A less than vintage year for sports books, with a depressing consolidation of the grip of the instant book on the imagination of publishing houses.

Sometime in the last decade or so television discovered sport. That discovery begat Sky. Sky begat the Premiership. The Premiership begat hype. Hype begat many books. Most of them we could do without.

George Plimpton, who perfected the genre of participation sports journalism in an era when sports books were serious business, has a theory about sportswriting which he raises again in this year's edition of Best American Sportswriting. Plimpton calls his theory the Small Ball Theory of Sportswriting. In effect, he maintains that the bigger the ball a particular sport uses, the worse the canon of writing around that sport will be. There are great books about baseball. Few about gridiron. Great books about ice hockey. Not about rugby.

George doesn't know much about soccer, but he would be happy to see his theory bolstered by the comparative quality of the writing about golf in any given year and the writing about soccer. This year is no exception. Golf spawns the most thoughtful and best-written works. Soccer is full of glossy club histories, dream teams, and "don't get me wrong Mark/Gary/Dave is a lovely bloke but" autobiographies.

There is nothing wrong with the autobiography or biography as a genre, but when the overwhelming mass of the authors set out to avoid insight, controversy, perspective, deep thought or good writing, the effect is mindnumbing.

The book as nice-little-earner is the latest hoodwink gimmick deployed against gullible fans. It's a long time since the late Peter Ball and Eamon Dunphy collaborated to produce Only A Game?, but for honesty and insight their seminal work has yet to be surpassed by another soccer book.

Still, the mills of commerce grind on. While readers were just putting down the prodigious Stephen F Kelly's 15th book, a biography of Alex Ferguson, they will have been surprised to note that an auction was beginning somewhere in England for the publishing rights to Ferguson's official autobiography. Bids start at £450,000, but are expected to top £1 million.

Let's hope publishers and readers get their money's worth. This poor, benighted soul has read through books on or by Kenny Dalglish, Ferguson and Kevin Keegan in the past 15 months or so without learning one useful thing (Apart from the fact that soccer biographies are to be avoided unless you are being well paid to write one, in which case they are a legitimate journalistic venture). Meanwhile, next year is a World Cup year and we brace ourselves for the blizzard of good and bad which that always brings. Memo to Glenn and Gazza: Save yourself the postage boys. Don't send review copies. Please. In the name of God, please . . .

Best American Sportswriting (1997) (Houghton Mifflin, £9.99) Editor: Glenn Stoutt. - The annual round-up of the best sportswriting in the world (well, America, but generally speaking it's the same thing) is graced this year by a typically elegant introduction by George Plimpton, one of the heroes of the game. The collection starts off with Jon Krakauer on Everest and has plenty of big hitters thereafter. Gary Smith, Rick Reilly, David Halberstam, et al, get run outs. This year's pressing won't go down as vintage, but a treat for the connoisseurs nonetheless.

Danoli (Robson Books, £16.95) Tom Foley and Michael Taub. - A weak book about a horse sufficiently well-liked to be bridled with the title People's Champion. Much loved maybe, but the people would have to be extraordinarily smitten to want to read his life story. Vincent O'Brien, the man and the Legend (Sporting Books Publishers) by Raymond Smith £9.95. - New assessment and portrait of the Master of Ballydoyle from one of the best stayers in the business. Irish Flat Racing Records (£5) Edited by John and Bob Kelly. - Proved a winner during the summer and has been updated for the Christmas market. The book achieves its main goal admirably by providing a comprehensive record of Irish flat racing results from 1950-1997. Meticulously researched, it has the winners of every Group One, Group Two and Group Three race included.

Lately arrived on this desk, two books in a series from Thames and Hudson, Basketball, World Champions Series (£14.95) by Eric Besnard, and Boxing, World Champions Series (£14.95) by Christian Delcourt. Both men are correspondents for Canal Plus in France, and both books are packed with luscious images of either sport. The words are less impressive, but if you choose Don King and Mickey Rourke as your boxing essayists, you are buying publicity not literary immortality.

