Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger (1990)

Title: Friday Night Lights

Author: H.G. Bissinger

Pages: 357

Published: Sep 28th 1988

Publisher: Da Capo Press

I have mixed feelings about this book and I feel like I'm going to say worse things about it than it deserves so hold on.

Reading the prologue and the preface of this book I got really excited. The book seemed to have a meaning and I was prepared to get seriously blown away. The characters were introduced and I felt like we connected straight away. However, as the book started to actually give me history about Odessa, the politics and the economic situation I started to loose interest. The chapters on racism, discrimination, education and economy were interesting, because I can relate to it, I understood it. But frankly, I don't understand economy and politics. Not my area. At all.

I didn't quite understand the football parts either, although I mean, what else did I expect? It's a football book. About Football. A Town. A Team. And a Dream. Literally. But I didn't get the semantic field. I don't understand how it can matter how far you run in one season. I don't know what's a lot and what's not. I know three words: touchdown, quarterback and running back. That's my vocabulary. Finito. Unfortunately. I think I may have enjoyed the book much more if I had understood it.

I would highly recommend the TV series 'Friday Night Lights' which is honestly more about the characters and their lives rather than the football itself. That appealed more to me. The series is only based on the idea surrounding the book. It does include any of the characters, the same team or town. The film however, which is based on the book is quite boring. I lost interest quicker than I lost interest in the book.

Despite all my criticism about the book it is still regarded as the best sports book written, so if you do understand the language of Texas football, by all means go for it. But I'm a fantasy/history/sci-fi/romance kinda person and maybe it had to do with the fact that it was a school book.

Plot Summary:

In the state of Texas American football is a religion. And nowhere is more fanatical about its football than the small town of Odessa. There, every Friday night from September to November, a bunch of seventeen-year-old kids play their hearts out for the honour of their high school. In front of 20,000 people. In 1988 H.G. Bissinger spent a season in Odessa discovering just what makes a town pin its hopes on eleven boys on a football field. He lived with the students, coaches and townspeople who dedicate their lives to their team, sharing their joys and triumphs, their pains, injuries and bitter disappointments. He returned with a compassionate but hard-eyed story of a town riven by money, race and class, where a high school can spend more on medical supplies for its athletic program than on its English department. Friday Night Lights is one of the best books about sport ever written. It is the story of how dreams and reality collide, at once glorious and immensely sad. Because for the 30-odd boys of the Permian Panthers, these days will have been the best of their lives.

- Waterstones.com

My Rating:

5/10
It really wasn't my kind of book.