Watching Wildlife Book

This review is going to be less of a review, and more of me talking. You've been warned!

I hunted this book down because I read somewhere that Aaron Sorkin got a lot of his ideas for Sports Night from watching Keith and Dan on SportsCenter. And Sports Night being one of my favorite shows, and my sports mania still in full swing post-Red Sox victory, I figured I needed to get my hands on it.

And it's good. Very, very funny. It makes me cranky that I never actually watched SportsCenter when they were the hosts - I mean, I had good reasons, what with being ten years old then, a girl, a reader rather than a tv watcher, and lacking cable - but, man, was I missing out.

As a terrible storyteller, I appreciate a good one, and these guys are good. They wrote the book in their same back-and-forth banter style that they used on the show, and it worked much better than I expected it to be. Probably in large part because when they interrupted each other, it was usually to mock each other. I can't really remember any one or two stories vividly, which is a good sign: they were all so good that none of them stood out.

Keith's list of baseball players who should be in the Hall of Fame was far more interesting than a list of 100 guys I've never heard of before should ever be. I'm going to have to hunt down some of the names, to see if they ever made it in. (As, of course, this book was published in 1997, and presumably, things have changed since then.)

I suppose I should make it clear that even though it is a book about their lives working in sports, and what they think about sports, their favorite parts of different sports, their problems with sports, their craziest moments in sports, their favorite things said about sports - sports sports sports - you don't need all that much knowledge about sports to read it. It probably makes it more interesting, and you'd get more of the jokes, but it's still a fun read without much prior knowledge.

I especially enjoyed "A Sort of Glossary of Terms", explaining where the catchphrases and sayings they used came from. Very funny.