One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Friday Night Lights. I knew there'd been a book, and then a movie, and that the show wasn't especially closely related to either except in broad strokes. But I'd always harbored a curiosity about the book, so I picked up H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights to finally experience the source material. In it, Bissinger tells the story of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, in the late 80s. But he doesn't just tell the story of the team...like the subtitle ("A Town, A Team, And A Dream") suggests, he places them in context. He tells the story of Odessa, of the boom-and-bust oil economy in Texas with which Odessa lives and dies, the racial tensions that are ever-simmering, and the way that a community needing something to cheer for and feel good about can place so much hope and feeling into a sports team.

That enormity of public emotional investment into the team has real ramifications for the people who make it up: the coach and his family, of course, but also the players. The coach (only very vaguely reminiscent of the beloved Coach Taylor) is at least a well-compensated professional, but the players are just teenagers. You can see the loose outlines of some of the characters who would make up the core of the show: the hot-shot, big-talking running back, the reserved, wary quarterback, the trouble-making, fast-living halfback. But the players themselves are kind of inconsequential: they are merely the bodies inside the uniforms that have such symbolic meaning. It's Permian that the crowd roots for year after year, even as the names on the jerseys come and go.

Reading this after seeing the show is the opposite of the usual reaction: the screen adaptation is so rich and beautifully realized that the book has a hard time living up to the comparison. Part of that is because they're telling similar stories in two very different ways. The book is more interested in looking at the broader social picture and the way that team fits into that picture as a whole, and only then in its component parts, while the show takes the opposite storytelling tack and focuses on the people and their relationships making up the team, filling in the charged atmosphere around them but leaving it as mostly background. So by nature the book is more impersonal, more clinical and removed. The show, on the other hand, focused on realistic character development in a way that even many authors I've read could benefit from learning from. Of the two versions, I'd recommend that literally everyone watch the show, but the book is good-not-great. If you like stories about football and/or small town life, you'll likely enjoy it. If not, it's skippable. ( )

I have not read this. Y’all I do not care for sports at all but a good book is a good book.

I enjoyed Doris Kern Goodwin’s book Wait Til Next Year so we’ll see how this stacks up. I’ll update after I read this.

I really don't know football at all, and I think that prevented me a bit from enjoying this book as much as other people. For one thing, I really didn't get a handle on all of the different players (only Boobie stuck out) and my eyes glazed over when Bissinger would do a play-by-play of the games. But this is a powerful book about adolescence and the allure and psychic dangers of sports and putting people on a pedestal. ( )

PAP II Summer Reading:

As with Into the Wild, I did put this one off, too, for nearly three months, and it was the one I finished within twelve hours of the first day of school. Unlike Into the Wild, I find very little redeemable about this book, which I continued to look for a thread of light in (even as a mismanaged sports metaphor for the urban superhero), but I found myself in a depressing dirge that told tack by tack exactly why high school football should be removed from ruining children's lives.

I can easily piece together how we'll use it to discuss identity, conformity, and individualism, but just as much I'm counting down to returning it to Amazon in exchange for a completely different book, and thanking my stars that Audible does that. ( )

A look at Permian High School foot ball program in 1988. H.G. Bissinger followed this team for one season, then in this edition went back 25 years later to follow up his book. It is a raw look at many issues that our country faces today. ( )