Fiction

After that, I read Lee Child’s short story James Penny’s New Identity. It’s based on a minor character in the first draft of the second Reacher book, but it didn’t really work for me. I’m currently reading Bernard Cornwell’s Stonehenge.

In between, however, I read David Halberstam’s The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship. Although not a a work of fiction this is a remarkable book. Halberstam’s considered it his best work, which is saying something.

It deals with the 60 year friendship of four Boston Red Sox teammates: Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, Don DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Unlike Halberstam’s Summer of ‘49 and October 1964, this isn’t really a book about baseball. It’s about relationships between disparate personalities, one of whom was volatile (Williams), and the trust and love between them that grew and endured for decades. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.