Top ten soccer books

Mihir Bose is an award-winning sports journalist with a career spanning more than 30 years as a sports writer for the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. He was the BBC's sports editor until last year. The 2010 World Cup will be the sixth consecutive tournament he has covered.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of football books. One title on the list:

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

A classic which brought into British sports reporting some of the style and verve already part of American sports writing. Scott Fitzgerald had rebuked Ring Lardner for wasting his time writing about baseball. Brian Glanville had always found it difficult to be taken seriously as a novelist because he wrote on football. Hornby used football to display his literary skills.

Read about the other books on the list.

Read an excerpt from Fever Pitch.

--Marshal Zeringue