Football fever

Just when you thought there was no medium left for football to invade Donald Mahoney compiles this summer's essential soccer reading list

Not enough football in your life these days? Don't despair. Publishers have flooded the market with a dearth of World Cup-themed literature this summer so when you're not watching, discussing, or dreaming about the World Cup, you can read about it.

Despite what David Beckham might lead you to believe, football and intelligence are not inherently contradictory. Granta editor Matt Weiland and Scott Wilsey have compiled A Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, which features football essays on every nation participating in Germany 2006 from Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Caryl Phillips, among others. Thinking fans might also be interested in Paddy Agnew's Forza Italia in which the Irish Times' Rome correspondent finds the romance in the scandal-ridden Italian game.

There are more books published about England's unspectacular adventures in international football than one would care to count. In particular, the canon of 1966 nostalgia has expanded of late, in direct proportion to the decline of England's current side. Simon Hattenstone has penned the best of the lot, tracking down the surviving 10 members of England's one footballing success in The Best of Times: What Became of the Heroes of '66. And if you were ever the slightest bit curious about whats it's like to travel with a couple of thousand sunburned, overweight, off-key bald men, try travelogue/social commentary Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation, Mark Perryman's follow-up to The Ingerland Factor.

Self-pitying Celts have a variety of literary options this summer, none better than '78: How a Nation Lost the World Cup, in which author Graham McColl spends 288 pages describing Scotland's brief dalliance in Argentina in 1978, when the Tartan Army lost to minnows Peru and scraped a win from eventual runners-up; Holland. The publisher asks: "If you end up beating the eventual runners-up, doesn't that mean you are the winner?" The answer is; no.

Scotland is not alone in its World Cup misfortune. Ireland's absence from Germany 2006 has left a void in our collective hearts this summer. Dust off Mick McCarthy's World Cup Diary 2002 to revisit the farce of Saipan and the glory of beating Saudi Arabia.

For all of its ecstatic moments, the World Cup is replete with long spells of down time. Luckily, there is a bevy of World Cup trivia books, including the alternative guide to the World Cup They Think It's All Shite... It Is Now, full of useless information about the darker side of the beautiful game.

Finally, no World Cup reader would be complete without National Anthems: 50 National Hymns from Around the World. Now you can impress your friends and bartenders by learning the words of "Dabrowski Mazurka", the Polish national anthem.