Stack By The Tub

Maeve Donnelly

@jpslowroaster

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The off-season lives here. Wet hair, pruney fingers, paperback swelling like a bad ankle sprain. I read until the water is cold or the neighbors start yelling about parking, whichever comes first. Heavy on bodies, tactics, and people making terrible decisions under pressure. You know. Like a Pats goal-line series in 2015.* *Yes, I’m still mad. No, I don’t want to talk about it. I want to annotate it.

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Stack By The Tub — 3 items
Name	Author	Year	Genre	Key themes	Sports adjacent	Bathtub commitment	My take	Best read during
1The Body Keeps the Score	Bessel van der Kolk	2014	Nonfiction · Psychology	Trauma, neuroplasticity, embodied healing	Quietly yes — every overtrained hamstring I see is hiding a chapter of this book.	Slow, annotated soak; best in 20-page chunks before bed.	Reads like the manual I wish half my patients’ MDs had. Dense, but the kind of dense that shifts how you see every sideline collapse and every "I’m fine" lie.	A rainy JP Sunday when the Green Line is down again and you were staying home anyway.
2The Breaks of the Game	David Halberstam	1981	Nonfiction · Sports history	Labor, race, strategy, the business of basketball	Full box score. This is a film session in book form.	Long, pruney, probably two baths and a third-quarter shower read.	If you’ve ever yelled about switching on a high pick-and-roll, this fills in the why behind the Xs and Os. Also explains half the old guys at the Y.	Dead of winter, after a Celtics road loss where the bench looked confused for 48 straight minutes.
3Belichick	Ian O’Connor	2018	Biography · Sports	Obsession, leadership, control, long-game scheming	Do you even have to ask.	Two deep soaks plus some subway chapters you pretend aren’t making you emotional.	You come for the rings; you stay for the petty, meticulous grind. Also a reminder that genius plus zero balance is…a lot, even if it wins divisions.	Late-season Pats game where the weather is ugly and so is the play-calling.