You Reap What You Read

Unlike most of my colleagues (such as Angry Eyes), I have never been an avid reader, which is quite bizarre given the nature of my work. Imagine a soccer player who hates playing soccer. That is simply unimaginable and inexplicable.

In fact, I am a selective reader. I don't read a lot of things, as I often find books and texts boring. But you can still find a lot of books and magazines in my bookshelf, the reason being most of the them are related to sports.

I have always been a sports fanatic, but my interest is strictly limited to being a spectator instead of a participant. When I was a small kid, I would tape a lot of sports programmes on TV (Italian Serie A and the NFL in particular) and watch it again and again whenever I had time, and so I could and can still remember nearly every word of the commentary. For example, my man Martin Tyler reminded us, after an excellent 2-1 home win over Bologna early in the 1990-91 season, to "watch out for Sampdoria", which would go on to win its first and so far only Serie A title that season. I still have a couple of seasons' (from the early to mid-90s') worth of Serie A and NFL tapes in my cabinet, ready for me to pop into the VHS player when and if I have time.

You may say that watching the same tapes again and again has made me more laconic, which is probably true. But the flip side is, the excellent commentary of Tyler and Peter Brackley, among others, has greatly enhanced my English proficiency.

Anyway, when I finally have some (NOTE: not "a lot of") money, I decided to buy sports books, lots of them. My collection mainly consists of books on Formula One, but the number of baseball books is also increasing at a rapid rate. When Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" created a lot of controversy a couple of years ago, I immediately bought one from my trusted old friend, Amazon. And being an avid follower of Rob Neyer, I just can't miss any of his work. But despite being a huge fan of soccer and American football, I don't have too many books on them in my collection.

As for magazines, there is only one that I have been reading regularly for nearly 15 years: Sports Illustrated. It has the two things that I am looking for: Excellent coverage of sporting events (mostly in North America) and fantastic columns by renowned columnists like Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin. To say that I am trying to imitate Reilly's style in this blog, but to no avail (possibly forever), would be an understatement.

Daryl is now nine-month old, and we hope that he would pick up reading as a habit, as experts always say that it would be good for his development in terms of speaking and writing. At the moment he can only play with his toy books, and still can't turn the pages properly. I know we still have time, but being his parents, we are always worried about a lot of things.

No, we don't want to force him too much, but there are just some things that we should tell him to and not to do. We want him to love books and we want to build a nice little library for him. But instead of a sports library, we want his to be a general one, with topics involving every aspect of mankind. Otherwise he would be like me, who know nothing but sports.

But first we have to find a bigger flat, and buying a Mark Six ticket may help realise our dream.