Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports

National Book Award–winner Casey (Spartina) offers insight into his lifelong avocation. Casey notes that the “parts of history most easily accessible to us are, naturally, those more fully recorded,” and he spent most of his adult life recording his own. Offered in a series of vignettes, some previously published, Casey focuses on endurance activities, such as long-distance running, cross-country skiing, and rowing and canoeing. Those are occasionally interrupted by chest-thumping events such as judo and hay baling. Casey, a literature professor, regularly invokes such authors as Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, and William Faulkner. His own narrative skills are featured in his tale of an Outward Bound adventure in Maine. Spent largely with a group in a whaling boat that became a “communal cradle... conveniently on course,” it was a physical and mental journey akin to a combination of Walden and Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” (Nov.)