The Great Match Race

So after... uh... 7 or 8 years of college, I'm trying to get back into my former reading habit. It's not so much that I didn't read during college; it's just that, outside the Terry Pratchett books, Fruits Basket, and web comics, I wasn't picking most of the titles. So I picked a book from a genre I've always easily sunk into: horses.

I've been reading horse books for a long time; between the various parts of the standardized testing in first grade, I was reading Black Beauty. (Not that I understood the political undertones in the book for a long time.) Then there was the Walter Farley series, the Marguerite Henry books, and a miscellany of peripherals. (The 1940s-1960s were a great era for horse books.)

I did get sucked into Seabiscuit a couple years ago; I saw the movie first and some time later picked up the book used at a book sale somewhere. I started reading it while I was rearranging furniture in the bedroom and had taken all the books off the shelves to move them around, and about an hour later I remembered that I was supposed to be moving furniture.

This time it was The Great Match Race, by John Eisenberg. It took me longer to get through, mostly because I'm so out of the habit. The story is the match race in 1823 between the American Eclipse and the challenger(s) the Southern horsemen put up against him, trying to topple his undefeated record. Eisenberg does a fantastic job of crafting the story in such a way that the reader, first of all, is uncertain until just before the race which of the Southern horses will be chosen to race Eclipse (five were in training), and second of all, how the race turned out. Since I haven't read much about pre-WWII racing, I didn't know the outcome ahead of time, and once I actually got to the day of the race in the story, I couldn't put it down.

Eisenberg, John. The Great Match Race. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-55612-0.