Golf is Ruining My Life is a book of reckonings, meant to be both playful and serious, told by a golfer who has a love/hate relationship with the game. Part Dada Art book, part sociology, part intellectual adventure with a sidekick, part personal confession. Does the narrator hate golf? No, he loves golf but he sometimes dislikes the people who play it, including himself, and questions all the time he's spent playing it.
A tour de force of a book by a well-seasoned poet-golfer who struggles between agony and ecstasy while playing a gentleman's game. It's great fun to watch the narrator 'go inside the ropes' between hope and despair, joy and misery, memory and real-time events, traversing the course, rubbing up against the quirky and always contrary ways of his golfer friends with his sidekick Jack, while becoming familiar with the world-class Dadaist Kurt Schwitters on a rainy day inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
From an early reader of 'Golf is Ruining My Life'—
You have created something special!!!
It will now reside on my golf shelf with
Who's Your Caddy, (Rick Reilly)
Golf in the Kingdom, (Michael Murphy),
Golf and the Art of War (Don Wade)
Golf for Enlightenment (Deepak Chopra)
The Greatest Game Ever Played (Mark Frost)
The Inner Game of Golf (Tim Gallway)"
— Thomas Raher, San Francisco
Brooks Roddan lives and works in San Francisco where he writes every day, enjoys making small-scale paintings and collage, and operates IF SF Publishing, leaving town as often as possible to his cabin in upstate Wyoming where nothing is expected of him.
"5.0 out of 5 stars An endearing, poetic look golf and life. This charming tale is about how nuanced our lives really are, if you are open to it, the way this book's narrator is. Everyday our mind reacts to the same activities in different ways. It sees things it didn't see before, or it dwells on things it previously ignored. Sometimes it fusses, fumes or worries, at other times it's full of delight and wonder. It's almost as though our mind is a writer, constantly looking for new material for a story or poem or a new philosophical angle on what life is really all about. Sometimes this a beautiful experience, at other times, it's downright absurd, which is why it make sense that the author ends us using the famous absurdist and Dada artist Kurt Schwitters as his mental caddie to navigate him down the weird and wonderful course of this game called life." - Snappy Girl
"Just wanted to tell you I have been reading GOLF Is Ruining My Life slowly over the last few days and it is astonishing. In every best of ways.. consider this reader blown away." - Dan DeVries
"Lechery, Anarchy, Delirium, Bourgeois Inertia, Flagrant Hypocrisy, Primitive Injustice, An Order of Organized Crime in Fact" - Antonin Artaud
"This is a uniquely intriguing book, at some points insightful, at other points funny and entertaining, and often thought-provoking. I am savoring it at a slow pace." - Tom Trabin
"love this narrative style of yours—I swear it feels very distinctive, all your own. It bubbles along quietly about poetry and art and then some delicious thing turns up, like in a Jacques Tati movie. You are the Mr. Hulot of the links." - Elias Crim
