Sometimes, Hein sends us posts about books. We don’t assign these articles, and we don’t pay for them. We just post them. Don’t blame us.

Trying to Get Back into Reading Books? Here are some secret tips and how-to hints from the experts!

Reading for Pleasure for Search Engines

1. Read what interests you. It’s all books.
2. Nobody cares what you read.
3. Get comfy.
4. Charge your phone way over there.
5. Try a different book.
6. Grab the books you’ll read today.
7. Don’t sweat the books you haven’t read.
8. Be yourself. 

Two Thousand, Five Hundred and Two Books to Read or Die Trying

Which books, and how many, must we read before we die?

Considered:
501 Must-Read Books
Bounty / Octopus (Hachette), 2006
ed. Emma Beare

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Quintessence / Universe / Rizzoli, 2006, 2010
ed. Peter Boxall

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List
Workman, 2018
by James Mustich (with three assistants)

501 Spanish Verbs: Fully Conjugated, 4th edition
Barrons, 1996
by Christopher Kendris

Bud

Undersized underdogs, libraries, and the Mets

BUD HARRELSON, SUPER SHORTSTOP is the title of a throwaway book I briefly owned, but that’s not the book that made me a Mets fan. That book is How to Play Better Baseball, written by the super shortstop himself and edited by Joel H. Cohen. With my mom standing somewhere behind me, I picked that book off the shelves of a public library in the Pacific Northwest of the late 1970s.

Bud Harrelson’s self-identification as a “little guy” in his introduction got me right away. He wrote that “big guys,” around “180 pounds,” play other positions, but that a slick-fielding little guy could play shortstop.

Harrelson did just that, wearing a (presumably extra-small) Superman T-shirt under his uniform, and contributing to Met roommate Tom Seaver’s incredible outings as the pair played in the 1969 and 1973 World Series.

I still like undersized underdogs, libraries, and the Mets; I like baseball again, too.

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