Book of Basketball roundtable

For a few weeks after Bill Simmons's The Book of Basketball was released, major newspapers and media outlets seemed reluctant to review it. They may have been wary of granting legitimacy to a chatty book of NBA lists, penned by a blogger and erupting with porn references. Maybe it was a more general snootiness, a preference for books dealing with more serious subjects (as the author of a forthcoming book about basketball, I hope this isn't the case). Or, perhaps it just took about a month to cook up a review.

Even when the New York Times Book Review did publish a consideration of Simmons's book, it seemed insubstantial compared to The Book of Basketball's scope and ambition. As just about everyone knows, Simmons devoted 700 pages to his attempt to weigh in on every important debate in American basketball history. Six hundred words in the NYT book review just doesn't seem like enough.

Aside from Josh Levin's review at Slate, no pedigreed reviewer really wrote a satisfying take on Simmons's magnum opus. Until last week, when New York Magazine brought together two of its staffers, Brooklyn literatus Jonathan Lethem, Deadspin writer Tommy Craggs, Seattle author Sherman Alexie and Free Darko prime mover Bethlehem Shoals to give the big book the close reading it deserves.

I'm especially proud of Craggs, who graduated a few years ahead of me at Northwestern, and whose headshot I remember seeing above columns in the Daily Northwestern sports section.

My favorite part of the discussion is this pitch perfect Simmons imitation in New York book critic Sam Anderson's second post:

Both conversations are complex and fascinating─but trying to conduct them at the same time is like, oh, I don't know, like trying to make out with a voluptuous stripper in the Champagne Room at a smokin' hot Vegas strip joint in Vegas while also reciting (still in Vegas making out with the stripper) your ten favorite lines from The Shawshank Redemption. No matter how much you want to do both at the same time, you can't. You just can't. (I will now light my terrible Bill Simmons mini-impression on fire.)

Anderson also scores points for framing the macro- versus micro-Simmons concept that dominates the second round of posts.

How would Simmons respond to some of the critiques of his book? I bet we'll find out eventually, and when we do, I hope he tackles the weightier, more nebulous issues about race and writing that Craggs and Shoals raise toward the end of the discussion, and not just the "Simmons overrates Durant and Iverson" angles.

Happy reading!