Here are 100 books that The Lighter Side of Cricket fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I love cricket and have spent a lot of my life unsuccessfully learning how to play it. It still has a fascination for me. I am also a psychologist, and cricket has given me an even deeper understanding of human life.
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 book is aimed at the fan; at the person who listens to the Test Match on a motorway and narrowly avoids crashing whenever somone takes a wicket; at the weekend player who happily gives up his valuable afternoon to be given out for 0 by the umpire and who can't quite remember the lbw law. However, unlike most cricket books (gentle, elegiac, full of photographs of village greens circa 1850), this book is realistic. It accepts the great unspoken truth of cricket: that the other team are only there to make up the numbers and that the people you're…
I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I love cricket and have spent a lot of my life unsuccessfully learning how to play it. It still has a fascination for me. I am also a psychologist, and cricket has given me an even deeper understanding of 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.
I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I love cricket and have spent a lot of my life unsuccessfully learning how to play it. It still has a fascination for me. I am also a psychologist, and cricket has given me an even deeper understanding of human life.
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.
Of all the books about cricket, Mike Harfield's "Not Dark Yet" brings a rare authenticity to the subject. This is a book by a genuine cricketer and a genuine cricket fan with a talent for capturing the spirit of this special game in his witty prose. David Lloyd, aka Bumble, laughed so much he agreed to write the Foreword. He even showed the book to Christopher Martin-Jenkins who found it 'very entertaining and enjoyable'. Reading the book raises the spirits with its cheerful jollity. The mixture of banter and eclectic cricketing information carries the reader along, making for both easy…
I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I love cricket and have spent a lot of my life unsuccessfully learning how to play it. It still has a fascination for me. I am also a psychologist, and cricket has given me an even deeper understanding of human life.
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.
It seemed a simple enough idea at the outset: to assemble a team of eleven men to play cricket on each of the seven continents of the globe. Except - hold on a minute - that's not a simple idea at all. And when you throw in incompetent airline officials, amorous Argentine Colonels' wives, cunning Bajan drug dealers, gay Australian waiters, overzealous American anti-terrorist police, idiot Welshmen dressed as Santa Claus, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and whole armies of pitch-invading Antarctic penguins, you quickly arrive at a whole lot more than you bargained for. Harry Thompson's hilarious book tells the story…
A historian interested in the ‘cultural war’ over the legitimate form, function and meaning of sport, it is strange to look back and consider how ignorant I was of the class and cultural dynamics that shaped cricket in England until I began studying sport in my early thirties. Why, for instance, was English cricket ‘posh’ when compared to Australia? And why, within England, did the North and South have completely different cricket cultures and regional identities? These were questions I began to address in earnest and, a short twenty years later, I believe I finally have the answers. I could not have done it without these books. Enjoy!
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.
I’m a New Zealand writer, publisher, and editor, who has followed cricket since I was a boy. I've published poetry on many sports, including cricket, football, rugby, tennis, surfing, and netball, and edited/published anthologies of New Zealand cricket and football poems, "A Tingling Catch" and "Boots". My reading on the subject of cricket literature led me to seek out many different books and writers on a subject I didn’t think had an extensive history. I've played club cricket and schoolboy cricket and have a wide knowledge of the game from reading about its history and have visited cricket grounds such as Lord’s in London. I have been dubbed the “Poet-in-Residence” at The Cricket Society.
The Cricketer’s Companion, edited by Alan Ross, is an indispensable compilation of cricket stories/prose, accounts of great players and the poetry of cricket. Ross was the literary editor of renowned London Magazine and a sports enthusiast. This anthology has something for everyone and is eminently worth dipping into. A rich and wide ranging choice by Ross, he was quoted as saying that “I aimed at two things – the creating of a book that contained the most essential and enjoyable writing on cricket, and one that gave as inclusive a view as possible of the great landmarks.” It was aimed for those shipwrecked on an island perhaps as it includes everything you would need to know about cricket to survive if you couldn’t get to a match.
