The System, by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian

I love college football. My wife and I have had season tickets for the Longhorns for over 20 years (although with the introduction of the poorly named Loyalty Program that may not last much longer) and I don't remember the last fall Saturday that wasn't spent watching the battle of the gridiron. The System is about the parts of the game not covered by the box scores, though: the boosters, the politics, the crime, and of course, the money.

Benedict and Keteyian don't have a single narrative, but instead structured the book like a series of essays. The exception to this is the tale of Mike Leach, from his decision to ignore his law degree in order to pursue football, to being the head coach of Texas Tech, to the idiocy of Craig James and his son causing Leach to lose that position, to his resurfacing as the leader of Washington State. (I always liked Leach and thought he was a great addition to the Big XII, even if his Red Raiders did stop the Longhorns from going to the National Championship in 2008.) Other chapters covered Don King, who ran the Yellow Rose strip club in Austin and offered VIP service to athletes (saying "I've done more for recruiting at UT than Mack Brown"), 17 year old Jane Brown at BYU who was raped by freshman football players (who were so new to campus they actually hadn't yet played in a game), the NCAA itself and its epic bungling of the Miami booster case, and essays titled "Crime and Punishment" (subtitled "SEC leads the nation") and "Gameday" ("The genius of ESPN").

The System provides a look at a variety of issues in college football, but doesn't attempt to provide any solutions. Challenges to the status quo like the Kessler antitrust suit, unionization, player stipends, and students rights to their own image aren't mentioned at all. This lack of detail and analysis keeps this book from being a true exposé, but it is still a great primer for the aspects of the sport not seen on College Gameday.

First Sentence:

On Saturday afternoons in the fall of 1981 the roar of the crowd would echo across campus every time BYU scored a touchdown.

I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, by Tucker Max

Tucker Max is one of the most reprehensible human beings to ever write a book. It also happens to be possibly the funniest book I’ve ever read. I took I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell on an airplane and found myself literally laughing out loud more than once. The lovely British lady across the aisle asked to see what was so clearly amusing me and I passed her my copy. After she read the title and back cover, it was coolly handed back to me without a word—she wouldn’t even look at me for the rest of the flight. Yeah, it is that kind of a book!

Max sleeps with any woman he can, drinks himself to oblivion with his friends, and ridicules every one else he meets. He is rude, crude, and has an ego the size of New Jersey. Instead of these traits making him become that asshole at the end of the bar hitting on everything that moves, though, he started blogging about his exploits, turned the blog into this book, and the book into a movie. A big of a raunchy jerk as Max seems to be, I think I’m jealous!

Instead of a review, I will just post these quotes:

• “I barely remember what she looked like (thank you, Dollar Beer Night).”
• “We decide that we are starting to like Texas. Baby Dolls does nothing to derail our crazy train.”
• “Don’t let anyone tell you different: The only good part about Duke is that it is 15 minutes from UNC-Chapel Hill.”
• “He’s the type of drunk that makes you wonder why alcohol is classified as a depressant.”
• “You have not heard a girl scream during sex until you’ve heard a deaf girl come. It was literally like a cross between a retard scream and the noise a horse makes when it’s being slaughtered.”
• “She was 18 and had left Florida State two months into her freshman year because it was too difficult... She was literally just too stupid for Florida State. TOO STUPID FOR "FREE SHOE UNIVERSITY!"”
• “If you EVER speak ill of the McGriddle again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth.”

These perfectly capture the tone of the book: offensive, misogynistic, and laugh-out-loud funny.

First Sentence:

I used to think that Red Bull was the most destructive invention of the past 50 years.

10-Minute University, by Jim Becker, Andy Mayer, Bob Tzudiker, and Noni White

The world’s fastest-talking man is back! Here we are taken on a whirlwind tour of collegiate life, covering topics from physics to film appreciation, from philosophy to football. The humor is fast and furious, and unfortunately hit and miss as well. When discussing relativity: “So a child on Earth ages faster than her astronaut mother traveling at near-C speeds, Mom comes home young, refreshed, little Betty looks like a prune.” Evolution gets summed up as, “Natural selection sure is fun when you’re the survivor.” Eh. Comparative literature was my favorite, both for the content—everything from the Bible to Valley of the Dolls—and the structure: the world’s greatest books summed up in a 360 word run-on sentence.

First Sentence:

Welcome students.

Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami

Battle Royale details a ruthless program where middle-school students are armed and dumped on a small isolated island. They are forced to fight each other until there is only one child left alive, while the totalitarian government monitors the whole thing. To make sure the teenagers obey the rules and try to kill each other, metal collars are fastened around their necks that will explode if they linger in a forbidden area or attempt to remove them. If twenty-four hours pass without a murder, all of the collars will be detonated simultaneously. A few students willingly participate in the slaughter, which gives everyone on the island a palpable fear of their classmates.

Very violent and fairly graphic, the manga roots of this novel are easy to see. This was described to me as a Lord of the Flies for our generation; after reading it I can easily see the comparison. Lord of the Flies detailed the psychological unravelling of a group of marooned kids on a desert island, where Battle Royale focuses more on how commonplace violence has become. While both involve children in untenable situations, Battle Royale is much more horrific because the kids are forced to act against their classmates by an uncaring government.

While a fascinating read, it was somewhat difficult to follow in places. I found the Asian names hard to keep straight, especially because I’m not savvy enough to tell which names are male and female. Yoshio, Kazuhiko, Noriko, and Yukiko are four examples—the first two are male, the last two female—of names I confused throughout. Luckily there was a roster in the front of the book telling who was who, but it was distracting to flip around when I needed help. Even so, this was a compelling read that was hard to put down. Very entertaining.

First Sentence:

As the bus entered the prefectural capital of Takamatsu, garden suburbs transformed into city streets of multicolored neon, headlights of oncoming cars, and checkered lights of office buildings.

How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater, by Marc Acito

This is an odd book: I found myself admiring it and hating it at the same time. It is billed as the humorous story of how a kid tricked his father into paying his tuition to Julliard. Sounded amusing, but started really slow. It took the first third of the book to get to the point where tuition is denied; a lot of setup for a weak payoff. It came off as a young adult book: the protagonists are all teenagers and the subject is a coming-of-age story. However, the language and strong sexual content was extremely inappropriate for that age; many scenes are nothing more than fairly explicit porn with a strong homoerotic flavor. Forever by Judy Blume handles this topic in a mature and professional way, but Acito seems to prefer Hustler as a model.

The hero, Ed Zanni, is a self-important, pretentious, eccentric thespian—exactly the image I have in my head of an actor. His incessant whining (while ringing true for an irresponsible high school senior) was thoroughly unenjoyable. I can’t remember the last time I rolled my eyes so much when reading a book. The rest of the cast were all one-dimensional caricatures, The Breakfast Club gone horribly wrong.

That said, the imagery was fantastic: “a voice so warm and pure you want to take a bath in it.” (Oddly the author uses the same phrase later to describe sex.) Another phrase I liked: “Pairs of shoes should be like pairs of people. They should complement one another, not match.” While not very practical, it cemented the offbeat nature of the described character.

Coupled with my love of theater (I respect acting, but don’t have much in common with actors) and the fun phrases I was able to finish this fairly quickly, but I don’t think I’d recommend it.

First Sentence:

The story of how I paid for college begins like life itself—in a pool of water.