Left Foot in the Grave (Collins Willow, £14.99) Garry Nelson. - He didn't seem to have enough good stuff for his first book, so the arrival of a second from Garry Nelson is a bit of a surprise. This continues the journeyman's story as he slogs through a season with Torquay United as they clinch 92nd and last place in the league. Some laughs, some bitterness, some evidence of a man running out of steam.

My Story, An Autobiography (Ebury Press £16.99) Jack Nicklaus with Ken Bowden. - There is something in Jack Nicklaus's character which foretold that his autobiography would have such a stubbornly plain, prosaic title. That character, the meticulousness and attention to detail, shines through this wellwrought book.

Hogan (Rutledge Hill, £16.95) Curt Sampson. - Riveting portrait of a strange, dark and ultimately unknowable soul. Hogan had so much tragedy and hurt in his formative years that it is a wonder he didn't devote his life to violent criminality. Instead, he is one of that select band of golfers to have won all four majors, and is possibly the most interesting figure the game has produced. It's a compliment to Sampson to say that you can be bored by golf but fascinated by the subject of this book.

Four Iron in the Soul (Viking, £15.99) Lawrence Donegan. - Perhaps it's time for a change of life, but this old diehard seems to have enjoyed more golf books in the past year than is usually considered healthy. This, one of the best of this or any other season, is Donegan's wry account of a year spent pulling the trolley of a journeyman pro. Lots of pathos, lots of laughs, lots of good lines. Not the stuff we associate with golf. (Pringle-clad complainants can register their anguish at thumphries@irish-times.ie)

A Lot of Hard Yakka (Headline, £16.99) Simon Hughes. - This won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award in Britain this summer. That is usually sufficient reason to buy a book, but its cricket-oriented content balked this reader. It's more journeyman stuff, this time from a Middlesex fast bowler. More Than A Game (Orion, £18.99). - Much of the best sportswriting these days is done by those lucky folk who work for magazines and have months on end in which to prepare several acres for their sacred words. We envy them the time and space and respect them nonetheless. Lots of good stuff in here.

In the Name of the Game (The Dub Press, £8.95) JJ Barrett. - This dumb hack had been thinking for a while about doing a book on the GAA in Kerry and the effect the Civil War must have had on it when JJ Barrett's book fell into his hands. We realise now that such a book is best done by a highly literate Kerry GAA man with a family history which disappears straight into that murky period of strife. These are extraordinary tales from an extraordinary time, words which give a sense of the period and a sense of the GAA's place in it. If you want to know about the soul of Ireland, here is a good place to start learning.

The Mirror Book of Ulster Gaelic Games (Jeroquin, £8.99) Jerome Quinn. - Back in a bigger format than in days of yore and bearing the name of a sponsor, the discerning Mr Quinn's Ulster GAA annual is an indispensable source of material for GAA buffs. Every possible statistic, result and nugget of Ulster GAA trivia resides somewhere between these covers. Would that the other three provinces were so well served.

Back to the Hill (Blackwater Press, £8.99) John O'Leary, with Martin Breheny. - Bulging the canon of GAA biographies comes the story of John O'Leary, the popular north Dubliner who tended the Dublin net for the county's last 70 Championship games. One of only three players to have kept goal for Dublin in the Championship since the late 1960s. Between the jigs and the reels, the good times and the bad, there just had to be a good story to tell.

Legends of the Ash (Wolfhound, £16.99) Brendan Fulham. - Third volume collating the memories and moments of cherished hurling men and camogie women. Invaluable for sentimentalists, journalists, enthusiasts, purists, revisionists and Zen Buddhists alike. This fan was mildly depressed to note that he is older than several among this collection of masters. Note to publishers: equivalent book chronicling junior B hurlers?

