22 books like Fibber in the Heat

This is a book that has sparked a thousand imitations. If a writer isn’t honest, he’s not doing his job, and Nick Hornby is painfully honest here about his self-destructive, blokey obsessions with football and music. It’s a trailblazer of a book and a theme that resonates with a lot of men, me included.

Why would anyone seriously want to attend a family wedding when your team is playing in a cup final? How inconsiderate can a couple be to get married on the final day of the cup? To hold those thoughts–without a hint of irony–is viewed as an affliction and an absurdity by many. But of course, they don’t understand! 

It's not an easy read, but I read this one and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road back-to-back. These are two books about lost souls walking away from something, not knowing where they’re going.

Michael K is another character who invokes more sympathy/pity than admiration. Sometimes, I didn’t overly care about Michael K’s suffering, feeling he’d brought it on himself. Mostly, though, I wanted him to find his simple peace.

JM Coetzee is such a good writer. His sparse but full sentences always deliver something.

When a prospective agent asked me who I most aspired to be like as a writer, I said Percival Everett. Her response was, ‘But you’re not black?’

To me, labeling Percival Everett as a ‘black writer’ does him a huge disservice because, above all else, he’s unpredictable, quirky, and seriously funny. I love this book because it’s weird and subverted, with a hero who’s a mathematical expert in nothing–confronted by a villain who wants to steal and control nothing. It’s fun and frothy, with tangents and trapdoors all over the place. Like most, I came to Percival Everett via The Trees and backtracked. I'm glad I found him, though. 

Keith Waterhouse is a forgotten writer nowadays, which is a shame. His dreamy character, Billy Liar, is a brilliant creation and one for all ages–the original young man stifled by family, boredom, and expectations who wants to break free from it all and live out the life he’s already living for himself in his head.

I read this book when I was a teenager, probably because my Dad often called me and my brother ‘Billy Liar,’ such as when I told him I wanted to be a jockey. I was too heavy for that profession, even then (plus, I’d never sat on a horse and still haven’t). Still, that’s the joy and absurdity of this book; it takes the notion of following your dreams to a new and dangerous level.

Personally, I’m always fascinated with dreamers like Billy. But there are times when his life choices make you groan.

I love this book for its twists and jokes.

It’s full of little stories and you think at the beginning of each one that that it’s going to describe an interesting situation from a serious point of view. So you wait for the ending. But it suddenly turns at the last and gives you a totally unexpected comical twist.

I have heard a lot of cricket stories but I hadn’t heard the one about WG Grace before. This book is a diamond mine.

This is a very funny book about a very serious game’ and has a foreword by David Lloyd, the famous comical cricket commentator and ex-professional player.

This is a true book describing all the events involved in getting a team together to play cricket each week. It’s hilarious some of the excuses they come up with for not turning up each week.

There is a magnificent photograph at the end of the book showing all the members of Mike Harfield’s XI in 1981. People’s names have not been changed and no one’s identity is protected.

There are also some real gems of information that you wouldn’t find even in Wikipedia about the finer points of the derivation of the word ‘Nelson’. Also some humorous quips about real-life famous figures, not necessarily connected with cricket, but the descriptions are depicted in cricketing terms.

This is a fantastic idea, to assemble a team of eleven men to play cricket on each of the seven continents in the world. What is more amazing is that it actually took the place.

The book is actually a posthumous publication since Harry Thompson, the famous writer, died soon after completing the tour and was still playing cricket in his last days. There are wonderful descriptions of their players.

One, apparently was so covered in hair that he was accepted by a troupe of monkeys whilst fielding in the outfield in Kuala Lumpur.

This is a total gem of a book. It is a collection of all the best classic short stories about cricket that there are.

They have the Arthur Conan Doyle one called "The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper". This will always be my favourite. I roared with laughter at the Furniss Drawings in the book –  caricatures of WG Grace reprinted with permission from MCC. But besides these there are little gems collected from obscure sources, each of them brilliant in their own right.

Very rarely do you have anything so good in one volume. 

This is a book about cricket, one of the enduring passions of my life.

Specifically it is about West Indian cricket and life in the author’s home of Trinidad. James was a Marxist intellectual, which is unusual for a cricketer. He writes eloquently and insightfully about cricket and some of its leading characters of 80 years ago. He writes about class and colour in both the Caribbean and England, where he played and reported on cricket for newspapers.

My interest has also been in the British Empire and its impact. The overriding impression this book left with me was the “Britishness” of the people of Trinidad; how much the people had imbibed it. So when many immigrated to Britain in the 1950s it felt like they were going ‘home’, only for many to be ostracised.

Although best known for his A Social History of English Cricket (1998), The Willow Wand is, for me, Birley’s best cricket book. I imagine I’d have enjoyed Birley’s company for he not only writes with great humour, he understood exclusivity was not the same thing as quality and he burst the elitist bubble that had long surrounded the game in England by dissecting the game’s most treasured and fervently protected myths and personalities with forensic precision. 

Be it imperialism, the game’s most revered chronicler Neville Cardus or, even, the game’s premier icon W. G. Grace, Birley leaves no stone unturned, and he even alludes to the distinct regional identities that define the game in the North and South of England, which formed the basis of my own book.