The booger in the pool is way more important to me than what place I came in at the 1988 or 1992 trials.
My favorite book this year — at least it’s the one I’ve picked out of the stack beside my bed the most often — is Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (Blue Rider Press), a memoir of competitive swimming and a meditation on the swimming pool that defies any attempt to sum it up in a single line.
Benjamin Anastas’ Year in Reading.
What her elegant prose allows to float slowly to the surface with the fluid definition of air bubbles is the fact that because she did not succeed at the Olympic trials she has succeeded in life by learning that life is “complicated, mostly sad, and mostly beautiful.
Buzz Poole reviews Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies
