What to read about golf

Like baseball and cricket, golf has inspired writing of the highest quality. P.G. Wodehouse wrote whimsically about his favourite game. John Betjeman, who was buried near the tenth green of a rugged Cornish golf course, wrote a delightful poem, “Seaside Golf”, about scoring a birdie on one of its toughest par fours. Perhaps John Updike best described the novelist’s attraction to this most frustrating of sports. “It is of all games the most mysterious, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest.” Its detractors may say that a round of golf is a “good walk spoiled” (the title of a fine book by John Feinstein). But they are wrong. Here are five of the best golf books, chosen from a long and worthy list, that demonstrate why.