80 books like Not Dark Yet

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.

Marcus Berkmann doesn’t write about great famous cricket players of superb accomplishments. He writes about people who are also great, but in a different way. He writes about incompetent amateurs like us, the ordinary weekend cricketers.

Berkmann is a prime example with a thunderously low batting average. It’s all about failure in so many ways and is so hilarious for being all that. It’s absolutely perfect for reading in the cricket pavilion or in your car on a rain-affected cricket day waiting for the showers to stop. But you will still get wet with tears of laughter. It’s so true of trivial human life.

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 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.

Although a book that bites off more than it may comfortably chew, Bowen’s masterpiece could not be ignored. As the first (and only) attempt to tell the history of cricket on a global scale, Bowen’s analysis may appear, considering subsequent research, a tad superficial in places. However, as a point of reference, it is a remarkable – unique even – book that has belatedly been recognised as a classic. 

Why the delay? Bowen, as the game’s first maverick historian, was not only adept at exposing the inferior scholarship that then passed for cricket history, he also took great pleasure in baiting the establishment and those who thought they were part of it. As such, it is upon his shoulders, rather than James perhaps, that fellow ‘revisionists’ Birley, Marqusee, and myself stand upon.

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.

A book I found second-hand so it may not be widely available online. It is the quintessential anthology on the poetry of cricket dating back over 200 years and was described as a history in verse of the British national summer pastime. This was the book that first led to my interest in cricket literature and gives a meticulous history of cricket in poetry. All forms of cricket (club, village, schools, test, and international) are mentioned just as all forms of verse are used from doggerel, couplets, and single quatrains to longer narrative heroic poems on olden day cricket. The anthology shows Frewin’s great love of cricket and is a labour of love making it a masterpiece at the time it appeared in the 1960s.

It’s a small world as they say. And the world of cricket is undoubtedly smaller as I know Gideon. This said, I would defy any serious appraisal of cricket’s historical literature to exclude one of his many excellent books on the game. 

I have, however, chosen his first which covers one of the most momentous events in the game’s global history: the creation of a new competition called World Series Cricket (WSC) by the Australian TV mogul Kerry Packer that, ultimately, led to the game’s renaissance. As much as the story, and the various characters involved, are superbly researched the story of WSC, as Haigh acknowledges himself, "could just as easily be a text on television economics, or marketing, or sociology, even anthropology." It remains, therefore, a very important book.

If James and Birley upset the game’s establishment, the impact of Marqusee’s Anyone But England was on an altogether different level. Like James, Marqusee was a Marxist. But where James pulled his punches and has, regrettably, been co-opted by English cricket’s establishment, there is very little danger of Marqusee ever suffering the same fate. One must only read his Wisden obituary to understand this. 

Suffice to say, Marqusee’s unflinching analysis exposed English cricket’s institutional hypocrisy, class discrimination, and racial prejudices long before the issues of elitism and racism became points of serious discussion in 2021. Considering this, it is a genuine tragedy that Marqusee and this book were not taken more seriously. Nevertheless, despite the passing decades, Anyone But England still packs a serious punch!

Found at a book fair, Six and Out is a classic of Australasian cricket literature and the first book I came across that focused on New Zealand and Australian cricket writing. It is an anthology divided into groupings: cricket tales, cricket heroes, general cricket, cricket mayhem, cricket verse, and cricket cartoons. It has a something for everyone feel about it. Perfect for those rain affected matches. It was considered the best Australian cricket book ever published at the time. It was a ground-breaking grouping of cricket writings and first appeared in 1964. Jack Pollard followed cricket ever since he was a boy in minor grades and he was influenced by readers of the first edition on what to include as thousands wrote to him making suggestions.