If you want to know how much I like Hanif Abdurraqib, I read this book about basketball even though there wasn’t a sports-related book bingo square to fill with it. And I enjoyed it. Far more than I’ve enjoyed other books this year about topics that should have been a slam dunk with me (ha ha, I made a sport reference in my sport book review).
There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib makes basketball interesting, because it’s not so much about the sport itself as how people feel about the sport. I could not care less about scores and statistics, but I very much care about understanding my fellow humans, and I’ve never really understood the passion that people feel for sports and the attachment they feel to their local (or otherwise identified-with) team.
This book is about LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, but it’s also about high school basketball, and it’s also about shooting hoops with your friends on the cracked court in your neighborhood. But like all of Hanif Abdurraqib’s books, it’s also about his life and family, about growing up Black in a neighborhood that other people looked down on and feared, and it’s about love (of basketball, of friends, of that neighborhood).
This book talks about LeBron James, but it also talks about players who came before him, and players who came up around the same time as him, showed similar or even greater promise, and stumbled somewhere along the way. James and the Cavs serve as the sort of central motif of the book that would draw in a sports fan, but they are really just one part of a greater story of basketball in Ohio over the past fifty or so years, and Abdurraqib’s childhood and young adulthood, including some time in prison and some time being unhoused.
In fact, the moment that sticks with me from this book is not a basketball anecdote, but when the author was sleeping in a storage unit and heard the manager loudly lead a superior doing an inspection to another area, allowing him to vacate before he was discovered. That little kindness, that unspoken acknowledgement that she knew he’d been crashing there and wasn’t going to get him in trouble, was such a beautiful thing.
But there are also beautiful moments for basketball fans, as Abdurraqib turns his poetic attentions to gravity-defying dunks and game-changing plays, describing them in a way that helped me understand why they were important, and how they would make a fan feel.
I think often about the idea that books build empathy. I believe they can, if we’re reading the right books, but also if we’re reading them with the right mindset. You have to be willing to meet the author where they are. You have to be willing to say “I don’t care about basketball, but you do, and I am curious about what it means to you” or “I grew up hearing negative stories about the sort of neighborhood you grew up in, and the sort of kid and young man you were, but I want your perspective.” I find that Abdurraqib’s books give me a window into what it’s been like to be a Black Muslim boy and man in America, as opposed to my experience growing up as a girl in a white Christian family. Though we are almost the same age, our experiences are so very different, with only the small overlaps that come from being kids in the 80s and 90s in families that never really had enough money.
There’s Always This Year did not make me a sports fan; I’m not going to sit down and watch a basketball game any time soon. But now I have a deeper understanding of sports fans, and maybe I have a little more empathy for Seattleites who are still mad about their basketball team being sold away to another city.
CWs and TWs: Discussions of death, including death of a parent, crime, the briefest mentions of sex and drugs, ample discussion of racism, medium amount of justice system content.
Source and Format: I borrowed the audiobook from Timberland Regional Library.
Reading Challenge Prompts
World of Whimm: Best Seller. This book was a New York Times best seller.
SAL/SPL/KCLS: SAL Speaker (Past or Present). I’m really glad Abdurraqib was an SAL speaker because any time I can use one of his books for a book bingo square, I will.
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 10 of 25, no bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 14 of 25, 1 bingo.
Book Riot: 12 of 25.
Physical TBR: 6 of 12.
World of Whimm: 17 of 24, 2 bingos.
SAL/SPL/KCLS: 6 of 23, no bingos.