The spectrum gets wider every year when it comes to sports books. Every year there's a new idea, or a new personality, or old ideas updated and given a fresh face. That's where the simple pleasure of these books lies – in their inventiveness and their craft. Mostly when it comes to this page at this time each year, we try to avoid the crassest of the cash-ins and the emptiness of the annuals and go instead to the quality that sits on the shelves waiting for the Christmas rush. This year, it must be said that here was no absolute unignorable stand-out – Four Kings by George Kimball and the autobiographies of Ronan O'Gara and Jamie Carragher are the best of the best but not by any huge margin. Still, there's plenty to be getting on with.

GAA

Whether or not you'll want to delve into Michael Moynihan's Blood Brothers (Gill & Macmillan, €16.99) will depend on just how well-disposed you are to Donal Óg and his not-always-merry men to begin with. If you're sick, sore and tired of listening to the Cork hurlers then it might be your instinct to keep walking here and try some other book out for size. This one is worth settling on, though, if only so that you can collect more grist for your mill.

Moynihan's book is a walk in their shoes from their coming together as teenagers in 1996 to up to but not including the current bother. It's them in their own words, justifying their own decisions, documenting their own hurling lives. It's the thrill of JBM handing them their jerseys in 1999, the line in the sand of 2002, the drills of Donal O'Grady and the inner calm of John Allen, rounding off with last year's stand in support of the county footballers. There are insights and anecdotes – although perhaps not as many new ones as you'd have hoped – and by the end you're left with a group of men who you can hardly help but respect, even if you don't always agree with them.

If it's gentler fare you're after, then it's to another Corkman you should turn. In Hurling: The Warrior Game (Collins Press, €24.95), Diarmuid O'Flynn does a hurling lover's job of steering you through the old game and its players. There are neither bells nor whistles here, no controversy or score-settling either. Instead, it's a straight-up set of interviews with men who've hurled their whole lives. Well over 50 hurling men past and present have their bank of knowledge on the sport raided by O'Flynn and what results is part oral history, part coaching manual. Shining through it all is the dear affection for the game held by the interviewees, drawn from them by an equally smitten interviewer.

Elsewhere on the GAA shelves this year are The Best of the West by John Scally (Collins Press, €24.95), a breezy read with a fair amount of laughs; Final Whistle by Paddy Russell with Jackie Cahill (Mainstream, €17.99), an interesting outlook on the game by a referee who has found himself wrapped up in some of the more newsworthy on-pitch incidents these past few years; and A Year With The Dubs by Daire Whelan (Gill & Macmillen, €13.99) is a fan's diary. A paperbacked blog more than anything, it shows Whelan as someone with a real grasp of what being a helpless Dublin fan means, from the early-season ambition, to the mid-summer over-confidence to inevitable end-of-year despair.

Soccer

Soccer holds its end up this year, with a few splashes of quality to go along with the perennial shelf-bending quantity. Best of the lot is Carra by Jamie Carragher (Bantam, €13.99), as honest and entertaining a book by a still-playing professional since Roy Keane's. Carragher is as direct here as he is in the tackle and by the end, there isn't a football fan alive who won't have warmed to him. He spares nobody – least of all himself and his family – and tells you all the stories you suspect are the norm behind the scenes of the Premier League. Cracking stuff.

For the soccer geeks among us – and we're everywhere, even in your newspapers – Inverting The Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson (Orion, €24.00) is more than just formation pornography. It's a history of the thinking behind the game, a decade-by-decade, movement-by-movement look at what has appeared on the pitch and the limitless possibilities presented by 22 men, a ball and the offside rule. Notable for the fact that it's so unabashedly centred within the playing of the game itself, a rare delight at a time when more and more sports books are sold on the back of well-renowned names and faces.

For that side of things, there are more than enough titles out there to slake any thirst. My England Years by Bobby Charlton with James Lawton (Headline, €22.00) is the second part of the great man's massively successful autobiography and a fine and elegant job it is too. Trapattoni, A Life In Football by Egon Theiner and Elisabeth Schlammerl (Liberties, €12.99) suffers a touch not only from having been translated from German but also from being more a reference book than one offering any insight into the man.

Rugby

Arguably the best Irish book of the year is My Autobiography by Ronan O'Gara with Denis Walsh (Transworld Ireland, €23.50). As he gets older, the Munster and Ireland out-half has found himself growing wiser, surer and, at times, lippier and the book profits from all three of these characteristics. As with Carragher's book, the touchstone here is honesty and if there aren't quite the same amount of madcap anecdotes, that's because O'Gara inhabits an altogether different world to the Liverpool footballer. He faced into a tittle-tattle maelstrom last year and through it all played a mixture of brutal and brilliant rugby, culminating in him lifting the Heineken Cup in May. Between himself and Walsh, that story is told here with flawless skill.

Anthony Foley was O'Gara's leader and brother for so many years that it's unavoidable that some of their stories overlap from time to time. That's not to say that Axel (Hachette, €26.99) isn't worth the read, just that it's a different kind of one to O'Gara's. Foley is the last link to the amateur days and his book stands as the perfect bridge between these times and those gone by.

Golf

The major golf offering this year comes from the doyen of Irish golf writers, Dermot Gilleece. In Touching Greatness (Transworld Ireland, €14.99), a lifetime's worth of encounters with the great and the good of the golfing world is documented by a man who has seen it all at least twice. Gilleece has met and interviewed them all from Sarazen to Woods, from Bradshaw to Harrington and all points in between. A knowing and comprehensive read.

For something a little more narrative-driven, Arnie & Jack by Ian O'Connor (Yellow Jersey, €22.50) benefits hugely from the author's obvious fascination with the relationship between Palmer and Nicklaus and how it has manifested itself for good and for bad in the 50 years since the pair first met.

