Five things you wish you'd written

Well, one of them is William Nack's piece on Secretariat and I almost don't give a damn what the other four are.

 

My last five stories

Signed
Jayson Blair

 

The Crossing _ Cormac McCarthy, easily my favorite book in a great trilogy

To Kill a Mockingbird, the most perfect little book I've read, because there was no fluff, no wasted words, no book-bloating "look at me, I'm a writer" paragraphs.

The Killer Angels, because so many have written about the Civil War and few have done it so well.

The Old Man and the Sea,

Dave Barry's 50 funniest columns. (Chicks dig funny dudes).

Grapes of Wrath, just cause

 

How can you tell this is a bunch of low-paid sportswriters?

No one has wished they'd written a pre-nup.

 

Slap Shot
Home Game
The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty
Live From New York
Game Of Shadows

EDIT: Death of a Racehorse

 

1. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
2. The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane ("None of them knew the color of the sky" ... one of the best first sentences of all time)
3. The Eighty-Yard Run, by Irwin Shaw (I tell people this is the best sports story I've ever read, even though it's not, you know, REALLY about sports)
4. The House That Thurman Munson Built, by Michael Paterniti
5. The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell

 

1. A better resume when I was coming out of college.
2. An article that would let the reader know that I am on the staff at a major metro.
3. Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella
4. Happy Birthday To You
5. A letter to my dad, before he got sick, explaining what he meant to me.

 

Loved McCarthy's "The Road" ... Of the three McCarthy novels I read, it was the one I most enjoyed ... beyond the dialogue in "No Country ..."

If they ever make a movie out of that book, it will have a downer ending that makes "Legends of the Fall" look like Gidget.

 

Couldn't agree more about the dialogue in "No Country." I read the book before I saw the movie, and was sad that my favorite part (the part where Llewellyn picks up the girl and they're talking about life, as he's driving) didn't make it.

 

Haha. Nice. But to nit-pick: Technically, they wrote their stories.

 

Absolute props on that one. I remember that story from a lit class in college, so much so that I recently ordered a book of Shaw's short stories from Amazon just so I could get "The Eighty-Yard Run."