Off-Season: Books!!
The hockey off-season brings a surfeit of warm-weather activities: golf, baseball, rollerblading, and my favorite, reading. I don’t find it at all incongrous to read hockey books when it’s 90 degrees and humid. To help share the warmth, I collected my list of favorite hockey books in a sidebar page, and I’ll get around to updating it in the next few weeks.
Just finished Jack Falla’s Home Ice and Saved. I think you have to read them in that order; Home Ice is about the joys of owning a backyard rink and is a collection of his essays and stories, all true. Saved is a work of fiction, but like all good fiction, a little bit of the author makes a celebrity cameo appearance. It’s especially appropriate for this playoff season, but I won’t spoil the ending.
June 1st, 2008 at 7:58 am
Hi, Hal…thanks for mentioning my recent books HOME ICE and SAVED; and, you’re right, they should be read in that order.
The follow-up to HOME ICE - another collection of essays and memoirs — is entitled OPEN ICE and it should be in book store in early September. It’s now up for pre-release discounted sale on Amamzon.
Am toying around with idea for another novel, but first I want to see how SAVED does. Most early reviews have been good but there haven’t been many of them.
Jack
September 21st, 2008 at 8:33 am
Thanks for the kind words about Jack. There have been many, but some more from the heart and others more from the form. I’ve read the ones from the heart and learned things (particularly about Jack’s impact teaching) that I never knew — other than why he only taught 8:00 a.m. classes and would give students six exclamation points for the semester; “Use them wisely”. He had a deep seated hatred of them.
One thing that I’m pretty sure about — Jack wasn’t “vanity cruising Google”. I’m sure for two reasons. First - he had extremely little vanity, and second, had even less computer skill. E-mail could challenge him at times. Only saw him cry maybe three times, but I believe one of them was when he had to give up his Underwood he’d had since high school and finally use a computer…a MAC to be specific since it was supposed to be easier to use. It wasn’t.
Thanks for remembering my brother so kindly. I miss him.
Elizabeth (Falla) Verrill