Golf Library

After much deliberation I have finally released the first version of Dave's golf book ratings. (It's a permanent fixture over there in the right-hand column.) I went with the simple four-star rating system.

The four-star system has the advantage of being really simple, but also has the disadvantage of grouping all golf books into one category. Questions arise: How does one compare instructional books to biographies and novels? Do books get extra stars for being classics? I settled on this criterion: if a golf buddy wanted to borrow a book, how strongly would I recommend it?

Let me answer some additional questions:

• Did you really read all those books? Yes.
  


• Why? I'm tempted to make some comment about the winters in Upstate New York, but the truth is that I read golf gooks in the summer too. The honest answer is that I really do like golf that much.
  


• Is there really such a thing as a golf novel? Yes. See The Greatest Game Ever Played and Paper Tiger.
  


• Why didn't you list the authors? Not enough space. I debated this one for a while.
  


• Which instructional books should I read? Read Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, followed by The Plane Truth For Golfers. I'm planning a post on Ben Hogan, and I'll include some stuff about this book. It's a classic (the classic?). By the way, "Plane Truth" is a play on words for the swing plane in golf, I didn't misspell plain.
  


• Which non-instructional books should I read? Tough call! Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect is about the mental side of the game, and it's a great book. It's not a technical book, so I'm not considering it an instructional book. The Greatest Game Ever Played does a nice job of recounting early-twentieth-century golf in America.