Canadian Gift Guide

When the boyfriend and I stumble upon a bookstore, we often go in. I’m an avid (like psychotically avid) reader, and he’s a more moderate one. Regardless, there is plenty of common ground in a bookstore as he eyeballs dozens of books and tells me to put them on an ongoing mental list of gifts.

One day when visiting the US of A and tracking him down in the ‘sports’ book section, I let him continue to peruse the books while I tried to find something interesting to browse through. I was immediately drawn to ‘The Sports Book’, mostly because the cover is literally made out of the universal surface of sports: Astroturf.

Upon further perusal, I realized the book functions as a coffee table / sports encyclopedia hybrid, with literally every single sport you can imagine getting a few pages to explain the sport, the equipment, and interesting facts and trivia, with plenty of science-y looking diagrams. Eventually the boyfriend sauntered over to see what this magical green fuzzy book was all about, and was equally entranced.

This is not a book for the casual sports fan, I will tell you that much. It’s also not meant to be read in one single sitting. Instead, it falls into what I call the ‘reference’ category, where you pick it up when it calls to you, or say, when you’re watching late night Olympics and trying to figure out the differences between Judo and Jujitsu.

It is so striking that it definitely earns coffee table honours, especially if your pals (or that special guy in your life) have a sweet basement lounge set-up to showcase the thing while having friends over for the ‘big game’, whatever that may be.

I myself wouldn’t mind owning this book, to be perfectly honest, so don’t think it’s just for the guys. But given that OCD sporty-ism tends to still be more of a man thing, if you’ve got a sporty father, brother, boyfriend, nephew, or friend in your life, this is sort of the ultimate book for them.

One final caveat – this book is easier to find if you have the ISBN, because typing in “The Sports Book” in a bookstore search engine is dangerous (although for the record, I have yet to visit a Chapters and NOT see a copy of the book). So for your easy shopping, the ISBN is 9780756631956, and both Chapters and Amazon’s online stores carry the book (it’ll pop up if you copy and paste that number) for around $27.