A review by pdxpagemaster
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

emotional funny hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

“I would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing. It isn’t my first time, casting this wish out into the distance, but I would like for the wish to be taken seriously this time around by whoever is in charge of such things. I don’t believe the architect to be any kind of God, though I would be open to being proven wrong. I imagine, most likely, that we are dealing with one of God‘s lesser angels. One of the bored and mischievous ones, with too much time on their hands, who disrupted an otherwise reasonably stable emotional cocktail with their own whimsy. If this meeting were ever to occur, I would most like to discuss the nuances of heartbreak. Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator. Loneliness and heartbreak are not the same. I have been heartbroken and preoccupied with any number of pleasing, but ultimately, foolish pursuits, just as I have been lonely with a heart at least mostly intact (though it can be said that my heart, and perhaps yours, hum at the frequency of a low and ever-present breaking).”

This is so much more than a book about basketball.