Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger (Post #2)

The section of the book I read this week deals with how the town of Odessa rallies around and supports their football. With the oil industry in the tank, the townspeople have nowhere to go and nothing to do except eat, sleep, and live football. The team support association, the Watermelon Feed, counts among its members most of the people in town, and nearly every business took out an ad in the team's yearbook. The townspeople dress almost exclusively in black and white (the Permian colors) during the season, and the coach is held to such a high standard of quality that "For Sale" signs are posted on his lawn after almost every loss. To be a Permian cheerleader (a "Pepette"), one must undergo a whole season of being in the service of one football player. The cheerleader is expected to do certain things, such as bake, for their player, although some cheerleaders have done much more. Overall, the Permian football experience may seem somewhat weird to an Ardsleyan who has not imagined that high-school football could be this intense, but for these people, it is their lives.

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger

In Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger is very clear in what his goal is: to write about high-school football. And not just any old, hooray-if-we-win football team; his case study is the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, where stadium lights highlight the prairie every Friday night. Odessa is supported by two things: the vast reserves of oil and natural gas that create a vicious boom-bust cycle, and the routinely excellent football team. At the time, Permian were 4-time state champions in the toughest state for high school football in the nation, and yet the townspeople still grieved over each and every loss. The players Bissinger focuses on include Brian Chavez, a Harvard-bound tight end and "Boobie" Jones, a former star running back who is determined to prove that he can come back from a serious knee injury and still merit playing time. While this team will produce players that populate top programs around the nation, there are no NFL-bound supertalents here. Part of the interest here is that in the absence of a bona-fide star that all the hopes of a team are placed on, the reader is free to focus on the team as a whole, rather than just a LeBron James or a Randy Moss. (Couple notes: Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Roy Williams went to Permian, and Bissinger's latest book, More Than A Game, is co-authored with LeBron James about his high school team)

Quarter 1 Summary

With the first quarter ending Friday, it is a good time to look back on all the blogs I've written these past weeks. From Summer of the Gods to War of the Worlds, my reading has been varied and mostly challenging. Looking at the topics of the books, I have read a fair amount of non-fiction and historically themed books. The experience of blogging has been interesting. Previously, I had not been used to writing more than a couple of sentences at most about what I had been reading independently. However, I have enjoyed writing more about my books, because it allows me to express connections and thoughts I may have had about the book, but had not written down previously. While War of the Worlds is relatively easy to analyze and write about, I anticipate challenges down the roads with the other books, and I welcome those challenges.
In the second quarter, I would like to gain a greater understanding of my books through blogging. As I said before, blogging helps me by allowing me to get my thoughts onto paper (or the Internet, whatever). In the next quarter, I'd like to not only spill out my thoughts, but also arrange them and collect them into more polished writing pieces. So far, I've been interested in all of the books I've blogged about, and I'd like to continue my interest in the second quarter.