The Art of Fielding

Any book with heaps of praise and baseball player at the center will have me from the get-go.  I started this 500-page book last weekend and found myself laughing and turning pages, happy to have found a novel to relish.  Then, about 300 pages in, it started to slog, and by the end, it was only a two-hour waiting room stint (for nothing of consequence) that propelled me to finish the book.  Well, I would have finished it, because even though I wished for about 150 fewer pages, I did like the book.  I just didn't love it the way that I had hoped to.

This is a first novel for Harbach, and though it took him 9 years to write, I will probably read his next novel, whenever it appears.