Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: art of fielding

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Literary March Madness

How do the best books of the year face up in a March Madness-style tournament? Visit The Tournament of Books by The Morning News to find out. The staff of this publication are pitting 16 books published in 2011 against each other. Read them for yourself and weigh in:

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Teju Cole, Open City
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Judging books by their covers

Did you know that the same book often gets a different cover when it's marketed in a different country? This article from The Millions compares the British and American covers of eleven famous books, including the bestselling The Sense of an Ending, The Marriage Plot, The Art of Fielding, State of Wonder, and 1Q84. So how important is cover art to you? Comments welcome!

Another Top 10 Books of 2011 List

Want a second opinion to the New York Times top 10 books of 2011 list? Here's the top 10 picks of the year (including both fiction and nonfiction) from a Shelf Awareness freelance book reviewer (read the full article here.) Only one book made it onto bost 'Top 10' lists: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, about a disasterously thrown baseball that affects the lives of five people in surprising ways.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach *
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier
Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman
Volt by Alan Heathcock
Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert
History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

The Other Walk: Essays by Sven Birkerts

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda