While the National Hockey League remains on ice, the Los Angeles Review of Books serves up this long, luscious compendium of hockey books, beginning with an excerpt from a 1955 Sports Illustrated article about a New York Rangers-Montreal Canadiens game at Madison Square Garden:

“[The game] seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers — a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.”

The writer had never seen hockey before, and never wrote about it again. But as David Davis explains, the “brief essay captured hockey’s relentless tempo, its improvisational surges, its attendant carnage.”

The writer was William Faulkner, who knew attendant carnage when he saw it, and evoked it like no other novelist who ever lived.

Davis rattles off a rich litany of hockey books, including Canadian novelist Mordechai Richler’s prose and goaltender Ken Dryden’s acclaimed 1983 book, “The Game,” which has been lauded by narrative-lovers, sabermetricians and those in between as one of the best books, fiction or non-fiction, ever written about the sport.

The Montreal Gazette’s Ian McGillis, earlier this year:

“The Game does more than capture the essence of a team and a sport. It also provides a collateral social history through the eyes of a fully engaged citizen, nowhere better exemplified than in Dryden’s memorable account of the mood in the Montreal Forum the night the PQ won the November 1976 provincial election. Finally, The Game works so well, and stays so relevant, because Dryden is a real writer.”

Davis is hopeful that last season’s Stanley Cup victory by the Kings “will inspire a young writer to create the Great American Hockey Novel.”

But you don’t have to be like me, in the land that hockey forgot, to feel the temptation to plow into a few of these seemingly exotic volumes, even if the Powers-That-Be in the NHL manage to settle their differences and end the lockout.

For the winter will be a long with or without the games, and there’s never enough time to read even a sampling of what Davis has aptly recommended.

Twice in my lifetime, a National Hockey League team has absconded from Atlanta for the sport’s native environs in Canada.

When the beloved Atlanta Flames — and they will always remain beloved to me, for they were a team of my youth — headed to Calgary, I paid little attention to the NHL for at least a decade or more. There were few games on television then, years before the league made another push into the Sun Belt.

But when the Atlanta Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011, I still had a reason to watch at least one game.

That game has been the Winter Classic, an outdoor spectacle begun in 2007 and played around New Year’s Day, usually at a football or baseball stadium. Instead of watching run-of-the-mill bowl games, I prepared a New Year’s champagne brunch and switched on what for most of us in America remains a novelty sport.

The staging of this event was one of the most brilliant moves ever made by the NHL, a welcome addition two years after the cancellation of an entire season due to labor strife. Hockey purists, especially in Canada, derided it. But they didn’t understand the importance of drawing football-saturated American eyeballs as a gateway to becoming more serious fans.

What I liked the best about the Winter Classic was how it showcased a sports culture from northern climates with which I’m unfamiliar. Outdoor hockey is a staple of Canadian, New England and upper Midwestern sports culture, as well as the northern European nations that have produced so many top NHL players.

The features on recreational players in the Snow Belt, for example, helped me better understand the game’s appeal to people who are untroubled that hockey doesn’t translate well to television. They’ve got the game in their blood, beyond the spectator version.

The Winter Classic probably won’t ever make me a red-blooded fan. I will watch an occasional game that the fabulous Doc Emrick calls, including most of the Stanley Cup finals, but the genius of having that one game on the schedule has done wonders for the image of the NHL and the sport.

So it’s not a surprise to see the grieving that’s been taking place this week as the NHL is likely to cancel the 2013 Winter Classic, possibly today. Because of the ongoing lockout, with games called off through November, the New Year’s Day game in The Big House in Ann Arbor is endangered. Even the media consternation from Canada has been sharp. The Detroit Red Wings were to play host to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the first time the Winter Classic has involved a Canadian team.

This would be as great a casualty as anything on the NHL calendar, and not just because cancelling the Winter Classic may preface the wipeout of the entire season.

Scratching off this game — a healthy scratch, if you will — would undo many of the positive benefits that the Winter Classic has yielded, from a business and fan standpoint. According to Jeff Gordon of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“The impact of this latest player lockout will be profound. The fan base will erode dramatically in many markets.

“Some owners will opt out of the business. A team or two could move. Dozens of players will see their careers end. Others may opt to remain in Europe, where the leagues run without interruption.

“Much of the progress made since the last lockout will be lost.

“Hockey will remain a fringe sport in this country, well out of the mainstream. The NHL will remain a sad example of how not to run a professional sport.”

If there hadn’t been that previous lockout, I’d say those words were overreaching.

