There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension 

By Hanif Abdurraqib 

Random House, 2024. 334 pages. Nonfiction. 

While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir: 'Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.' 

This is the second essay collection I have read from Hanif Abdurraqib and it has convinced me to read everything else he publishes (see my review for A Little Devil in America if you want to learn more about his other collection I have read). Abdurraqib is both a poet and an essayist, and you can tell because his essays are as lyrical as poems, and his poems are meaningful enough to be full essays. I would highly recommend listening to the audiobook version, especially because this collection is narrated by the author himself. I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of sports, but I am a huge fan of talented writing and insightful cultural analyses. 

If you like There’s Always This Year, you might also like: 

Punch Me Up to the Gods 

By Brian Broome 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. 250 pages. Biography. 

A coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. 

How to Say Babylon 

By Safiya Sinclair 

Simon & Schuster, 2023. 335 pages. Biography. 

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair's reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

LA