Audiobooks with Don Review: THERE'S ALWAYS THIS YEAR: ON BASKETBALL AND ASCENSION

Imagine for a moment a book as a basketball game, structured loosely into pregame, four quarters, several intermissions, a time-out, and the postgame. That book is There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib. The book is a very challenging read as the game flow is interrupted by asides and back story in the same way a real game might go. Partly a sports story, as you would guess from the subtitle, the book explores the popularity of basketball in the region of Ohio where the author grew up. There's Always This Year is also part essay, part memoir, part social commentary, part cultural/racial observation, and part poetry, all moving far beyond basketball. 

Abdurraqib grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the 1990s and was a witness to a golden era of basketball as a young LeBron James became a legend of the game while many others with similar talents did not. Why does that happen, some make it and others with equal talent don't? And what does it mean to make it? Who deserves success? What role does the community play in terms of the tension between excellence and expectations on the individual players? These questions are just a few which Abdurraqib grapples with as he also dribbled (get it?) out details of his life growing up poor, black, Muslim, motherless, and in trouble with the law from an early age. Always. Always his focus returned to basketball, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and LeBron James.

I gave this book to my husband for Christmas. He is a sports fans, though he tends to enjoy watching football and golf more than basketball. I thought this would be a book he'd enjoy, but unfortunately the book doesn't allow for easy admittance. One has to pay at the gate to get into the basketball game, right? Well, that is the case with this book, too. It starts with the pregame and begins with this sentence: "You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together by talking about enemies." What? Enemies? That was not what I was expecting to read in a book about basketball. Let me backup to the epigraph because I think it provides a better launching spot for the 3-point shot of a starting place:

"Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down." -Toni Morrison

I'd say this is pretty good way to start this book. Over the course of the book, the author has to give up a lot of things that are weighing him down: to some degree even Columbus, Ohio, his old neighborhood, his memories and dreams, and yes, even basketball.

Hanif Abdurraqib is described as a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. But I think his poetry leads the way in all he writes. Here are a few examples of his writing. Can you sense the poetry behind the words?

About the death of a high school basketball star on the cusp of making it in the NBA, he writes:

"Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not" (90).

About memories of his childhood, Abdurraqib writes so descriptively and says:

"My childhood beloveds, my beloved childhood blocks, it is not you I swear. It is my own memory -- memory that I, even now, cannot detach from dreaming. Which is a more whimsical way of saying that the block doesn't look like the block that I once knew and loved and dribbled basketballs on, dodging cracks in the sidewalks or the glass, broken tenderly enough to take the shape of a small brown mouth" (93). 

Then there was the poetry poetry: 

(165)

After Don's aborted attempt to get into the print version, we decided to listen to the audiobook together. I confess I found the opening five minutes philosophically dense and hard to penetrate, too, but soon we settled in to the author's narration of his story. With only seconds left in the game/book (Do the Cavaliers win the championship with LeBron at the helm, or not?) I start sobbing. Don, who is driving and has other things to pay close attention to, isn't sure why and looks over at me with a question in his eyes. It was this: all the sudden I knew everything the author was saying about life, memories, and dreaming was true. What if our childhoods are still going on in an alternative universe? And we, the livers of that life, are living in two places at once?

"When Brian Wilson completed the song "God Only Knows," he spoke of the impulse to fade the song out on a loop of the chorus, suggesting that it creates a sort of infinity spiral. A world where the song is still going on, always, somewhere. And you, the listener, are still in it, as you were at the time of listening. A dream with no exit. There is a universe, always, where you are joyfully encased in the endless return of chorus, and you might age there, but let's say you don't. Let's say you and the chorus both lock into a type of eternity, a forever of wondering God only knows what I'd be without you, an eternity of praising the fact that you'll never find out. And it is both beautiful and heartbreaking this, that we go on living while a past version of ourselves remain locked, peacefully, in a euphoric dream" (316).

I think the reason I got so choked up at this point related to Don and I both celebrating this summer with our high school classmates the 50 years since our graduations. We took big, long walks down memory lanes. We both lived idyllic childhoods filled with games, friends, sunshine and swim meets. Don especially had a childhood filled with freedom and fun in a small Eastern Oregon town. He'd leave his house on his bike every morning of the summer, bike to the school for baseball practice, stop off for an ice cream on his way to the swimming pool where he'd swim all afternoon, not biking home until dinner, when he knew his folks would begin to wonder where he was. I think I was crying as much for his memories as I was for mine. And I love thinking about that little boy biking around town in an endless, happy summer. It's a rare book that makes you reflect so deeply on your own childhood and feel so connected to a story so different than your own.

Both Don and I loved the audiobook and rated it with 5 stars.

-Anne