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have become, in my head, what Los Angeles is .) Going to a good U.S. bookshop is still ludicrously exciting (unless I’m on book tour, when the excitement tends to wear off a little): as I don’t see American books-pages, I have no idea whether one of my favorite authors—Charles Baxter, for example, on this trip—has a new book out, and there’s every chance that it won’t be published in the UK for months, if at all. There is enough money in the music and movie industries to ensure that we get to hear about most things that might interest us; books have to remain a secret, to be discovered only when you spend time browsing. This is bad for authors, but good for the assiduous shopper.
    Mark Salzman’s book about juvenile offenders I read about in the Believer . I met Mark after a reading in L.A. some years ago, and one of the many memorable things he told me was that he’d written a large chunk of his last novel almost naked, covered in aluminum foil, with a towel round his head, sitting in a car. His reasons for doing so, which I won’t go into here, were sound, and none of them were connected with mental illness, although perhaps inevitably he had caused his wife some embarrassment—especially when she brought friends back to the house. Jincy Willett, whose work I had never heard of, I bought because of her blurbs, which, I’m afraid to say, only goes to show that blurbs do work.
    I was in the U.S. for the two epic playoff series, between the Cubs and the Marlins, and the Red Sox and the Yankees, and I became temporarily fixated with baseball. And I’d read something about Moneyball somewhere, and it was a staff pick at Book Soup, and when, finally, No Name lay vanquished and lifeless at my feet, it was Lewis’s book I turned to: it seemed a better fit. Moneyball is a rotten title, I think. You expect a subtitle something along the lines of How Greed Killed America’s National Pastime , but actually the book isn’t like that at all—it’s the story of how Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A’s, worked out how to buck the system and win lots of games despite being hampered by one of the smallest payrolls in baseball. He did this by recognizing ( a ) that the stats traditionally used to judge players are almost entirely worthless, and ( b ) that many good players are being discarded by the major leagues simply because they don’t look like good players.
    The latter discovery in particular struck a chord with me, because my football career has been blighted by exactly this sort of prejudice. English scouts visiting my Friday morning five-a-side game have (presumably) discounted me on peripheral grounds of age, weight, speed, amount of time spent lying on the ground weeping with exhaustion, etc.; what they’re not looking at is performance , which is of course the only thing that counts. They’d have made a film called Head It Like Hornby by now if Billy Beane were working over here. (And if I were any good at heading, another overrated and peripheral skill.) Anyway, I understood about one word in every four of Moneyball , and it’s still the best and most engrossing sports book I’ve read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode.
    I have an autistic son, but I don’t often read any books about autism. Most of the time, publishers seem to want to hear from or about autists with special talents, as in Rain Man (my son, like the vast majority of autistic kids, and contrary to public perception, has no special talent, unless you count his remarkable ability to hear the opening of a crisp packet from several streets away), or from parents who believe that they have “rescued” or “cured” their autistic child, and there is no cure for autism, although there are a few weird stories, none of which seem applicable to my son’s