RR Book Club: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

It's winter, and I'm sorry about that. But just because it's the days of darkness-by-5 and cabbage for lunch, cabbage for dinner, we can still try and find some brightness.

And by we I mean me. I just finished a real morose book about patricide and the existence of God, and I’m looking to shake things up. I hope to do that with some fresh-cut grass, 5950 hats, and fearful glances at post-adolescent life. That’s right, I want to start reading Chad Harbach’s 2011 classic The Art of Fielding. The synopsis goes:

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended

I know that –ManBearPig has already read it and I think kinda liked it. I’m sure more of you have as well. So in the proud tradition of moderately-successful book clubs that we’ve had in the past, I would like to invite anyone who wants to come read The Art of Fielding with us. It’s a doozy, with ~500+ pages and ~80 chapters, and I’m not sure how I’ll divide it up yet. There's also an Additional Bonus E-Book that talks about potential book covers, if this thing really gets off the ground and grows wings.

So if you want to read this book, let me know in the comments below and we’ll see what kind of critical mass we can come up with. And if you have any ideas how to do a book club in any way/shape/form, also tell me how to do that. The only advice I know on how to talk about books was given to me by a good friend, "agree with your girlfriend and mention Italo Calvino." I will try and make discussion topics open-ended enough to include non-Art of Fielding readers and non-readers in general, but hey, I’m making this up as I go. Let me know if you want to get in on the game with me.