Still, for those of us accustomed this time of year to spending probably more time than we should watching basketball, the absence of hoops will be especially pronounced as we endure this uncertain time mostly indoors and away from people.

If nothing else we still have books, mostly accessible online. Basketball has been a popular subject for writers to tell any number of stories. The genre, like the sport itself, is still relatively new with most of the best books written within the last 40 years.

For whatever reason, the college game has inspired fewer books than pro or high school basketball. It could be that editors prefer to publish books about better-known pro subjects or unknown tales from the high school ranks. It could be that college coaches would rather cash in themselves with god-awful business motivational books rather than grant the type of access that produced John Feinstein’s best-selling Season on the Brink about Bobby Knight in 1986. (Feinstein has written six other college hoops books.)

Today would have been Selection Sunday and with hoops fans facing three weekends without the NCAA Tournament, here are 32 terrific basketball books to consider for your hoops fix. This is not meant to be a definitive list, just a ranking of my favorites.

32. Darkness to Light – Lamar Odom (2019) – I’m not a fan of jock autobiographies since they tend to be sanitized. No so with Odom, who held nothing back (it seems) when talking about shady college recruiting, the pro hoops life of alcohol, drugs, sex, and celebrity, and even living in the Kardashian world.

31. Basketball: A Love Story  – Jackie MacMullan (2018) – A tremendous oral history of the game that’s the book companion to an ESPN series written by one of the best NBA reporters.

30. Boom Town  – Sam Anderson (2018) – This is a fascinating piece of history as Anderson shows the growth of Oklahoma City and how landing the former Seattle SuperSonics jump-started OKC’s transition into a big-league market.

29. Boys among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Gen Redefined NBA – Jonathan Abrams (2016) – From 1995-2005, players could go from high school to the NBA. Abrams takes a look at those who made it big – Kobe, LeBron, Kevin Garnett, Dwight Howard – and many who did not.

28. Sprawlball – A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA  – Kirk Goldsberry (2019) – If you’ve ever wondered how analytics quickly transformed the NBA and all levels of basketball into a three-point shooting contest, this book provides an explanation.

27. LeBron, Inc. – Brian Windhorst (2019) – Windhorst has made a career out of covering LeBron James and there’s no shortage of material. Here he takes a deep look at the business side and how James has used a trusted team of longtime friends to build an empire.

26. Play Their Hearts Out – George Dohrmann (2011) – Youth sports has become sleazy over the last generation, especially AAU basketball. Dorhmann waded in hit deep to expose a world where teenagers switch teams and loyalties just like their NBA counterparts.

25. Outside Shot – Keith O’Brien (2012) – One of a number of terrific season-inside high school hoops books. Here O’Brien spends a year with a team in rural Kentucky that’s an inspiration to a struggling community amid an economic downturn.

24. The Jordan Rules  – Sam Smith (1992) – Smith was among the first to show Michael Jordan as a relentless competitor who wasn’t always the best teammate or nicest guy. I still remember watching Robin Ficker, the notorious Washington Bullets fan heckler who sat behind the visitors’ bench, reading the most damaging passages loudly from an advanced copy as Jordan, Phil Jackson and the Bulls tried to ignore him.

23. Fab Five  – Mitch Albom (1993) – Long before he was a mega-best seller of inspirational fiction, Albom was a decorated sportswriter. This story of the 1992-93 Michigan Wolverines featuring Chris Webber and Jalen Rose shows how college hoops quickly morphed away from the era of four-year college players.

22. Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry – Marcus Thompson (2017) – Ever wonder how a kid who couldn’t land a scholarship to his parents’ alma mater (Virginia Tech) ended up as the greatest shooter in NBA history? Thompson, a Bay Area journalist who has covered Curry for years explains. (Thompson’s 2019 book KD on Kevin Durant also is a terrific read.)

21. Tip-Off: How the 1984 Draft Changed Basketball Forever – Filip Bondy (2007) – A generation ago, the NBA Draft produced immediate-impact players and never was that truer than in 1984, which included Akeem Olajuwan, John Stockton, Charles Barkley and a UNC guard picked third by Chicago after Portland chose Sam Bowie.

20. Eagle Blue – Michael D’Orso (2006) – Who knew high school basketball was a big deal in Alaska? D’Orso spends a season the with the Fort Yukon Eagles as they travel through 50-below temperatures in pursuit of their dreams – and those of their village.

19. Money Players – Days and Nights in the New NBA – Armen Keteyian (1997) – Maybe the best investigative sports reporter, Keteyian pulls back the curtain on David Stern’s 1990s NBA golden age to expose gambling and other rampant player misbehavior.

18. Out of Bounds – Inside the NBA Culture of Rape, Violence, and Crime – Jeff Benedict (2005) – Attorney and investigative journalist Benedict examined the 2001-02 NBA and found that 4 of every 10 NBA players have a police record for a serious crime.

