Top 25 books you should read during the beach volleyball off-season

I like books. And when I say I like books, I mean I really, really like books. When I was little, my mom set an unofficial curfew of 9:30 p.m. I’d protest most of the time because I wanted to read more. It wasn’t irregular that my mom would turn my bedroom light off herself, and I’d counter by turning on the bathroom light — the bathroom was adjacent to my room — poking my head into the hallway, and reading via the bathroom light.

Could she really be mad at that?

The habit has only increased. When I have practice at 8, I wake up at 5:45 to make sure I get an hour of reading in beforehand — non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night, the Bible or some type of faith-related book sprinkled throughout, alongside Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Mag. I’m a nerd. What can I say?

So, I’ve decided to provide a reading list of the top 25 books — I think this actually stretched to 27 — I’d recommend you read over the beach volleyball off-season. It’s in no particular order, and includes a blend of fiction and non, memoir and novel, biographical and narrative style. Let me know what books you’d add, or which ones you like.

I’m interested in what fellow nerds think.

• Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday
  • Billy Allen was the one to turn me onto Holiday’s writing, and you can probably tell by Allen’s demeanor and self-deprecating social media that he probably knows the book by heart. This one is excellent, though, because every one of us falls victim to our own ego. We win one match and think we’re ready to take down Phil. Wrong. This book is a deep dive into the value of staying humble, and checking our ever-swelling egos.

• Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
  • I read this book amidst a brutal stretch of losses, and it was key to me not losing my mind and spiraling into a mental volleyball crisis. It preaches exactly what you’d expect it to: Nothing great will be accomplished by avoiding obstacles and difficult roads. The easy way is rarely the best way. The obstacle, per the name, is the way. So embrace the losses, the setbacks and failures. It usually means you’re on the right track.

• Wild, Cheryl Strayed
  • Strayed’s writing made me want to cry because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write as exquisitely as her. Aside from the unbelievable writing, this is an excellent choice for basically anyone, for it covers so much ground. Going through some turmoil? This is the book for you. Want to adventure? Check this one out. Scared of taking a leap of faith? No better choice than Wild. If you’re a writer, just understand this book will also make you very sad, because you’ll never write like Strayed.

• Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
  • William Finnegan is Eric Zaun before Eric Zaun — living in a van, surfing around the world, while somehow being exceptionally smart and literarily savvy. Finnegan’s surfing memoir is an apt comparison to the life many beach volleyball players live, and the writing is absolutely brilliant. I began reading The New Yorker specifically because he writes for The New Yorker.

• The Harry Potter Series, J.K. Rowling
  • The greatest piece of fiction ever. Read them. All seven. Then do it again. And never — I repeat, NEVER — watch the third movie.

• Tools of Titans, Tim Ferris
  • This isn’t the best book I’ve ever read, but it is by far the most useful. Ferris takes 200-some guests from his podcast — which is phenomenal, by the way — and transcribes and distills the best bytes of his interviews in written forms. It’s literally the best advice from the top influencers and performers in the world

• The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
  • This is my “desert island” item. I’ve read this book at least once a year since moving to California. It’s short, full of little golden nuggets of literary wisdom, and written in a language that is readable to a third grader and fascinating to an adult.

• Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink
  • Nothing in the history of beach volleyball has ever been somebody’s fault. It’s always, always, always their partner. They couldn’t set, or pass, or block, or serve. Couldn’t have been my fault. No way! And then you read Extreme Ownership, and you realize…yes, you could have done essentially everything better in that match you just lost. This book should be required reading for every beach volleyball player.

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson
  • We give so many fucks about so many things in this world. How many Instagram likes we got. Who followed whom. Who commented on what. What she thinks of those board shorts. This book is a superb wake-up call to just stop caring about all of these useless, arbitrary aspects of our overcrowded lives, and instead focus all of that extra energy into the few things in our lives that we SHOULD give a fuck about — which is not Instagram.

• The Timekeeper, Mitch Albom
  • Hands down the best sports writer on earth, Albom is also one of the finest in fiction as well. The Timekeeper is a valuable look into time, how we spend it, how we’re always trying to manipulate it — slow things down, speed things up, jump to this date, rewind to that date. It’s a quick read, too, a single sitting if you’re a nerd like me.

• Lone Survivor, Marcus Lutrell
  • If you read this book, you’ll never complain again. So please, for the love of all that is holy, read this book. This is a top-five all-timer for me, mostly because it woke me up to just how nice and easy I have it, because this country is filled with incredible people who are much better than me, willing to risk much more than me, for the sake of millions they’ll never meet. So good, one of the few movies that does the book justice, too.

