In my quest to learn more about the game, I've been buying up cricket books since, oh, August 2000. I must own between 50 and 100 of them now, and the majority are fiction-- an odd collection of titles reflecting both my idiosyncratic reading preferences and the unsystematic way in which I compiled my "library." Constraints of availability (sports books, esp. fiction, seem to go out of print quickly) and shipping costs (since obviously little if any of of this stuff is going to come from US booksellers) mean that there are undoubtedly "must haves" that I still don't have-- and that's presuming I've heard of them in the first place. If you'd like to recommend me a cricket-related book, please visit the topic I've set up for it at the Forum.

Meanwhile, I will list here the items I've acquired so far. Click on any linked title to read my review of the book. I'm way behind in writing these reviews, and if the few I've done make me seem an almost uniformly generous critic, remember that a book had to look potentially appealing to me before I'd buy it in the first place... and also note that I started writing about the books in the order I was reading them, and one tends to read the more interesting- looking ones in the stack first (note that David Gower's autobiography is one of them).

Oh, and click here for links to the online secondhand book sources I've found most useful in compiling my collection.

• Fiction
  • Botham, Ian & Dennis Coath: Deep Cover (1996)
  • Buruma, Ian: Playing the Game (1991)
  • Crane, Hamilton: Miss Seeton Goes to Bat (1993)
  • Fraser, George MacDonald: Flashman's Lady (1977)
  • Hay, Ian: Pip: a Romance of Youth (1916)
  • Heller, Richard: A Tale of Ten Wickets (1994)
  • Hobbs, Jack: The Test Match Surprise (1926)
  • Parker, John: First Wicket Down (1987)
  • Rushton, William: W.G. Grace's Last Case (1984)
  • Shaw, Stanley: Sherlock Holmes at the 1902 Fifth Test (1985)
  • Sobers, Gary: Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade (1967)
  • Wheeler, Paul: Bodyline: the Novel (1983)
  • Wilson, John: The Disappearance of Lindsey Barratt (1998)
  • More to come...
    .
• Biographies, Autobiographies, Profiles, etc.
  • Gower, David: Gower: the Autobiography (1992)
  • Gower, David & Alan Lee: David Gower: With Time to Spare (1980)
  • Steen, Rob: David Gower: A Man Out of Time (1995)
  • More to come...
    .
• Tour Diaries, Memoirs, Collections of Anecdotes, etc.
  • Gower, David: On the Rack: A Testing Year (1990)
  • Hughes, Simon: A Lot of Hard Yakka (1997)
  • Hughes, Simon: Yakking Around the World (2000)
  • Taylor, Bob & David Gower: Anyone for Cricket? (1979)
  • Walker, Max: How to Hypnotize Chooks (1987)
  • More to come...
    .
• Serious Non-Fiction, Essays, etc.
  • Coming soon...
    .
• Miscellaneous
  • Eastaway, Rob: What is a Googly? (1999)
  • Gower, David: A Right Ambition (1986)
  • Gower, David: Heroes and Contemporaries (1984)
  • More to come...
    .
• Films & TV Programs on Video
  • Coming soon...