Here's a special Father's Day edition of Monday Morning Quarterback. Peter King's regular NFL column will appear as usual this Monday.

Face it. Your dad has 567 ties. He doesn't want another one. He probably wants an iPod, but that's too expensive. You need a $23 gift idea: a book. And if you don't have a dad to buy for, treat this as a brief list for beach reading.

It's my first (and last, if you hate it -- but first-annual if you can tolerate it) summer reading list. If you are like me, you don't read enough. You spend time online or vegging in front of Curb Your Enthusiasm reruns or MLB Extra Innings. That's good, but it's not good all the time. So here are five books I've read recently and strongly recommend.

1. The Miracle of St. Anthony, by Adrian Wojnarowski (Gotham Books). This book about St. Anthony's (N.J.) High School basketball coach Bob Hurley got some good press last winter when it was published, but after reading it I've come to the conclusion that the press wasn't nearly good enough. This is one of the best sports books I've ever read. Jim Bouton's Ball Four is better, as is My Turn at Bat by Ted Williams; Paper Lion, by George Plimpton; and Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand. I'm sure I'm missing one or two more, but that's how much I like Wojnarowski's tome. Hurley, along with two dogged nuns, keeps an inner-city high school alive years after it should have been shut down, giving kids with no chance a shot. It should be the great American success story of today. I don't know how you read this book without coming away inspired to do something great for yourself, your family, your town or your country. And it all comes down to this: hard work. Hard work, and no excuses. At the end of the book, when you learn about Hurley's work ethic and his refusal to accept anything less than someone's best effort, Wojnarowski writes, "[Hurley] still believed there was just one old-school hard-ass way to coach these kids. When trouble came walking down that sidewalk, Hurley wasn't crossing the street.'' And here was Hurley, after winning a state championship, watching as his returning players took part in a pickup game that spring, and ... well, I'll let the author tell it. "When the kids hustled out into the hallway for a drink of water on that warm spring day in Jersey City -- Hurley, out of another time and place, reached for the broom and started sweeping.''

2. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little Brown). So glad my wife feeds my non-sports side occasionally. I loved this book. It's a thinking-person's guide to thinking. It's about how, basically, your gut instinct about almost everything is usually spot-on. Gladwell tells the story of a statue bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for $10 million that turned out to be a forgery, and how some experts examined the statue from every different direction and thought it was the real thing. Then a few other experts saw it and knew it was wrong just because of something they couldn't quite put their finger on; it just didn't look right. And it turned out there were right. At first glance, they knew it was a fake. "In the first two seconds of looking" they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at Getty was able to discern after 14 months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds. Fascinating, and really accurate.

3. America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, by Michael MacCambridge (Random House). I regret not reading this 2004 book sooner, because it's a gem. The inside stuff about the NFL's adolescence is amazing. Take Pete Rozelle's push to get Congress to approve the AFL-NFL merger in 1966. The deal was bogged down, and Rozelle had to promise the House majority leader, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, that he'd deliver an expansion team to New Orleans. Little did Boggs know that it wasn't much of a risk for Rozelle, because he knew New Orleans was going to have an expansion team soon. MacCambridge quotes Rozelle telling Boggs he had a deal, that he'd get a franchise for New Orleans. And MacCambridge quotes Boggs as saying, "If this doesn't work out, you will regret this for the rest of your f---ing life!" The merger passed. A week later, New Orleans got its team. This book has 100 of those stories. Maybe more. MacCambridge is a master storyteller, one of the best I've read in any genre.

4. Ireland, by Frank Delaney (Harper Collins). I read this during my trip to Ireland and just after. It just hit me right. A storyteller who wanders Ireland visits a country home and entrances a young boy who goes on to model his life after the man. When I tell you a book tells the story of Ireland from its roots, you probably sigh and say, "Next book, please,'' especially if you're not Irish. But trust me. This book will capture you and take you through it quickly, particularly the great stories about all the Irish counties.

5. Like a Rose: A Celebration of Football (Sports Publishing LLC), by Rick Telander. My former SI colleague, now a Chicago columnist, played at Northwestern, then had a tryout with the Kansas City Chiefs and kept a diary of that experience. This is a combination of that diary and a reliving his football life. It's goose-pimply. It's so affectionate and loving toward the sport, a quality there is far too little of in the sportswriting world. One of my favorite diary elements came when Telander and his cowboy roommate from west Texas with the Chiefs were sitting around the dorm room one day during Chiefs training camp and the roomie said: "Rick, what in the world am I doing here?" And Telander wrote: "His meaning was much the same as everyone else's meaning when they questioned their reasons for playing in the violent, insecure, nerve-wracking world of football instead of tending to the normal duties at home. I can't answer them because I often ask myself the same question.''

Hope you can find all, or at least one, for dad or the beach this summer.