80 books like Unstoppable

If you want a break from fantasy and sci-fi, and you love a book with morally grey characters, then this is it.

Beartown is a town that survives on hockey. The kids play it, the grown-ups work in anything related, and just like in sports, both sides consider themselves the good side in every action they take.

We follow the manager of the hockey club as he must make impossible decisions, then the players, each making their own mistakes. We see villains grow from a place that we can understand, and we see good people making bad calls because no one can be perfect all the time.

And most importantly, we see how sometimes, no choice is the right choice. Especially for the victim.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because it’s set in South Africa and has all the elements that move me as a human being: pain, pleasure, violence, mysticism, and adventure. There was also enough drama to keep my nose immersed in this book for hours on end. To say I loved Peekay is an understatement. It takes a hellofa writer to make me feel.

I ached for Peekay, was excited for him, humiliated for him, thrilled for him, and proud of him. I felt Peekay. I agree wholeheartedly with a literary critic who said of this book: “Unabashedly uplifting…asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independence–‘the power of one’ can prevail.” 

This is a book I found out about when I was researching and writing my own book. It follows the story of three British cyclists, Zoe, Kate, and Jack, as they train for Olympic glory. Cleave writes about the glorious excitement of the sport, the brutal pain of training, and the hard choices these athletes have to make and his characters are unforgettable. 

Gold helped me realise that you can write a book that weaves sport into a story about love, friendship, loyalty, and grief. Gold was a great inspiration to me!

Danny Kelly is a living, breathing gay Greek protagonist, and the choices this driven young competitive swimmer faces about loving relationships—while he’s in the pursuit of athletic prowess—are written with a resounding ring of truth. Tsiolkas’ visceral sex scenes, underpinned by gripping descriptions of the desires behind the mechanics, speak to much more than the act itself. They go to the heart of identity in a novel with so many layers of self-definition: the migrant, the working class hero, the quintessential male, the stereotypical gay, the success story, and the abject failure. That Danny escapes his ambition alive is a miracle, and it has everything to do with digging deep and staring down expectations.

There is definitely porn in this book, except it’s tennis porn. How could it not, when we are talking about two of the greatest players to ever play the game? Although lately Novak Djokovic has entered the conversation for a good part of the last two decades, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were men’s tennis, and the pinnacle of their rivalry was Wimbledon in 2008, the specific tournament and the specific final that Jon writes about in this book. A classic match deserves a classic retelling, and this work of nonfiction does so much more by threading the many changes that have taken place in modern tennis: advances in racquet and string technology, performance-enhancing drugs, and the impacts of online betting.

If there’s a writer who could have written about tennis and pornography and made it work way better than yours truly, it is David Foster Wallace. But David did not waste his time on this planet (suicide in his 46th year) on idle silliness – no, he wrote essays like “Federer as a Religious Experience” for The New York Times, which is the fifth and final essay in his collection of his tennis nonfiction. Ranked nationally as a junior, David possessed intimate knowledge of the sport, and the first essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” indeed features a tornado that rips through team practice, but believe it or not, that natural disaster is not as frightening as the drudgery of tennis drills that he must master.

This beautiful book is the catalogue of an art exhibition devoted to paintings and photographs that capture the world of tennis, demonstrating the close link between art and the sport. Indeed, many enthusiasts see tennis as an art in its own right and this book should convince any waverers. The gorgeous coloured and black and white illustrations range from late Victorian genre scenes of tennis as a social event including champagne, strawberries, and flirtation, on through the androgynous twenties and thirties and its development into the modern power game. Accompanying essays trace the game’s wider cultural influence. Here you will find above all the languor and elegance of social tennis and especially the centrality of women to it, from ladies playing in bustles and high heels to the Williams sisters in skin-tight miniskirts.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Charley for our book.

He’s a great storyteller. He was probably the first practitioner to advocate for passive index investing. He’s a tennis enthusiast, and his book was inspired by a book he read aimed at amateur tennis players. Ellis learned that to win at tennis, the best strategy is to simply try to not lose, and to not try to act like professional players.

He realized that the same strategy worked for investors as well. That means that investors shouldn’t try to beat the market.

Originally written as a tennis coaching text – the wisdom of this approach transcends the world of tennis and carries an important message about how changing our thinking can release the latent potential in us whatever we are doing.

The focus is on the importance of self-talk – what our outer self is telling the inner self and in doing so chimes beautifully with what we know about our unconscious mind. We know that more than 90% of our behaviour is driven by our unconscious and it hears everything we say to ourselves – so consider the impact of critical self-talk and the potential damage to our confidence and performance.

The book is summarised in the formula: Potential minus Interference = Performance

We achieve at our best when we manage the ‘Interference’ we impose on ourselves!

I loved this book because of how raw and vulnerable Agassi was in sharing his insecurities and adversities during his time as a tennis pro. As a tennis pro myself, I completely related to Agassi sharing his experiences as a competitor and the internal challenges he faced mentally and emotionally.

There’s no doubt that sports have countless common threads that help us to succeed in life. When competing in tennis, you’re out there by yourself, alone with only your thoughts. Therefore, controlling your mindset and constantly striving for superior excellence is vital in giving yourself the chance for peak performance.

I also liked how he found fulfillment through personal growth and maturity in overcoming adversities which ultimately led him to have a deep love and appreciation of tennis, and finding the love of his life in marrying Steffi Graf.