Boxing

For a sport so well-served by fine writing down the years, it's been a while since a really good boxing book has seen the light of day. Just the right time then for George Kimball to treat us to Four Kings (Mainstream, €12.99), which, euro for euro, is certainly the best value of any book out there at the minute as well as being comfortably among the best. It tells the story of the last great fight era, when Hagler, Hearns, Duran and Leonard locked horns in the '80s. Kimball supplements his memories with fresh interviews with the four fighters and their people to produce probably the best boxing book since Kevin Mitchell's War, Baby.

Boxing takes up a fair bit of room in Kimball's other offering this year, a collection of his Irish Times columns called American At Large (Red Rock, €20.00). Shot through with the all-sport knowledge and wit that has made his column so popular, all proceeds go to Crumlin Children's Hospital. Other fistic offerings are the diverting if earnest Becoming Holyfield: A Fighter's Journey by Evander Holyfield (Simon & Schuster, €25.85) and the not-quite-as-brilliant-as-you'd have-imagined Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage by Budd Schulberg (Mainstream, €15.30).

Horse Racing

First among equals as far as racing books go is Brian O'Connor's highly entertaining Add A Zero (Hachette, €12.99). Documenting an attempt by the racing correspondent of The Irish Times to turn €5,000 into €50,000 over the course of a punting summer, it's an often-funny, always fascinating look into a wholly unexplored cranny of Irish sporting life. You meet characters who are both well-known and avowedly unknown and follow O'Connor on what you fairly early on realise is going to be a fruitless journey. O'Connor does a nice line in wry wit and is never anything less than ruefully aware of what a ludicrous task he has set himself.

The recently-retired Mick Fitzgerald has teamed up with Donn McClean to produce Better Than Sex (Raceform, €24.50), its title a nod to his reaction on the BBC to winning the 1996 Grand National. Mick Fitz hasn't lived as wild a life and doesn't have as redemptive a story to tell as McClean's last co-author Timmy Murphy but his book is no less enjoyable for that. Currently showing himself to be a fine analyst on Attheraces and Channel 4, the sensible, certain approach to his TV work shines through here.

Elsewhere on racing, Declan Colley's Mouse Morris: His Extraordinary Racing Life (Colley Press, €22.45) is a fascinating biography of one of Irish racing's more enduring individuals and Anne Holland's The Grand National (O'Brien, €29.99) is a beautifully-illustrated account of the Irish successes in the great race from down the decades.

Athletics

An Olympic year and yet no Olympic offerings this year from either track or field – a pretty solid reflection of where Irish athletics finds itself these days. Still, we always have our past glories to reflect on and two of the most glorious of them all have memoirs out. Best and brightest is Sonia: My Story by Sonia O'Sullivan with Tom Humphries (Penguin, €15.50). Apart from her pre-eminence, what always made Sonia so eternally popular was the whiff of vulnerability she carried around with her, that air of girlishness that made the nation desperately want her to succeed for herself as much as for the rest of us. Atop this book's many achievements is the fact that that side of her is captured here, side by side with the things that made her great.

There is no such side to Eamonn Coghlan's Chairman of the Boards, Master of the Mile (Red Rock, €22.00), largely because there is no such side to Eamonn Coghlan. Ambition scrams from every page of this, ambition tinged with the regret of never having won an Olympic medal. Elsewhere, The Irishman Who Ran for England by Jim Hogan (Currach, €14.99) isn't the most sophisticated book on sale but it's among the funniest and warmest. By contrast, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Marukami (Harvill Secker, €11.99) has had the literary types swooning and yet it's grinding and even dull in places.

General

As it's usually amid the over-arching and the far-reaching projects that the most interesting stuff is to be found, it would be wrong to ignore some of the following. Certainly Ireland's Olympians: Beijing and Beyond by Niall O'Flynn (Collins Press, €25.00) deserves to be acknowledged as the most comprehensive, educational and readable account yet written of where Irish Olympic sport stands. Everything is covered – from the genetic, financial, infrastructural and cultural reasons for our lack of Olympic success to clear and solid suggestions for a way forward. It always jars a little to hear sports books described as 'important' – The Koran is important; Fever Pitch is not – but if you think sport in Ireland is important, then this book is too.

Foul Play: What's Wrong With Sport by Joe Humphreys (Icon Books, €12.99) will probably annoy the hell out of you but that's no reason not to read it. Humphreys plays devil's advocate with sport's all-conquering popularity and attempts to pop its balloons along the way. His main problem is that you get the feeling at times that he doesn't wholly believe in what he's arguing and he doesn't quite stand all his points up strongly enough. And yet, it's a fun old read all the same.

We'll finish with two trips to Amazon.com for collections from across the pond, beginning with the Best American Sportswriting 2008 (Houghton Mifflin, €17.00) by William Nack and Glenn Stoute (eds). Now in its 18th year, the joy in this series is to be found purely in the writing. JR Moehringer's 23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear In The Space, the final piece in the collection, is especially inventive and little short of a dart to the heart of those of us putatively in the same business.

And if that dart isn't enough, then there's Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories by Gary Smith (Sports Illustrated, €19.00) to club us over the head and tell us to reconsider that bar job we always thought we'd be good at. Smith is simply the best magazine writer in America and it's sport's dumb luck that he chooses it as his subject matter. He writes four pieces a year for Sports Illustrated and they're always the best four in it. They take time and patience to read but they achieve a depth and insight unrivalled anywhere by anybody. This is his second collection and it's gold, every word.

Additional reading by Miguel Delaney, John Foley, Colm Greaves, Peter Gunning, Mark Jones, Ewan MacKenna, Enda McEvoy, Pat Nugent and Kieran Shannon