I´ve just finished The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. This slow and great novel was last September’s Amazon Book of the Month. It’s a story about baseball, campus life, romance and friendship. This is not a review (here’s a great one from NYTimes), but a small compilation of my favorite quotes from the book (love the Kindle «highlight» feature).
Putting Henry at shortstop – it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.
Henry closed on it quickly, absorbing it into his glove with the thoughtless ease of a mother being handed her newborn baby.
Locker rooms, in Schwartz experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after.
A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.
Couldn’t resist a techie’s note: the book was bought on the new HTML5 Kindle Store for iPad, a clever way Amazon has found to dodge Apple’s 30% «in-app purchases» fee.
Daniel Rabinovich
Daniel Rabinovich 