Reviews - There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

1.93k reviews for:

There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Hanif Abdurraqib

4.47 AVERAGE

akleake's review against another edition

4.0

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

In theory I have nothing in common with the author or his story. But I cannot deny the connection the author creates with his readers.
It’s unlike any memoir I’ve read. Beautiful prose with so much creativity and vulnerability.
Looking forward to reading more from this author.

terranstorm's review against another edition

Soft DNF as I actually think I'll come back to read this sometime later, but unfortunately I only started it the day before it was due back to the library as I hadn't been much in the mood for a memoir. Will request it again.

thebeesknees79's review against another edition

5.0

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

chestnut_pod's review against another edition

I'm pretty alone in this based on the reviews, but I think Hanif Abdurraqib's latest foray into the poetic memoir-and-philosophy-of-performance space which he essentially invented is his weakest. It being Hanif Abdurraqib, this meditation on basketball, Abrurraqib's lifelong fandom for it, and the game's relationship to the city of Columbus, is beautiful, melancholy, and often profoundly touching, but it felt less controlled than his previous excursions on Black art and performance. It's lovely but messy, basically, suffering from too much fluff at both the sentence level and the overarching narrative level. This diffusion hides the structure, which nominally follows the four quarters of a basketball game but at times fails to channel the content or emotional intensity of the many nonlinear narratives into something more than a series of beautifully written anecdotes or musings. There's also not quite as much basketball as I was perhaps expecting, with concomitantly more memoir, and perhaps my expectations of a different balance led me to feel ungrounded within the work. Worth reading, but far from his best.