The Most Fun Thing

Dispatches from a Skateboard Life

By: Kyle Beachy

Narrated by: Chris Mayers

Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Southwest Review • Electric Literature

Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old.

In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.

What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of 40, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?

Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime - often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. The Most Fun Thing is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy - and what it continues to teach him as he struggles to find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.

©2021 Kyle Beachy (P)2021 Grand Central Publishing

Critic reviews

“The year 2021 is the year of skateboarding. The ‘rebel’ pursuit was transformed into an Olympic sport. Thrasher magazine, skateboarding's bible, turned 40. So The Most Fun Thing couldn't have come at a better time [to] ponder the meaning of skateboarding.” (NPR)

"As readable as a skate mag and as complex as the best fiction, The Most Fun Thing imbricates themes of meaning, community, and the soul, and will leave you marveling at skateboarding’s mystery and hopeful for its future. A book as much for the skateboarder as the artist and the writer, the thinker, the feeler." (Mark Suciu, professional skateboarder)

"Reading The Most Fun Thing is the most fun thing that this reader has done in months. Kyle Beachy knows his skateboarding, but has even more to say about urban design, literary theory, marriage, the struggle for selfhood, the long-overdue exorcism of skate culture’s misogyny and bigotry, and the eternal knife fight between capitalism and community. With an omnivorous and probing intelligence, Beachy views our tattered world through the scratched fish-eye lens of a skateboarder, and finds jewels of truth hidden everywhere he looks." (Michael Christie, author of Greenwood and If I Fall, If I Die)

Pass

I waited six months for this book to come out. Unfortunately it is boring, purposeless, and the audio narration is painful. It also reads as if you are reviewing an essay on somebody who is competing in a creative writing competition, trying way too hard. Sorry.