The premise for this book was good: the author had to reduce his treasured collection of 1,134 football programmes down to 32 because he was emigrating. So I was looking forward to reading it but in the end it turned out to be a book of two halves.
The good half was where the author had something to say, for example where he related the programmes to childhood crushes or to meeting his first wife for the first time. I particularly enjoyed him meeting a fellow programme collector in the very early stages of his football match attending life. Could that have been the spur for the obsession that followed? Also there were good moments where the author talked specifically about various aspects of the programmes themselves.
Then there was the not so good half where the author didn't have a lot to say that hasn't been said before (as another reviewer already picked up on) like the obligatory first-match experience, which is the standard fare of all football memoirs, and the match report moments that you could have got from a newspaper.
Then I came to the end and the author dropped a bombshell saying that he was going to ship across the other programmes he left behind anyway at a later date so this made the preceding part of the book seem a bit pointless and I felt a little like I'd been lied to as he was going to be re-united with all his programmes anyway.
But it was a nice, easy-to-read book with the programmes being varied enough to cover lots of different teams and keep my interest.
(I got this book from Amazon Vine. It is available to buy here.)
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