For a guy who reads a lot — I like to read 2-3 books at a time and I’ve got my big ol’ nose in one in just about every room in the house — and loves sports, I don’t read a lot of sports tomes.

Frankly, sports books are painful. Boring. Needlessly self-aggrandizing. Yes, we get it: you were good at sports. No, you’re not as interesting off the field as you were on.

How many books do we need called, “Johnny Ballgame: How I hit .302 in the Majors”? Um, here’s how: You were born with slightly better height-weight proportion and eye-hand coordination. Your dad could afford to take the time and money to make sure you could play on that club team two hours away from Podunkville. And you got lucky.

Mostly, the good sports literature can be summed up in short pieces, such as, says, anything that Gary Smith wrote for Sports Illustrated, or tongue-in-cheek forays into the locker-room ridiculous with Rick Reilly, or something just plain heartfelt and beautiful, something that only Jim Murray could pen.

Generally, brevity is the better part of gridiron valor (or something like that), when all we normally get is athletes looking to make a buck (than you, Jose Canseco) and painful hyperbole from sportswriters looking to cash in before facing a forced early retirement.

But I have found a few decent books here and there, that can not only feed one’s sports jones for 200-plus pages but also actually have something to say about society.

I just finished Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four.” For a baseball fan, it’s a must-have. A former Seattle Pilots pitcher, he does a tell-all for the 1969 season in which the weak-armed knuckleballer tries to hang on with the expansion Seattle club, gets sent to the minors, contemplates retiring (not seriously), gets brought back up, gets traded to Houston (a team in a pennant race) and finally writes a book.

Then all hell breaks loose. Many of his former teammates (including his Yankee mates, Mickey Mantle et al) refuse to talk to him, slam the book and treat him like plutonium when he comes around (and he does, as a sports broadcaster).

One of the first, if not the first, Bouton’s book tells people outside baseball that players, coaches, owners and everyone else involved with the game is human. And that means they have faults. Some drink too much. Some take drugs (greenies, which act like speed — actually, a lot of them take greenies). Some are just jerks or lousy people. Even Bouton, who has his poor personal moments... and professional ones.

Some who’ve read Canseco’s “Juiced” may read it and say, “so?” But that’s the thing about “Ball Four.” It was groundbreaking, even if Bouton didn’t see why it should be thought of that way.

And it’s funny. Bouton is hilarious. He sees the lighter side of everything, never sees himself too seriously (or he does, but recants halfway through a speech about it), and points out the inequities of dugout life, the baseball business, celebrity and American culture.

Be warned, though: there are a few spots not appropriate for young minds — or old minds either. Something to do with the way players treat women. That’s all I’ll say.