• The Dip, Seth Godin
  • Didn’t think a book about quitting would make it onto this list, did ya? Well, it did, and it’s excellent. Godin breaks down one of the most difficult questions in life: When to persist, and when to save your energy and quit. It’s short, like 60-some pages I think, so you can read it with a few beers and enjoy a quick existential crisis. I took a lot of valuable lessons from it, though, and if you’re a beach volleyball player, you will too.

• Daring Greatly, Brene Brown
  • I knew I’d love this book from the very first page, which draws from my favorite piece of literature, Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the Arena.’ The theme of the book, though, is phenomenal: Anytime you seek to achieve anything great, worthwhile, you must first be vulnerable, exposed, willing to fail. You must, in essence, dare greatly. If you’re reading this column, that likely fits the narrative of your life.

• The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
  • One of my all-time favorites, I re-read The Outsiders every year, sometimes multiple times per year. I finished it on the flight to and from AVP Seattle this season. I think it was my third time through, and every time I read it, I relate more and more to the protagonist, Ponyboy Curtis.

• Open, Andre Agassi
  • This is, in my mind, the best memoir I’ve read, maybe the best book I read this year. It’s such a good look behind the scenes of an athlete’s — a prodigy’s, in this case — life beyond their sport, which in this case is tennis. The openness, honesty, and vulnerability Agassi writes with — well, J.R. Moehringer ghost-writes — is exceptional and enlightening.

• Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
  • The founder of Nike’s memoir on the founding of Nike, from tiny shoe company to the goliath it is today, is wonderfully revealing. Like Agassi’s odyssey through tennis, this is an excellent look at the absurd number of setbacks, near backbreaking moments, and obstacles Knight had to overcome to keep Nike alive.

• The Shack, William Paul Young
  • As I mentioned in the opening few graphs, I am constantly reading a faith-related piece of literature. Sometimes this is The Bible. Sometimes the Book of Mormon. Sometimes it’s little devotionals. Sometimes its faith-based fiction, like The Shack. Even if you don’t believe in God, this is a good read, at once poignant and inspiring. It’ll make you want to hug and love someone close to you.

• The Kite Runner, Khaled Housseini
  • A student I work with recommended this to me, and let me be the first to tell you this: It’s dark. It can take you to some goosebumpy places. But it’s devastatingly real, an excellent glimpse into life outside of our cozy, comfortable worlds. Housseini’s writing is also just downright enviable. I’d recommend everything he’s written, but this is top of the list.
• Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance
  • When we think of poverty, and the vicious cycle it produces, we typically think inner-cities, slums, that sort of thing. Vance shows a different side of that, how poverty wreaks havoc elsewhere, too, particularly in redneck or hillbilly country, which in his case was Kentucky and Ohio. This is a real and inspiring, pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story of a kid who made it happen, in spite of everything being stacked against him.

• Mind Gym, Gary Mack
  • One of Yogi Berra’s many splendid euphemisms is that “baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” It makes no sense. It makes perfect sense. Basically everybody can run and jump and hit a high line. Not all that many can quiet their minds. This book is an insightful window into how to begin controlling that constantly whirring brain of yours. At the very least, it helped me with golf. Until I had to make a two-foot putt to win a match. No amount of reading will chill me out for those.

• Mindset, Carol Dweck
  • The matriarch of the growth mindset, Dweck’s book gets wildly repetitive, so if you read the first 50 pages, you’ll get it. Focus on learning, the process, and not results. There, you basically just read it.

• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
  • Zusak’s writing quickly became a personal favorite of mine, because it’s so unique in style. He basically takes the rules of grammar and structure, crumples them up, sets them aflame and tosses them out the window. It’s awesome. That, and the story, which is historical fiction set in Nazi Germany, is wonderful.

• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
  • Written by a professor who is — you guessed it — giving his last lecture, with death knocking at the door, this is an emotional read, but to get the perspective of someone who knows they’re about to go is oftentimes a much-needed one. This is both light and heavy, funny and tear-jerking, a quick read you should read more than once.

• The Magicians Series, Lev Grossman
  • This is like grown-up Harry Potter. Same concepts — magic school, magic lands, magical beings, all that great stuff — but with more real-world problems attached to it. It’s a bit more mature, a bit darker, but the same page-turning type of read.

• The Lord of the Rings Series, J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Nerd out with me here: Who doesn’t like elves and dragons and trolls and wizards and undead things and trees talking and fighting in wars?? Don’t settle for watching the movies. They’re mediocre at best. Read the books. They’re awesome.

• 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson
  • I leave you with the book I’m currently reading, which is an international best-seller for a reason: It’s damn good. And a bit controversial, since Peterson tells it like it is, which doesn’t sit too well in our world of pampered self-esteem internet warriors. Which is exactly why it’s so good. It’s refreshing to read someone who doesn’t soften his language for an increasingly soft society.