But perhaps because I’m in a city without hockey, it’s especially sad to see the top echelons of the sport unravel before our eyes, once again.

It’s tough enough to lose teams in your town. But to watch a league flirt with self-destruction for the second time in seven years is a tragedy.

An avoidable, but a seemingly inevitable, tragedy.

The heartbreaking death of troubled NHL tough guy Derek Boogaard, the subject of a three-part series that concluded Tuesday in The New York Times, reveals how the league isn’t terribly eager to talk about his damaged brain that shocked researchers who received it on request from his family.

And it certainly hasn’t quelled the appetite some fans will always have for fighting, which remains a strong part of the game. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, in fact, really skates around the issue:

“If you polled our fans, probably more would say they think it’s a part of the game and should be retained.

“The issue is, do we increase the penalty?. Because it is penalized now. And there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming appetite or desire to go in that direction at this point in time.”

What’s raised more concerns are the recent suspected suicides of NHL enforcers Rick Rypien and Wade Belak and the nearly year-long absence of Sidney Crosby, the man on whom the NHL is placing Gretzky-like hopes.

On NPR last week, Stefan Fatsis said Crosby’s layoff with concussion-like symptoms is responsible for beefed-up penalties for hits to the head.

Yet Branch reports that Boogaard’s father has been met with only silence by the New York Rangers when he asked about his son’s medical treatment by the team. Neither would the Minnesota Wild, Boogaard’s former team, detail his treatment there.

The headline quote comes from the son of one of the Boston researchers who was unnerved by the cheering during a fight at a Bruins’ game he attended. Joe O’Connor of The National Post in Canada writes that tougher anti-fighting measures won’t help. (His colleague Jonathan Kay thinks very differently.)

Damien Cox of The Toronto Star doubts much will change, but accuses Bettman of an “effective, if rather cynical, game plan” since for now all the research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is being done “on the brain of a dead person:”

“So if Bettman is arguing that more data is needed — 1,000 dead NHL players? — he can stretch this argument out for years. Decades.”

NHL union chief Don Fehr was rattled by the report, and a Canadian brain injury expert is calling for an end to the role of enforcerin the NHL. But players reflect the ambivalence, including Mark Stuart of the Winnipeg Jets:

“This is their job and this is what they love doing. The violent part of it is unfortunate and the injuries are very, very unfortunate, but it’s up to the individual and they’re going to do whatever they can to continue to play.”

I’m admittedly not a very close follower of the NHL. I live in a city that has lost not just one, but two franchises to Canadian teams, so it’s a bitter pill. And I’ll probably never understand why fighting has been, and probably will be, an integral part of the game.

What I do see is that NHL players take an absolute beating, probably more so than football, because of the number of games involved. The NFL is only now starting to come to grips with its concussion issue in the wake of the suicide of retired player Dave Duerson. Even then, there’s been harsh reaction to doing anything that would change the violent nature of the game. For then it would not be football.

The NHL is going through a similar phrase. But if Crosby takes one more shot, will the continued inaction be worth it? Eric Lindros battled multiple concussions and retired at the age of 34, but Crosby is only 24 now.

This isn’t a rhetorical question, and I realize there probably are no clear answers now. The sport of hockey and the topic of sports injuries are not familiar terrain for me. And I realize that Boogaard had plenty other problems that contributed to his death.

But I’m seeking answers here, especially from from hockey fans who can help enlighten me about the fascination with fighting and whether the game would be the same without it.

European hockey coaches are complaining that their young stars are coming to North America’s minor leagues too prematurely in order to display their skills for National Hockey League teams:

“If the (NHL) would be two or three years more patient, we would send over a better player.”

Most interesting nugget here:

“NHL scouts generally believe Czech, Slovak and Russian players have a more difficult time adjusting to the North American lifestyle and hockey style than, for example, Swedish players.”

Language may be a factor there, especially since many Scandinavian kids grow up communicating in English far better than — dare I say — Americans.

Ironically, USA Hockey recently has banished national championship events for its youngest competitors, and here’s a compelling suggestion for other sports to follow suit. I’m not sure if mandating equal playing time is the best way for elite athletes to develop — they still may need to move to more highly-charged environments — but taking the onus out of winning from the outset is a terrific idea.

The European youth hockey development model — which I blogged about here during the spring — may finally be influencing some badly needed changes on this side of the Atlantic, where competition-driven parents have long dictated the direction of youth sports. Even more ironically, it is that European system — which stresses technique and skill development over competition at the earliest ages — that may be torn apart in the process.