17. Golden Days: West’s Lakers, Steph’s Warriors, and the California Dreamers Who Reinvented Basketball – Jack McCallum (2017) – So much has been written about how the Steph Curry Warriors have revolutionized basketball. McCallum shows how Jerry West has been the league’s common thread over the last 60 years, from his days as a Lakers legend through his stints as the architect of the Showtime Lakers and the Splash Brothers Warriors.

16. Canyon Dreams – Michael Powell (2019) – I might be guilty of recency bias putting this book so high since I just finished it. But this is a touching and at times disturbing narrative about life inside Navajo Nation and the important role of high school basketball.

15. The Book of Basketball  – Bill Simmons (2010) – I didn’t think I’d like this 700-page beast, written by Simmons at the height of his visibility as an ESPN.com columnist. But since he and I are the same age I found myself re-living much of my basketball fan experiences of the last 40 years.

14. Wilt: 1962, the Night of 100 Points  – Gary M. Pomerantz (2005) – There’s no video from this historic night when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in Hershey, Pa. Pomerantz, a determined historian, puts the pieces together to tell an epic story.

13. Raw Recruits – Alexander Wolff and Armen Keteyian (1991) – The FBI’s 2017 investigation into illegal recruiting in college basketball was nothing new. Wolff and Keteyian chronicled it nearly three decades earlier.

12. The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino  – Michael Sokolove (2018) – Sokolove has an underrated career of quality sports investigative work. This book with an awkward title is a thorough expose on how corrupt and sleazy college basketball has become, not just at Louisville during the Pitino era.

11. The Last Great Game – Gene Wojciechowski (2012) – This is not just a terrific retrospective of the 1992 Eastern Regional Final, where Duke beat Kentucky on a miracle Grant Hill to Christian Laettner pass. It’s a look back at what, in hindsight, was the end of the era of four-year college players.

10. The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics and What Matters in the End – Gary M. Pomerantz (2018) – Nobody does sports history quite like Pomerantz and he got Celtics great Bob Cousy to open up unlike anyone before. Though Bill Russell didn’t cooperate, this is a definitive account of the great ‘60s Celtics.

9. Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich – Mark Kriegel (2008) – Imagine if Pete Maravich played in the era of the three-point shot, ESPN and social media. Imagine if he didn’t have an injury-plagued career and a heart condition that ended his life at 40. Kriegel does a thorough job chronicling the short and troubled life of a basketball legend.

8. The Last Shot  – Darcy Frey (1994) – Perhaps the best of the season-inside looks at high school hoops, Frey takes us inside the Coney Island projects and the challenges facing players, including future star Stephon Marbury, hoping to overcome the streets to make it to college and beyond.

7. Loose Balls – Terry Pluto (1990) – If only more video of the great ABA still existed, we could experience Dr. J’s first pro seasons and more of the craziness of this league. Thankfully Pluto wrote this exhaustive oral history to show how the NBA owes much of its success to this short-lived competitor.

6. My Losing Season – Pat Conroy (2002) Sort of the non-fiction, sports memoir version of Conroy’s better-known book The Lords of Discipline, this chronicles his senior year (1966-67) as point guard on The Citadel’s basketball team

5. Playing for Keeps – David Halberstam (1999) The subtitle of this book is “Michael Jordan and the World He Made” and Halberstam provides a thorough portrait of MJ. But this is more a look at the meteoric growth of the NBA since the 1981 publication of Halberstam’s first NBA book, The Breaks of the Game. If you read only two hoops books, these would give you a thorough understanding of the role of basketball in U.S. culture.

4. Season on the Brink – John Feinstein (1986) – Feinstein wasn’t the first to do an all-access, season-inside sports book, but his subject matter (Indiana’s Bobby Knight) popularized the genre and produced an iconic portrait of a highly-successful but deeply flawed coach.

3. The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski (2005) – Long before he was ESPN’s NBA insider reporter known as “Woj,” Adrian Wojnarowski was a newspaper reporter who found time to spend a year following longtime high school coach Bob Hurley leading a tiny Catholic school in New Jersey despite minimal facilities and few resources.

2. The Boys of Dunbar – Alejandro Danois (2016) – In this age of high school basketball factories featuring players from all over the country, we’ll never again see a local high school team (pictured above) with four future NBA players, let alone one from the Baltimore projects featuring the likes of 5-foot-3 point guard Muggsy Bogues, perhaps the most unique player of all time.

1. The Breaks of the Game – David Halberstam (1981) –Halberstam might be the best writer ever to dabble in sports writing. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s chronicle of the 1979-80 Portland TrailBlazers is a thorough history of the NBA and a commentary on society at the time. It’s often cited as the best sports book ever written.