Keith rated it 4 of 5 stars: A delightful book that I have dipped into on many occasions over the years. It is that sort of book -- you can pass a few minutes or spend half a day reading selections. Edited by Alan Ross, it contains cricket stories, tales of great matches, essays on great players and men and moments, plus some lovely poetry about the summer game. And some of the finest writers on cricket are here: R.C. Robertson-Glasgow, Neville Cardus, Ray Robinson, A.A. Thomson, Jack Fingleton, etc. A treasury and a treasure!
A historian interested in the ‘cultural war’ over the legitimate form, function and meaning of sport, it is strange to look back and consider how ignorant I was of the class and cultural dynamics that shaped cricket in England until I began studying sport in my early thirties. Why, for instance, was English cricket ‘posh’ when compared to Australia? And why, within England, did the North and South have completely different cricket cultures and regional identities? These were questions I began to address in earnest and, a short twenty years later, I believe I finally have the answers. I could not have done it without these books. Enjoy!
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.
I’m a New Zealand writer, publisher, and editor, who has followed cricket since I was a boy. I've published poetry on many sports, including cricket, football, rugby, tennis, surfing, and netball, and edited/published anthologies of New Zealand cricket and football poems, "A Tingling Catch" and "Boots". My reading on the subject of cricket literature led me to seek out many different books and writers on a subject I didn’t think had an extensive history. I've played club cricket and schoolboy cricket and have a wide knowledge of the game from reading about its history and have visited cricket grounds such as Lord’s in London. I have been dubbed the “Poet-in-Residence” at The Cricket Society.
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.
I’ve always loved horses, in real life and fiction. I guzzled up pony stories as soon as I was old enough to read, then I started writing them, tales of teenage orphans adopted by distant aunts who lived in crumbling stately piles with fields full of ponies. When I started writing fiction for a living, it stood to reason horses would feature, and three decades after one trotted into my debut novel French Relations – then galloped off into the sunset in its sequelWell Groomed- they’re still a mainstay. Of the twenty novels I’ve written, more than half have horses at their heart, including my new Comptons series.
This first of Sassoon’s semi-biographical Sherston trilogy is a nostalgic amble along Edwardian English lanes, across its village greens, and over its hedges, tracing the early years of likeable, witty George Sherston before the Great War. It depicts a bygone era of pearl-clutching maiden aunts, rumbustious village cricket matches, and the rigours of the hunting field, in which enthusiastic recruit George is a terrific observer of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. He is winningly grateful to his horses for being so much better at it than him, from flighty first pony Sheila to trusty hunter Harkaway, and ‘bargain’ point-to-pointer Cockbird who is gifted to the cavalry at the book’s close, just as George accepts his commission to the Flintshire Fusiliers to fight in the Great War, saying farewell to his halcyon childhood. Sassoon, famous for his war poetry, is such a warm and intelligent writer that his affection for characters…
The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell
A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war.
In this first novel of the semiautobiographical George Sherston trilogy, Sassoon wonderfully captures the vanishing idylls of the Edwardian English countryside. Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's…
I’m a New Zealand writer, publisher, and editor, who has followed cricket since I was a boy. I've published poetry on many sports, including cricket, football, rugby, tennis, surfing, and netball, and edited/published anthologies of New Zealand cricket and football poems, "A Tingling Catch" and "Boots". My reading on the subject of cricket literature led me to seek out many different books and writers on a subject I didn’t think had an extensive history. I've played club cricket and schoolboy cricket and have a wide knowledge of the game from reading about its history and have visited cricket grounds such as Lord’s in London. I have been dubbed the “Poet-in-Residence” at The Cricket Society.
Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade may not be available online as it’s another one I found second-hand. It’s written by one of the great West Indian cricket players Gary Sobers. Published in the 1960s it reads like a James Bond-Ian Fleming-type spy novel covering a youngster Clyde St Joseph Bonaventure at a computer company called Star Computers which has a cricket team that he plays for. Bonaventure makes headline news for inventing a way of playing cricket using a computer programme to smash over 200 runs and take 6 wickets for less than a hundred runs. Bonaventure finishes his training by completing his new programme for computers. Bonaventure is offered bribes by foreign competitors but refuses and is kidnapped by a “foreign power” but escapes.
