With this book post I am caught up, something quite rare ... and especially this late in the year when I am scrambling to get it all done for the year-end/best-of post (tho that always comes in January.
I wasn't quite sure about reading a "baseball" novel. I have nothing against the game, but just wasn't sure it would hold my interest for 500+ pages. But the book had some buzz and was ending up on a lot of those year-end lists (Amazon picked it as its book of the year), so I figured I give it a shot. While sport, and particularly baseball, as a metaphor of life is not the freshest concept out there, Chad Harbach ends up making it an enjoyable journey in his debut novel, The Art of Fielding.
Jumping in blissfully unaware, I thought it might be about life in the big (or even) minor leagues, so was surprised when the setting was a (fictional) small, private university in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior. Likewise, while I thought the focus would be on baseball it quickly shifted to other members of the campus community, each with their own struggles in learning the lessons of life, both on and off the diamond.
While I wouldn't put it at the top of my list. Harbach makes some rookie errors here and there - including an ending that I didn't like as much as the rest of the book, that likely puts it just outside my top 5 fiction reads of 2011. Likewise, both times I have sat down to write about the book - first for my Goodreads review and here (which granted is just a pumped-up version of that review) - I just don't really don't know what to say about it... though again I hesitate this shouldn't be inferred as a bad thing. Maybe it is just the holiday season/end of the year that leaves one's brain scattered and/or tired.
But overall, I still had a great affection for this book... very like-able/engaging, lways wanting to get back to reading it (which is a very good sign/thing), and addictive-ly readable (80-ish chapters over 500 pages = a lot of "just one more chapter").
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