All the Facts about Fiction

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, what is your favorite book?

-- AJ Fikery, in The Storied Life of AJ Fickery 

I just spent a couple of harrowing weeks in Venezuela. I was shadowing two military criminal investigators searching for an ex-Delta Force captain who was doing his best to stay hidden. Before that I cooked with a chemist. And over the last year I’ve traveled through time, been invisible, defied death, and marched with a female Russian sniper. I’ve exchanged backhands with an aging tennis star trying to regain her past glory. I’ve visited midnight libraries and circuses. 

Pretty exciting stuff for a 50-something third-grade teacher. I spend the day encouraging readers, and I also spend most nights embarked upon grand adventures. The kind you only find in books. The kind only a lover of books can take. 

Being a book lover grants me membership in a secret society. We don’t have a special handshake or organized meetings. But when we meet an instant convention ensues. The agenda is the same and features one simple question: “Have you read anything good lately?” 

We are the fans of fiction. 

We talk about books, we suggest books, and we occasionally buy each other books. Many of my teaching colleagues are members. Beautiful Karla is in the club, as are several of the wives of my best friends. Sadly, my dad and I are the only men in the club. The data out there says that women read more books than men do, and when it comes to fiction, women again are more bookish. Studies also reveal that men resist reading books by female authors. What a shame! My inner Harper Lee is weeping. 

Men may have closed the book on fiction by choosing to live in a strictly non-fiction world. And I agree, the non-fiction aisles of the bookstore are great places to visit. Give me some history, a biography, a sports story, or a Christian living soul-shaper and I’m all in. But it’s fiction that really pulses through the pages of my heart. Ninety percent of what I read is fiction. And we readers, fiction or non, are a dying breed. 

That’s because a third of teens aren’t reading for fun anymore. According to a recent survey, 31 percent of 13-year-olds said they never read for pleasure, 22 percent read once or twice a week, and only 14 percent read for fun every day. The stats are a complete flip from 40 years ago when only eight percent didn’t read for enjoyment. It doesn’t take a genius to see the negative effects of smart phones and social media when it comes to reading. Just check the grade books. Math and reading scores on the nation’s report card have fallen to their lowest levels in decades, even lower than 2020’s pandemic scores. The good news is that kids who read in their spare time scored higher on average. 

There are several other benefits to cracking open some fiction. According to psychologists, reading fiction improves your theory of mind. Basically, theory of mind is when you use a host of input to figure out what another person is feeling or thinking based on what they’re not telling you. It’s reading people, like when you look past a used-car salesman’s smile to see his sack of lies. And by reading fiction you’re not only activating the part of your brain responsible for theory of mind, but you’re strengthening it too. Secondly, reading fiction makes you more empathetic. And lastly, reading fiction increases creativity. 

Reading fiction must be the reason for my heightened creative, empathetic people-reading skills, but personally I enjoy fiction because I love marveling at what someone has accomplished. We all love to experience uber-talented people doing what they do best. It’s why we love the Olympics, concerts, sports, and movies. People making really hard things look easy leaves us in awe and often left wondering how did they do that? And since we’re not gymnasts, musicians, quarterbacks, or actors our level of marveling is heightened from our lack of experience in those disciplines. 

For me, it’s the same with authors. I can’t soar through the air like Simone Biles, but writing is a little closer to my wheelhouse. I often describe creating these blogs as putting a puzzle together in which I also have to create the individual puzzle pieces. Two pages and 900 words is doable. But 400 pages and 90,000 words? That’s a lot of puzzle pieces. And when an author combines world-class writing with an original, creative story, I’m in awe. They’re the ones who cause me to read a sentence that’s so good I have to close the book and stare at the wall. They’re the authors who move me to highlight sentences or entire paragraphs. 

They’re the creators of page-turners. The books for which I forsake all other obligations because I can’t put them down. The books that live on after I’m finished, that leave me a little sad that I’m done. They’re the ones that I’ll recommend to others. 

October is National Book Month. So, get out there and grab a book. Go on a new adventure. Re-read an old favorite. Visit the local library, support an indie bookstore, or download an audiobook for the commute. 

And let me know what your favorite book is. My secret society is always accepting new members.

The Power of Playing Catch

Joe Posnanski’s “The Baseball 100” is 869 pages of pure awesomeness. The book chronicles 100 of the best ballplayers to play and not play Major League Baseball. I say not play because Posnanski includes several black players like Josh Gibson (no. 15 on the list), Buck Leonard (no. 53), and Cool Papa Bell (no. 84) who never had the chance to perform in the majors.

There’s plenty of statistics and Hall of Fame talk in the book, but thankfully Posnanski doesn’t settle for a repetitive formula or go overboard with numbers. The stats are fascinating though. Like this one: in 1947, Johnny Mize (no. 64) hit 51 homeruns and only struck out 47 times. Today’s sluggers strikeout 47 times in a month.

Posnanski dives deep into the stories that allow even the most avid baseball fan to learn something new. For example, Charlie Gehringer (no. 87) grew up in Fowlerville, MI, less than 20 miles from the tiny town of Hartland where I lived for four years as kid.

One of the recurring themes in the book is the role that dads played in getting their sons to the big leagues. The fathers taught, inspired, and practically willed kids like Cal Ripken (no. 44), Warren Spahn (no. 49), Chipper Jones (no. 54), Gaylord Perry (no. 68), Brooks Robinson (no. 73), Carlton Fisk (no. 80), and Phil Niekro (no. 81) into the big leagues.

If my dad had Major League aspirations for me, he never filled me in. But he did set me on a life-long, baseball-loving journey. Like the wise friend who introduced me to Beautiful Karla, without hinting at her secret plans to set us up, my dad jumpstarted my heart’s passion for the pastime. He did it with the simplest of acts. He put a ball in my hand. And then we played catch.

Playing catch has an evolution, similar to how a child moves from crawling, to walking, to running. It started indoors, with my dad gently tossing a ball into my mitt, like lobbing apples into a basket. I would then shotput the ball to him, covering the five-foot distance with a three-hop roller. In time, I learned to catch the ball and return it safely without breaking any living room lamps. Then the fun began. Playing catch moved outside.

Under a blue midwestern sky, my dad took a knee and threw slow overhanded rainbows at me. Eventually, he could stand up and put a little extra umph into his throws. He taught me how to turn the glove for backhand grabs and preached the priority of always using two hands. He taught me how to catch grounders and pop-ups. You don’t always have to talk when playing catch. It’s a wordless connection of hearts. But interestingly, the better you get at playing catch, the farther away the participants stand.

My dad bought me my first mitt. It was made by Cooper, a now defunct Canadian company known for its hockey gear. Then he got me a pitch-back. The pitch-back featured netting tightly stretched across a self-standing metal frame. If I threw the ball precisely, the pitch-back would zing the ball right back to me. He probably bought it to hone my accuracy because he was tired of retrieving my overthrows from the corn stalks in my mom’s garden. Or he bought it so I could play catch by myself. Nevertheless, it did hone my accuracy. Because if my throws didn’t hit the netting, I had to chase my overthrows into the corn stalks.

He signed me up for little league and for a couple of years coached my grade-school teams. In second grade, I was a light-hitting, defensive master. In one game, Dad moved me from second base to left field when the opponent’s top slugger came to bat. And on the days without games or practices we continued to play catch. After working as Southeast Michigan’s top medical textbook salesman, he’d come home, unload his books, and crouch down like my favorite Tiger Bill Freehan as I practiced my 32-mph fastballs.

He taught me how to read a box score and he let me fall asleep to Ernie Harwell turning Tiger games into poetry on the radio. He drew pictures on napkins to explain why right-handed hitters prefer left-handed pitchers (and vice versa). And we continued to play catch.

He took me to my first game at Tiger Stadium in which Reggie Jackson (no. 59) hit a homer. A few years a later we saw Mark “the Bird” Fidrych beat the Yankees. At another game he encouraged me to approach Carl Yastrzemski (no. 38) for an autograph. And he bought me two more mitts (a Wilson and a Rawlings), after each of their predecessors wore out.

But somewhere on the journey we stopped playing catch. Exactly when, I’m not sure. Was it in 5th grade when we moved to the suburbs, and I suddenly had plenty of neighborhood buddies to play with? Or was it that our father/son time simply morphed to tennis court clashes at the swim club and to one-on-one basketball battles on the driveway?

You know where this is going, right? It’s time for us to play catch one more time. I’ll take my glove on the next trip to Monterey. We’ll find a corn stalk-free zone outside his home. We’ll begin by standing close together. We’ll soon be able to increase the distance, but we’ll also be going back in time as we resume an activity that started a half century ago. The familiar thwack of the ball hitting our mitts will sound like a sweet summer symphony. We won’t need to say much because each throw, each catch, will be a non-verbal chorus of thank yous from my heart to his.

When we’re about done, I’ll crouch down like Johnny Bench (no. 30), and I’ll wipe a tear from my eye before he unleashes his best Nolan Ryan (no. 50) fastball. It might not top 32 mph, but it will feel like 100. And it will become the No.1 memory in my baseball-loving life.