To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever

I read Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever - A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry on my train ride up to North Carolina. Again one of those books that I just kind of raced through, I think it took me like eight hours (on the train, in a row that means). Anyway, I liked it as an introduction to UNC (where I am now sitting in the graduate library trying to write a paper for one of my classes back home), but I did not find the book all that hot other than that.

I care a lot about basketball, I play as often as I can (my feet look so bad as of right now, just because I have been playing so much the last few days that I think I might have to take a break), I read about the NBA quite regularly (or even religiously if you want), but I am not one to go into these obsessions. I can relate to that to some extent with regard to German football, but even there I simply don't care that much. I don't even really watch anymore because there are seemingly a million things that are more important than sitting in front of the TV at anykind of fixed time. My point is, this book was written by a die-hard UNC-fan and Duke hater, someone who actually comes from Chapel Hill, his father already went to UNC here and it is fun and amusing to read about the antics involving the Duke-UNC rivalry, but Blythe does it over 300 pages and I believe he could have done it as well on 100.

Quite simple, the topic exhausts itself after a while and Blythe still keeps on going on about it for another 200 pages (or 6 hours, whatever you prefer). Thus, do I recommend this book? If you are a basketball fanatic, yes, if you will go to UNC (or Duke) anytime soon, yes. Otherwise? No.