The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, read by Holter Graham

★★★★ // ★★★★★

♫♫♫♫♪ // ♫♫♫♫♫ 

[16 hours]

Chad Harbach's debut novel "The Art of Fielding" came out as a 2011 favorite among readers and critics alike.

Full of beautiful musings on life, literature, family, college and baseball, "The Art of Fielding" follows five characters whose lives intersect at the fictional Westish College: Henry Skrimshander, a shortstop with awe-inspiring talent and a intrinsic love for the game; Mike Schwartz, his best friend and the Westish Harpooners' team captain; Owen Dunne, Henry's "gay mulatto roommate"; Guert Affenlight, the college president; and his recently divorced daughter, Pella.

Though "The Art of Fielding" is essentially a book about baseball (and some people on the fringes of it), it is regardless a work of literary fiction - bringing beauty and a sense of meaning into what goes on on the field, and in addition, bringing on that resonance and discourse with other works of literature (most prominently with Moby Dick, as the fictional school boasts an obsure tie to Herman Melville.)

As first novels tend to do, "The Art of Fielding" has a few weaknesses, though they do not interfere too much with what I took away from the novel as a whole. I thought the development of the "dangerous affair" should have been better developed from Owen's side, and had it been, I would have felt less uneasy and disturbed by the whole affair, though only slightly.

The bottom line: The chatter surrounding this book elevated my expectations too high. Regardless, I thought it was a worthwhile read. Strong, well-defined characters (for the most part). And the baseball talk brought on a sense of nostalgia for me, having grown up following my brother's traveling baseball team around the midwest.

Holter Graham, the audiobook reader, really made the novel come alive for me. As far as audiobook readers go, I group them into four categories: one, the ones I absolutely cannot stand; two, those whose voices interfere with the story in a minor sort of way - unclear, distracting, annoying; three, those who disappear into the story; and four, those who add a little something extra to the experience of the work. I would place Holter Graham's reading just between the third and forth categories.

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“Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen.”

Some helpful audiobook resources

Ambling BookPlayer - free (or paid upgrade) app available for Android, iPhone, iTouch, and iPad. The online library can be organized by free and paid. The audiobook downloads straight to your device. However, these are big files and unless you have an unlimited data plan, you should download via a wifi connection.
Librivox - free, volunteer-recorded audiobooks. Downsides - the catalog is difficult to navigate, some of the readers are less skilled than others. On the plus side - free public domain audiobooks, multiple recorded versions, multiple languages.
Audible - Amazon-owned premium audiobooks. Downsides - these get pretty expensive. Upsides - they offer an extensive library and quality recordings.
OverDrive/Media on Demand - this free  service lets you borrow audiobooks electronically straight to your mp3 player, smart phone, e-reader, computer, or alternatively, you can burn them to cds. Though, if you're going to go through the effort of burning all those CDs, you might as well just go to the library. While the wait is impossibly long to borrow e-books, significantly less people listen to audiobooks. The search feature isn't very accurate (and the selection includes a lot more popular and genre fiction than literature), but I'm sure these pitfalls will be improved in time. To see if your library is participating in this service (or something similar), visit your library's homepage.
Your neighborhood library - many libraries have a moderate selection of audiobooks on CD and cassette, in addition to offering mp3 downloads online. Also, a lot of libraries will borrow an item you requested from another library to lend it to you. In my experience, not many people check out audiobooks on CD regularly. At least, at the library I frequent, the selection the audiobook section is always full of CDs and empty of people.

Know any other resources that might be helpful to audiobook readers? Let me know!

audio|bookworm manifesto

Interested in listening to audiobooks but don't know where to start?

You've probably had someone define you as a visual, aural, or kinesthetic learner sometime during your childhood. Maybe you even began to identify with that definition of yourself. I, for one, always maintained that I was a visual learner. I never thought I could listen to an entire novel and be able to pick up subtleties, follow characters, or even maintain my understanding of the plot without being able to see anything. But my younger sister used to marathon the Harry Potter audiobook series on her iPod over and over, so I figured I would give it a try.

The first audiobook I ever listened to was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows during a car ride from Chicago to upstate New York and back a few years ago. As a passenger, listening to a book on my iPod helped pass the time. I was able to devote nearly all of my attention to it. I came away from my first audiobook experience impressed, but I wasn't sold. Not yet. I liked the feel of a book in my hands, the action of physically turning a page--and I still do. But there is also something powerful in hearing a book read to you. In his book The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach described reading aloud as an intimate act. Many cultures were born out of oral storytelling. Many of us grew up as our parents read storybooks to us. We are told "stories" every day: crazy blind dates our coworkers were subjected to, the retellings of movies we probably wouldn't see anyway, the what-happened-last-night's our friends whisper to us in excruciating detail over the phone. So it really isn't that far removed. It really isn't that much of a stretch to listen to a book rather than reading it.

Nearly a year after I graduated college, I found myself in a temporary office job. Boring, as most temporary office jobs are. Filling, data entry, sending mass spam emails, staring at the electric glow of an out-of-date computer monitor. The kind of job you could do without thinking, or nearly so. Then one (glorious) day after I had long exhausted my iPod music library, while procrastinating and skimming the offerings on the Android Market, I downloaded the Ambling Book Reader, followed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet recorded by volunteers with the Librivox Project.

Cue life changing moment...

Since that day in March 2011, I have listened to at least 399.7 hours of spoken word (or so boasts my iTunes library).

Okay, so, maybe not all of you have day jobs where you can "tune out" and still accomplish your daily tasks with regular accuracy. When I'm not working as an office temp, I still manage to get my audiobook fix in by listening in the car or on the train, listening while knitting, cooking, or painting my nails. I've seen my sister listen to Harry Potter on headphones while she applies her makeup, brushes her teeth, and ignores the rest of the family at dinner time.

And I've found that listening to audiobooks has given me a chance to experience a lot of literature I never would have had the time for otherwise while still working days, attending graduate school classes, and writing short stories. My discovery of audiobooks has certainly made my job and commute more enjoyable, and my life more fulfilling. I have a list of 56 books read/listened to in 2011 that I can be proud of - and all the knowledge of life and humanity and literature that comes with it.

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If you haven't already guessed, I will be using this blog to review audiobooks, but also to promote literacy through their use. We live in a fast-paced world. Not everyone has time to sit down and crack open a 300+ page novel. But who doesn't have time in their commute to get through a couple chapters a day of that book they've been meaning to read forever?