There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (BOOK CLUB March 2025)

This powerful and poetic book will make you look at basketball in a whole new way.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib was on so many end-of-year best-of lists, including President Obama’s 2024 Summer Reading List. Reviews have said this book is "a powerful, digressive book that considers basketball, race, and place,” "audacious, energetic, and playful," "vulnerable and genuinely moving," "a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph," and "a captivating examination of basketball culture.”

From the GoodReads summary:

“While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. ‘Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jumpshot,’ Abdurraqib writes. ‘The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.’

“There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.”

There’s Always This Year was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

It has a 4.34 star rating on GoodReads with 8,685 ratings and 1,886 reviews.

For the audiobook listeners among us, the audiobook is narrated by Abdurraqib himself and had pretty positive reviews on Audible, calling it poetic and beautiful and giving the performance 4.7/5 stars.

We will meet on Sunday, March 30, at 4pm PT/7pm ET (note the Sunday day and time!) to discuss this book. 

Zoom links and reminders will be posted one week before the meeting and the morning of the meeting.

Further Reading/Watching recommendations for Secret Stuff Book Club members are are below.

Happy reading,

Colleen (and Laura)