Marathon Monday: Top 5 Books About Running

In honor of today's 115th running of the Boston Marathon, five books you definitely don't need to be able to run a marathon in order to read (and hey, none of them are BORN TO RUN!):

John Bingham, THE COURAGE TO START. The cheese factor is such that it must be digested in small bits, but Bingham's positive uptalk of running as a Sport for Everyone doesn't wear and is easy to internalize.
John L. Parker, ONCE A RUNNER. The Mile of Trials, the Trial of Miles! This novel about a superior college athlete (earlier described as the THE FOUNTAINHEAD of running) feels at once like a long work of poetry and the kind of paperback that might be passed around in a locker room from teammate to teammate.
Kathrine Switzer, MARATHON WOMAN. Fittingly, Switzer was the first woman to run with an official number in the Boston Marathon (acquired through registering with her initials instead of her full name), but went on to carve out a career in managing and publicizing women's sporting events, dealing with organizations that wanted to negate her entire career.
Dean Karnazes, ULTRAMARATHON MAN, because before he was an ego on legs and a "fighter" "against" "childhood obesity" he was just a dude at a desk job who was kind of regretting life.
Haruki Murakami, WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING. Murakami is probably the most serious writer-runner and this book is about half writing, half running. But if you can shake the laughable image of Murakami running with a MiniDisc player in the first chapter, you will probably underline a dozen passages in this book and press it into the hands of all your friends... says my friend.

If you know aught of Wolfe or Kesey, you know I was in California over the weekend (well, tumbled off the plane yesterday morning). I thought about writing a Reading On The Road post, as I do, but I wasn't sure how much I would get read if anything. I was still vacillating half an hour before I had to be at JFK, which is uncharacteristically indecisive even for me.

On the flight out I was unseasonably plowing through Ian Frazier's TRAVELS IN SIBERIA. The in-flight TV system was broken and repeating a 40-minute loop of promotional clips of Broadway shows, shopping, actors from "Fringe" being interviewed. The man next to me hadn't brought anything to do, and about two hours in he pressed the call button and complained to the flight attendant, "Can you do something about this? It keeps repeating. I'm beginning to get irritated." The world's tallest, baldingest 5-year-old.

On the flight back I didn't sleep much but I read most of John L. Parker's ONCE A RUNNER, which I picked up on a whim at the Strand a few weeks ago. It's sort of like a FOUNTAINHEAD set in college track and/but (depending on your view of THE FOUNTAINHEAD) it improved as it went along.