The Club

 The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports, by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, mostly lives up to the claims of its subtitle. It's a light, fun read. I've known that the EPL was the most entertaining league in world sports for a few years now. I enjoy weekend mornings with a cup of coffee, transfixed as Tottenham Hotspur roars through miserable English weather, far across the globe. The Club more or less explains why I, and countless others from every continent, can actually watch them. Television deals, wealthy owners, machinations of culture, and deliberate appeals of individual clubs have raise the profile of English soccer from a urine-soaked hooligan brawl in the 1970's and 80's to the fine entertainment it is today.

Plenty of moral ambiguity fogs the story, as select billionaires from around the world have turned middling clubs from relative backwaters into huge successes. Some clubs, like Blackburn Rovers, were financially propped up to actually win the league, then fell away. Others, like current league leader Manchester City, are essentially PR for the Abu Dhabi royal family, and while they aren't historically well-respected in England, they are enormous international entities. Chelsea owes its recent trophies to a Russian industrialist. Arsenal and Manchester United are owned by out-of-touch Americans. Traditionally important teams like Leeds and Newcastle struggle to keep up. As a fan of an American college team from a relative backwater (Oregon State) who has seen my rival propped up by a billionaire (the University of Oregon), I can empathize with English fans that do not welcome this change. Still, Tottenham is a terrific team to follow. I'm glad that it isn't difficult to watch them live, weekly, on the west coast of America. I don't know how I feel about what it took to get EPL football into my living room, but I'm glad it's there. 

A Life's Work

 A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk is a parenting memoir that speaks the truth. In that sense, it's a rarity. My edition came out seven years after the original, and it contains maybe the best addendum I've ever read, where Cusk addresses "readers who find honesty akin to blasphemy when the religion is that of motherhood." She has to clarify that she does not, in fact, hate her own children. And with that out of the way, we plunge into a wide-eyed and often hilarious account. The physical changes of pregnancy, the lack of sleep, the bizarre social expectations, and the inability to connect with her baby daughter all are given a thorough examination. I can see why at the time the text was controversial, in that it totally lacks sentimentality, but having read later Cusk, I was not surprised. Her voice, if anything, was funnier in A Life's Work than it was in the Outline trilogy or her essay collection, and I loved it. 

One interesting theme throughout the memoir was the dual impact of reading. On one hand, classical literature gave Cusk a foundation to understand her experience. She begins chapters with passages from writers like Edith Wharton or Charlotte Bronte, and these segue easily to her own revelations. On the other hand, current parenting books leave her bewildered. "Like a bad parent," she observes "the literature of pregnancy bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal, with ghoulish hints at the consequences of thoughtless actions. Eat pâté and your baby will get liver damage. Eat blue cheese and your baby will get listeria . . . Stroke the cat and your baby will get toxoplasmosis . . ." It was both funny and alarming how off-base Cusk found most professional advice. This juxtaposition between the usefulness of literary fiction and the stress of unhelpful nonfiction made as good a case for the study of English literature as I've seen.