Prolific writers always impress me, even if I don’t read much of their work. I found it hard enough to even write one (unpublished) novel, much less many manuscripts. Then there’s the whole thing about getting an agent and all that mess. The amount of work involved amazes me.

Then I read John Grisham’s “Playing for Pizza” and I realized that once you get your foot in the door, you can take it easy once in a while.

Don’t read this as criticism of the book. I really enjoyed it even if I could see just about every twist and turn coming a mile away. I imagine that the 250 pages took Grisham a couple of weeks to write. He probably spent more time on making sure he had the details of place names correct than he did on the basic story.

And that’s OK. Sometimes, a book just needs to be fun. Grisham accomplished that in “Playing for Pizza,” which follows a career NFL backup quarterback as he goes to Italy to reclaim his career after ruining the Cleveland Browns’ chances to win a Super Bowl.

That right there tells us that the story is fiction – the Browns undefeated? Preposterous (says the angry Ravens fan).

Anyway, you can follow a pretty basic, but interesting story, of an American football player’s immersion into Italian culture. Or you can wait for the movie because this thing is just set up for a movie at some point.