it had not nearly the effect on me that Extremely Loud did. I'm talking in terms of the simplest human emotions, love and loss. Not that the story of an autistic teenager isn't affecting, but this is just three normal people who love and lose and still love.

Also, I didn't sense any sort of environmental lecturing from Extremely Loud.

To be fair, I understand that Mr. Foer now goes about lecturing people about eating meat. Which, you know... he's probably not entirely wrong, at least in terms of what eating meat costs our society, but I still choose to eat meat most days of the week anyway.

But anyway I didn't really get any of that out of this book. One of the *characters* is a vegetarian, but it's only mentioned in a few bits and frankly I'd be hard-pressed to identify any of it as proselytizing for much of anything but "please stop killing people I love."

[madbard]

What I liked most about Foer's book were its moments of whimsy; Oskar's frequent flights of fancy were charming and touching. The author also has a talent for conveying sympathy for human pain in a way that's visceral and direct

[dogofthefuture]

True enough that there is a lot of pain. At its very core, it's simply a sad story.

I guess I didn't get the amount of politicizing you did. Not saying it's not there, although I honestly don't remember multiple hybrid car lectures. Maybe my eyes just glazed over.

And maybe this one resonates more with me having recently had a fair amount of loss. Give me another year or two and perhaps I won't find it quite as heart-rending.

[errforce1]

Possibly it's because of just what you spent the first 9 chapters of the book exploring - that intertwining of politics, religion, race, class, and etc., make soccer fanship really about identity, not the actual game. Here, there's not even much of that stuff attached to our popular sports, so soccer's just never going to have a chance.

Uh.

[dogofthefuture]

It's funny, because I knew, I just knew that someone would object to this. So, fair enough, let's give it a fair rundown

[yiskah]

This is all really interesting - my interest in football itself is pretty marginal but I am fascinated by the culture that surrounds it (particularly in the UK, which is - obv - what I know most about). I guess it's linked to the point about football being 'socialist' (large clubs notwithstanding), as unlike the other big international team sports (rugby, cricket), you need neither a lot of space, nor a lot of equipment, nor a nice soft grassy area on which to fall down - you just need a ball and 2+ players. All over the world, football's the game I've almost invariably seen played by poor kids in the street (the exception being in India, where they played cricket). So because of that it became linked - in the UK, at least - to the white working-class (given that the UK didn't have substantial non-white immigration until the 1950s), a group that's become increasingly disenfranchised over the past several decades, leading in part to the ugly manifestations you describe above

[dogofthefuture]

True enough - really, all you need is a ball and some space. (To be fair, that's all you really need for American football too, as long as you know the rules.) I actually have no problem with the game itself, though honestly I'm not interested in watching or playing it. It's the fanship that I was thinking of.

I actually have read Everything is Illuminated. I thought it was... okay. Didn't really grab me quite the way Extremely Loud did.