I wasn’t going to read The Art of Fielding, even though I kept seeing it on “year’s best” lists, because I was all, “ugh, baseball.” But then, on Slaughterhouse 90210 (which, by the way, is a fun blog to follow, because it pairs stills from movies and TV with choice quotes from great books), I saw this quote:
“David’s sense of humor was awkward and mechanical, as if he’d learned it from a book, but over time this mechanical quality could come to seem funny in itself.”
And realized that it sounded exactly like the kind of book I would enjoy, baseball or no. This was correct – it’s one of those books that, yes, is about baseball, but is also about love, and ambition, and friendship, and maturity, and how life laughs at our plans. Also, tangentially, Herman Melville and exhuming bodies.
My only nitpick would be that, having recently been 22 myself, I doubt that there would be so many wise-beyond-their-years 22 year olds in such close geographical proximity, unless I really did cheat myself out of something by not attending a liberal arts school in the US.
This book was heartbreakingly good.
Exactly how I felt! It’s a book about baseball, and everything else besides baseball. I loved this book.