Nathanael Yellis

My theory, emerging during this 50 in 2014 project, is: Great literature both motivates you to read and makes you think for a long time afterwards.

Jordan is living a life that intrigues me. A politico and digital guy, he started a real company.

Good authors are fun to read; great authors' words resonate for months.

Baseball. Summer is about listening to, talking about, and sometimes watching our national pastime.

While in high school, I worked at Wallingford Farm, a somewhat touristy food and garden store. My coworkers were an odd mix of local workers: people spending a lifetime in dead-end jobs along with some high-school students like me. As a fairly privileged and definitely homeschooled kid, Wallingford was quite the learning experience.

When a book becomes a movie, watching a few trailers gives away the plot. This is usually enough to keep me away. When I saw Life of Pi on the side of the road, I almost didn't pick it up. But, free books. The movie didn't tell me the best part of the story: the first hundred pages or so are all about how a spiritually inquisitive teenager finds religions.

There's great baseball and then there's great baseball stories. I'd put Ball Four up there for both, because both the story and the way this book is written are reminiscent of what makes baseball great.