There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Great read for anyone from Ohio and especially The Land! Very nostalgic times of endless hours on the basketball courts, from the neighborhood legends to those who made it out the hood to those who loved the hood and never wanted to leave. A basketball story engulfed in a life story engulfed in the Cavs championship in 2016 with Lebron’s greatness embedded.

First reading that made me emotional. Raw, beautiful. From one 614 native to another, thank you.

No one is doing it like Hanif Abdurraqib. At this point, I truly think he could write the phone book and I'd still read it cover to cover (and probably cry). You don't have to love basketball to love this book. This is a story of community, loss, connection, hope. You feel everything Hanif is feeling in these pages. The writing is lyrical, moving, and there are moments that stopped me in my tracks. I'm struggling to eloquently write a review that does this book justice. Just go read it for yourself, ok?Thank you to Hanif for sharing his talent, to Netgally for the ARC, and most of all to ME for already pre-ordering this book months ago as soon as it was announced, despite being drunk at a Dave and Busters when said pre-order link went live. I'm so happy to have this on my shelf.

I want everyone in my family to read it. So much heart and soul

I wanted to love this book, which I bought after hearing the author interviewed on radio. Honestly, I found it a slog to grind through. The run-on sentences, massive paragraphs without a break, endless asides and interludes make it a tough book to stay with unless you're 100% bought in. It's a book about basketball much like "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" is about motorcycles. As in, not much at all.But as a meditation of life as a black man in modern America, there is a lot there worth sticking around for, especially for a reader who comes from a very different background. And those asides and interludes often go into fascinating places. At other times, they go on forever leading nowhere at all. Like I said, there's a lot of good stuff here and I get why this book and Hanif get the allocades they get. But it felt like a book that could really benefit from a mean sob of an editor.