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Next Up: Refactoring, by Martin Fowler

I am running on a ridiculous sleep deficit brought on, not by NaBloPoMo—which I've actually been keeping up with rather well, don't you think?—but by The Blind Side, which I've stayed up late (past 1:30am several nights in the last week) reading. If you've read Moneyball (and if you haven't, click on that link and buy it right now!), you know something not only about baseball, but about how Michael Lewis can suck you into a sports story and make you want to know MORE. If you've read Moneyball, you're probably a bigger fan of baseball, certainly a better fan of baseball, and possibly even a fan of the Oakland As, whether you live in the Bay Area or not. I'd say it's a good bet you're also a fan of Scott Hatteberg, even though he's with the Reds now.

In The Blind Side, Michael Lewis does for the NFL offensive lineman (and more specifically, the Left Tackle), football in general, and Michael Oher in particular what he did for the Oakland As, baseball, and Scott Hatteberg in Moneyball. Namely, he makes you stay up all night reading. He makes you poke the person next to you to say, "did you know linemen only made $90K a year in the late 80s? I didn't know that" and "oh my god HE KNEW THE MATERIAL" and a bunch of other random things, some coherent, some not. He's made football announcers and sports analysts everywhere talk about the blind side the way baseball announcers now talk about plate discipline and on-base percentage. I've been catching most of my football on the radio lately due to Sunday hockey games, but I bet when I watch on TV this weekend, some on-air analyst will circle the pass rusher and the left tackle and make a point about how a block made that pass possible, or how a missed block resulted in that ferocious sack.

At the same time he's raising the profile of offensive linemen and left tackles everywhere, in The Blind Side Michael Lewis is also telling the story of Michael Oher, a poor kid from the wrong side of Memphis with incredible natural ability but no future—until he ends up at a Christian high school and finds himself adopted by a rich, white, evangelical family who give him the love and support (and the advantages of being part of the upper class) that had been utterly absent in his life. You'll shake your head in wonder a few times, you might cry through some of it, and certainly you will laugh your ass off in the section about the Mumford-Briarcrest high school football game. And you'll probably be checking to see whether Ole Miss will be on TV this Saturday.

I feel like a much more educated football fan for having read The Blind Side, and I'm glad I met Michael Oher through its pages. I'm also more than happy to be finished with it because dammit, I need some sleep!