Talking Gaelic: Leading Personalities on the GAA (Blackwater Press, £8.99) Eamonn Rafferty. - Knowing how much time it must have taken to put together these 28 interviews on the role of the GAA in modern Ireland, we hope Eamon Rafferty will forgive us if we churlishly express a wish that there were more than 168 pages worth. There is much in this book which is ordinary, but much, too, which is fascinating and revealing. Required reading for all those dimwits who spewed such extraordinarily ignorant views about the GAA in the wake of Charlie McGreevey's £20 million lottery grant.

A Season of Sundays (Sportsfile, £15.99). - Ray McManus and his team of photographers tell the story of the past GAA season in the form of pictures. A beautiful record of a fleeting summer. The Playing Rules of Football and Hurling (NRC, £12.50) Compiled by Joe Lennon. - Meticulous gathering together of the rules of the games by the former Down captain. The guidelines within are more celebrated in their neglect than in their observance. Will settle many a pub argument, especially down in Kerry, where memories of Joe's playing days are vivid. Best not say anymore for fear of provoking argument from the feisty Mr Lennon.

The Boys in Green: The FAI International Story (Mainstream, £15.99) Sean Ryan. - Extensive trawl through the archives helps shed some light on the current picture. Lots of love and affection in these pages. A deserved success for one of the best-loved figures in either journalism or football.

Into Thin Air (MacMillan, £16.99) Jon Krakauer. - Now available on this side of the Atlantic, an extraordinary story told brilliantly and with an honesty which chills the bone. At the end of this tale of an ill-fated Everest expedition in May 1996, Krakauer includes correspondence he received from friends and relatives of the deceased following the original publication of a shorter version of the story in Outdoors magazine. The very inclusion of such wounding words is a reflection of Krakauer's brutal honesty.

The story of the climb, the storm and the deaths is told with a candour which beats you about the head at times. People die. People save themselves and never even look back. Many have been quick to judge Krakauer, but the message of his book is that none of us can judge until we have visited those extremes. Krakauer's book has given birth to a little industry of publications directly concerning the events of May 1996. It is unlikely that any other book on the subject will be as compelling.

Reach for the Sky (The Collins Press, £12.99) Pat Falvey. - Pat Falvey of Cork knows the risks which Everest offers. His friend, Dr Karl Heinze, died there while they were climbing it in 1993. That price which mountains extract adds to their allure in some perverse way. Falvey was never deterred. Occasionally in the past few years postcards would arrive on the desks of journalists in this city from Pat Falvey charting the progress of his attempt to climb the world's seven highest peaks. Those of us who filed them under Affable Lunatic missed a good story and a strangely driven man.

Theatre of Dreams: a Lifetime of Devotion to Manchester United (Marino, £6.99) Chris Moore. - Ace journalist Chris Moore has a hidden affliction. He deals therapeutically with his Manchester United fixation by talking about it and sharing it with others. Fellow sufferers will find this book helpful. The unafflicted will shrug their shoulders. Leeds fans, like myself, will shudder. Chris, Chris, Chris . . .

The Red Army Years (Headline, £16.99) Richard Kurt and Chris Nickeas. - Could it be? Yes. Just what the world needs: another Manchester United book. For some of us, the 1970s were a peaceful time when Leeds ruled the earth, or came in second in the race to rule it, and Manchester United were a quaint club with some bad haircuts and a familiarity with Division Two. Now that the club has become a leading world religion, it turns out that the 1970s were, in fact, all about Manchester United; we just didn't know it then. Kevin Keegan: My Autobiography. (Little Brown, £16.99). - Well who else's autobiography were you going to write, Kevin? Selfserving run down of the reasons why spending money doesn't always guarantee you silverware. Cynical in its timing and conception and, like Keegan's reign at Newcastle, something of a disappointment.

Finally, just time to tune up the brass band and herald the arrival on our desk of the second annual Test Your Knowledge Quizbook, conceived, compiled published and produced by the inimitable John Marron and yours for just £4.99. Last year's edition was a sellout. Easons are stocking this year's. Reviewer's guarantee: your life will be poorer without this book.