I was thoroughly unprepared for how much I enjoyed this book. All I knew about it was that it was about baseball and it was immensely popular. Popular books about baseball aren't generally my cup of tea.
But when I finally picked up the audiobook and started listening it quickly became one of those books that causes me to extend car trips and sit in my vehicle long after I've reached my destination. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next!
While the plot does have intricacies and things do happen, it's the characters who drive the book. Each character, whether you like them or not, is an interesting creation full of impulses and desires and faults of their own. Each is striving for a goal. In the book there's a Melville leitmotif that crops up, leading you to compare each character's journey to the mythic search for the white whale. But it's not a dry, academic tome, this book is flooded with life.
What the author does very well is make our individual lives seem like part of an epic tale, and the characters in this book are part of a tale that is as finely tuned as the wires of a grand piano.
By Chad Harbach
I was thoroughly unprepared for how much I enjoyed this book. All I knew about it was that it was about baseball and it was immensely popular. Popular books about baseball aren't generally my cup of tea.
But when I finally picked up the audiobook and started listening it quickly became one of those books that causes me to extend car trips and sit in my vehicle long after I've reached my destination. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next!
While the plot does have intricacies and things do happen, it's the characters who drive the book. Each character, whether you like them or not, is an interesting creation full of impulses and desires and faults of their own. Each is striving for a goal. In the book there's a Melville leitmotif that crops up, leading you to compare each character's journey to the mythic search for the white whale. But it's not a dry, academic tome, this book is flooded with life.
What the author does very well is make our individual lives seem like part of an epic tale, and the characters in this book are part of a tale that is as finely tuned as the wires of a grand piano.
Hooray for this book!